282 THE GEOLOGY OE TEOLLHATTEN. eyes a little at hearing of this fresh proof of his friend's mag- nificence ; but it sounds grander to English ears than it is in fact, for Moodie made money by his fishery, and of course required men, not only to j^reserve it, but to catch the fish while he was absent on any roving expedition like the pre- sent ; and as for boats, where planks may be had at the saw- mills for almost nothing, and where every man is more oi less of a carpenter, rough fishing punts are articles of very small expense indeed, and are generally built at home. It is said that the great lake, Wener, even now the largest in Europe, was once much larger ; that it once extended to the falls of Trollhatten ; that all the low-lying and marshy shores, which are now the delight of ducks and the glory of mus- quitoes, were once under water, but that the stream having gradually worked its way over the falls, like a saw, continu- ally wearing away the rock from which it fell, and carrying it off", portion by portion, opened a deeper passage, and that the lake has gradually receded to its present limits. This of course, happened in Preadamice times, or, to use the language of the allegorical history of creation supplied by the prose Edda — in those days, " before the sons of Bor had slain the giant Ymir."* And certainly the formation of the valley afforded some grounds for the conjecture : two low lines of hills, steep and cliff-shaped, suggested readily the idea of Preadamite banks; while the flat bottom of the valley, in many places irrecoverably marshy, in all liable to be covered with water whenever the river is in flood, looked quite as much like the bottom of a drained pond as it did like the real land. It was not without its beauty, either ; if ever it had been a lake, it must have been a lake studded with low islands, and these, as well as much of the marshy ground, were covered with forests, hiding, by the luxuriance of their growth, the numerous cultivated spots which inter- vened. It was a very different description of scenery to that of
- Bor, civilized man, — from heran, to bear ; the same etymology as
that of bai'u, a child. Ymir, Chaos, — literally, a confused noise the meaning is, *' before civilization had subdued Chaos."
