loo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Cape Farewell, where Greenland rises amid a group of rocky islands, 

 to more than 1,300 miles northward, and far beyond, where no human 

 step has trod, a rigid sea of ice sweeps its appalling and silent surface. 

 The ice piled up upon central axes forces itself outward in vast sheets 

 and icy currents to the shore. This universal exudation of ice makes 

 an ice-wall many hundred feet high along the coast, an impressive feat- 

 ure in that northern land, and a solemn token of the desolation it pro- 

 tects. At its foot a shelf of ice projects into the water, in places a 

 smooth table, but more frequently tossed in the wild commotion of con- 

 fused hummocks straining and grinding together, urged by the resist- 

 less impetus of the arctic tides. 



From the wide central area descend numerous glaciers upon both 

 the eastern and western coasts, and fimbriate by slow erosion the rock- 

 bound land. Thus carved, in the long succession of ages, deep fiords 

 penetrate the country, walled by lofty and inaccessible precipices, and 

 terminating at the feet of ice-tongues which protrude their burdens of 

 rock, gravel, mud, and soil, into their waters. In places these dejDosits 

 shallow the water to great distances ; and far from shore, rounded rocks, 

 transported from interior highlands, project their polished summits 

 above the waves. Bowlders of green-stone and syenite, rounded by 

 friction and brought from remote localities, are scattered over wide 

 districts. Again, upon the ice-foot which fringes the base of the cliffs, 

 bowlders, tons in weight, are found, dislodged by frosts from the rocks 

 above, and comj^osed of magnesian limestone and inferior sandstones, 

 while elsewhere long backs of rocks are seen abraded and furrowed by 

 ice-floes and glaciers. 



The glaciers occur at the indentations of the shore-line and where 

 the cliffs decline, affording them approach to the waters. Here break- 

 ing into gigantic fragments, each one a towering iceberg, or sloAvly 

 melting in the warmer waters of the sea, they constantly waste away, 

 and are as constantly replenished from the inexhaustible and overflow- 

 ing reservoirs they have left. The great conduit from the inland sea 

 is the Humboldt Glacier, which extends its glassy wall, 300 feet high, 

 along the deepest water for sixty miles, pouring out incalculable vol- 

 umes of ice, laden and penetrated with bowlders, trophies of its resist- 

 less march from hidden and unknown recesses. Kane's Northumber- 

 land Glacier, interesting from the apparent viscosity of the ice, reaches 

 from the interior to the coast unbroken, even when subjected to most 

 unequal and various descents, by any fracture, while in many places 

 " it could be seen exuding its way over the very crest of the rocks, and 

 hanging down in huge stalactites seventy or one hundred feet long." 

 This glacier carried enormous measures of earth, gravel, and rubbish. ' 

 The Great Glacier is rifted in long shelves, which at a distance seem 

 pressed together, the intermediate crevasses appearing as lines above 

 one another. As the motion conspicuous in every part of this glacier 

 successively brings these detached walls to the seas, they are floated 



