n to confirm so bold an hypothesis.
It was also remarked that if the land which connected Scandinavia with
the main continent was laid dry between the time of Pliny and the ninth
century, to the extent to which it is known to have risen above the sea
at the latter period, the rate of depression could not have been
uniform, as was pretended; for it ought to have fallen much more rapidly
between the ninth and eighteenth centuries.

Many of the proofs relied on by Celsius and his followers were
immediately controverted by several philosophers, who saw clearly that a
fall of the sea in any one region could not take place without a general
sinking of the waters over the whole globe: they denied that this was
the fact, or that the depression was universal, even in the Baltic. In
proof of the stability of the level of that sea, they appealed to the
position of the island of Saltholm, not far from Copenhagen. This island
is so low, that in autumn and winter it is permanently overflowed; and
it is only dry in summer, when it serves for pasturing cattle. It
appears, from the documents of the year 1280, that Saltholm was then
also in the same state, and exactly on a level with the mean height of
the sea, instead of having been about twenty feet under water, as it
ought to have been, according to the computation of Celsius. Several
towns, also, on the shores of the Baltic, as Lubeck, Wismar, Rostock,
Stralsund, and others, after six and even eight hundred years, are as
little elevated above the sea as at the era of their foundation, being
now close to the water's edge. The lowest part of Dantzic was no higher
than the mean level of the sea in the year 1000; and after eight
centuries its relative position remains exactly the same.[729]

Several of the examples of the gain of land and shallowing of the sea
pointed out by Celsius, and afterwards by Linnaeus, who embraced the same
opinions, were ascribed by others to the deposition of sediment at
points where rivers entered; and, undoubtedly, Celsius had not
sufficiently distinguished between changes due to these causes and such
as would arise if the waters of the ocean itself were diminishing. Many
large rivers descending from a mountainous country, at the head of the
Gulf of Bothnia, enter the sea charged with sand, mud, and pebbles; and
it was said that in these places the low land had advanced rapidly,
especially near Torneo. At Piteo also, half a mile had been gained in
forty-fiv