“…Published data (Murozumi et al, 1969;Boutron andPatterson, 1983, 1987;Go¨rlach and Boutron, 1992;Boutron et al, 1990Sheppard et al, 1991;Suttie and Wolff, 1992;Wolff and Suttie, 1994;Wolff and Peel, 1994;Rosman et al, 1994b;Vandal et al, 1995;Barbante et al, 1997a, b) indeed do not allow time trends from the Industrial Revolution to the present to be assessed: the longest time series which are available for single locations are only for :60 years at the best (Wolff and Suttie, 1994), which is clearly insufficient. Moreover, most data are for only one metal, Pb.…”