A rock such as we have here described may have been found supported in part by lesser fragments, or such supports may have been introduced by partial excavations under favourable projections of its surface; and in either case, the superfluous earth, sand, or stones under and about it, being removed, this ancient monument of the operations of Nature would henceforth become an instrument in the worship of Nature’s God--a Cromlech!
Whether, however, this be, or not, a correct view of the original impulse which led to the selection of these giant stones, or of the purpose to which they were applied, it is for our antiquarian friends to decide. Suffice it here to add, that the transportation of such huge masses from their native beds, by the power of man or of giants, was at such a remote epoch, and under the circumstances of the country, impossible; nor will I stop to inquire whether a work so mighty was performed by spirits light as air.
Let us turn to the consideration of the phenomenon of Boulders, as it has appeared to the eye of science. And perhaps there are no two facts which place it in so strong a light, and embrace so fully the reasonings founded upon it, as the dispersion of blocks of the granite and other rocks of Sweden over a large portion of Northern Europe, the boulders, either singly or in clusters, being disposed in long parallel lines or trainées, for upwards of two hundred miles from the mountains of Scandinavia, to which, by identity of mineral composition, they have been traced, although separated from them by the Baltic Sea; and the occurrence of boulders of alpine granite resting on the secondary rocks of the Jura chain, between which and the Alps are situated the deep valley of the Rhone, the Lakes of Geneva and Neufchatel, the distance travelled by the boulders being sixty miles. Saussure, struck by the spectacle of clusters of these fragments so far removed from any rock resembling them, declared that they looked as if rained down from heaven; a sentence strikingly expressive of the difficulties which attend on an explanation of their occurrence. De Luc rightly speaks of such travelled masses of stone as being “one of the most important of geological monuments, since they offer a rigorous criterion of the different systems concerning the revolutions which have happened on our globe;” and in describing the vicinity of Cuxhaven, situated at the extremity of the Bremen country, which lying between the Gulfs of the Elbe and Weser, is as it were a peninsula, he cites the very forcible example it affords of a vast abundance of boulders at a distance of more than two hundred miles from the Scandinavian chain, the outlet, itself sixty miles wide, of the Baltic, forming part of the intervening space.