timber towards the Wener, and he had been down the country to look for it. His superiority probably consisted in being the owner of land and wood. The boundary line between Norway and Sweden is here an avenue cut through the forest, with piles of stones within view from each other, and this is carefully kept up along the whole of this long frontier. The country is more cultivated and better than on the Norwegian side.

A little way from the village, on the road side, I observed an inscription cut out in lapidary style in a large piece of rock "In the years 1772 and 1788, Gustavus III. travelled this way to defend the frontiers; the gratitude of the country will endure as long as the world stands." One would almost suspect that some wicked wit had added the latter clause lately. It is on the whole, rather fortunate that the existence of the world has not depended upon the gratitude of this part of it. On the opposite side of the road there is an inscription still more ludicrous. It is in ancient Runic characters of the very remote date of last year, 1837. What it refers to, none of the persons I met on the road could tell; but Sweden may challenge all Europe to produce in a public monument such a specimen of the want of common sense, as modern words in an obsolete character, of which not twenty persons in a million know one letter from another.

Carlstad, June 5.-I reached this little town this evening. It is situated at the head of the Wener lake, upon a little island, between two mouths of a magnificent river, the Klar-elv. About

twenty miles up this river, at Dyefors, there is the most considerable salmon fishery in Sweden. It has not yet commenced, but it must be very interesting to the naturalist, for the salmon of the Wener lake cannot, like our oceanic salmon, go periodically to the salt water, and is probably, a different variety of the species. The Falls of the Gotha at Trolhætta are surely not surmountable by the body of fish caught at Dyefors, and the other waterfalls, or forces of rivers falling into the Wener and it would be an interesting fact, if a periodical return to salt water is not a necessary habit of this fish, as we suppose, but that it may remain and recover its condition in fresh water in due season, or if there is a variety of the species habituated to, or living entirely in, fresh water. The oceanic salmon is a much better fish for the table, than these, or even the Baltic salmon; but I could not learn that there was any apparent difference in size or form.

The river, which is occasionally a branch of the Glommen, runs through several narrow lakes and falls into the Wener, under the name of the Bye river. On one of these lakes is a little town called Arvika, which in 1815, it was proposed to rebaptize and call Oscarstad, in honour of his royal highness the crown prince. But names are stubborn things, and the new name could not be brought into use among the people, and is already obsolete. Carlstad is a kind of outpost of Gottenburg, and seems to have a good country trade. A mile or two from the town I met a little steam-boat in the forest, for

the woods concealed the stream, and close to the town a canal is nearly finished, for the purpose of saving time in passing up against the current of the river. These are proofs of a thriving trade in this neat little town. The population is about 2,500 persons; and for the size of the place, it appeared to me that the number of well-dressed people in the streets people, not of the working, nor even of the busy class, was unusually great. I found two booksellers' shops, and a music-sellers, in the town, but not a butcher's. Here, as in Norway, I presume, every family has butcher-meat killed and salted in autumn. With us in such small country towns, the enjoyment of the fine arts is not so generally diffused as that of eating fresh meat; and the proportions of supply for mind and body would be exactly the reverse-three butchers' shops at the least for one book or music shop.

The country from the Glommen to the Wener, a distance of 98 or 100 English miles, appears to have been a chain of lakes, of which the former islands are the present unconnected eminences of primary rock, granite, gneiss, or porphyry, and the bottoms, those cultivated valleys, from which the numerous isolated eminences, clothed with firwoods, rise abruptly, but to no considerable elevation, seldom 200 feet above their bases. The whole tract is but little elevated above the level of the sea, considering its distance inland. The Glommen at Kongsvinger, where it takes the remarkable bend at an acute angle to its former course, and runs W. N.W. for about sixteen miles,

before it resumes its south course, is only 455 feet above the sea level, and only 308 feet above that of the Wener. There is no ridge dividing the waters of the Glommen and Wener. The continuous hills, or elevated grounds in this tract appear to me to range not according to the run of the rivers or main drainage of the country, but according to great basins which at some period have held extensive fresh water lakes. This I infer from the great masses of gravel, sharp sand, and rolled stones on the sides and even summits of considerable eminences. The connecting ridges between these eminences of primary rock, are often composed of such alluvial banks. The supposed rise of the Scandinavian land might perhaps be more satisfactorily traced from an examination of the ancient shores of the Wener, and the other great basins of the Peninsula, than of the Baltic. If the small gap of Trolhætta, by which the Gotha river issues from this lake, were dammed up by some convulsion of nature, the chain of basins, now dry land, would again be filled with water up to the valley of the Glommen, and the east side of Scandinavia would be an archipelago of innumerable rocks, and islands, with long ribs of land here and there projecting from the present back-bone of the peninsula. About one third of all Sweden, 13 parts, is reckoned to be less than 300 feet above sea level, that is, less than 153 feet above the level of the Wener, which is 147 feet above the sea. The Wener at present is known to have a difference of ten feet between its highest and lowest

38

level. This difference never exceeds four feet and half, between one year and another: but the accumulation of water which cannot run out by its present outlet, the Gotha river, raises it in a series of years unfavourable to evaporation, to this great known difference. The great banks, or ancient shores, therefore, resting against the eminences of the ground rock in this tract between the Glommen and the Wener, are not phenomena requiring very extraordinary convulsions or changes in the country, to account for their production.

Carlstad, June. Every traveller is placed between two difficulties that of founding too much and too soon upon trifling isolated circumstances and that of postponing his opinions upon them, until he has become so accustomed to see them, that he makes no observation or opinion about them at all. The latter is the safest course for the traveller, but the worst for the reader; who, if he has before him the circumstances and impressions as they arise, may draw his own conclusions, and adopt no more of the traveller's than he sees fit. I shall therefore take this course, and give my opinions as they arise, although the circumstances may not always be thought of so general and important a kind as to bear them out.

This country is certainly of richer soil, better farmed, and in every way even in the transport by water of its staple product, timber, from the most remote recesses - better adapted for supporting its population, than any part of Norway. This part of Sweden also is divided, like Norway, very