The country passed over in this day's journey is not interesting to any but the geologist. It presents only a series of humble-looking farmsteads, and one or two small and unimportant towns. The farmhouses bear a general resemblance to those of Switzerland, but want the overhanging eaves, and are less picturesque, though some are painted of a red or ochrey colour, which gives a cleanly effect. Unlike Switzerland, too, barns, byres, and all sorts of store-offices occupy detached buildings, an arrangement by which the risk of fire is materially reduced. The scenery, though sufficiently rude, is not romantic; for the hills are in general only a few hundred feet above the level of the sea, and their outline has been rendered tame by the glacial polishing above described. The ice, as I sometimes surprised my Scandinavian friends by remarking, has been a great enemy to the picturesque in this region of the earth. Though there is no want of population, the country is dull. One misses even the little taverns and huckstry-shops which everywhere give a sort of life to the roadsides in England and Scotland. In the afternoon we came to a fiord, and found at its upper extremity the town of Uddevalla, containing from 3000 to 4000 inhabitants. Uddevalla is a name of no small interest in science, because of a great bed of ancient shells found near it. This, too, is a kind of object very rare, and only seen on a most limited scale in the superficial formations of Britain. The effect was novel and startling when, on the hill-face overlooking the fiord, and at the height of two hundred feet above its waters, I found something like a group of gravel-pits, but containing, instead of gravel, nothing but shells! It is a nook among the hills, with a surface which has originally been flat in the line of the fiord, though sloping forward towards it. We can see that the whole space is filled to a great depth with the exuviæ of marine mollusks, cockles, mussels, whelks, &c. all of them species existing at this time in the Baltic, with only a thin covering of vegetable mould on the surface. That surface has been broken in several places by the peasantry, who dig and carry away these spoils of ancient seas to spread them over their lands. I feel sure that some of their excavations are twenty feet deep; yet that is not the whole thickness of the shell-bed. Of course it is a proof of the sea and land having formerly been at a different relative level; and one more convincing could not be desired. I was familiar with this as a geological fact; but the shell-bed of Uddevalla presented it with a freshness and liveliness of evidence beyond what I would have expected. Seeing these shells so entire, so like in all respects to any bed of shells on the present shore, one looks upon the period antecedent to the assumption of the present relative level as a thing of yesterday; the whole series of intermediate events, including, what is probably