Rink ] -^"^ [March 20, 



happened to attack them. He succeeded in completing his circuit of the 

 peninsuhx with its inlets, and in filling one of the principal blanks of our 

 Greenland map. 



The Ancient GiiACiAi, Epoch op Greenland. — Largely provided as 

 it is with ice- formations, Greenland, strange to say. has also a past ice 

 period to boast of. The recent explorations have proved that what we 

 have spoken of as the coastland free from ice was formerly covered with 

 it like the inland, this ice covering reached, in the immediate vicinity of 

 the present inland-ice, a height of 3000 to 4000 feet, and further to the sea- 

 ward between 2000 and 3000 feet. All the usual traces of ancient ice- 

 streams, the erratic blocks and the ground rocks, are the same here as in 

 Northern Europe. These facts seem to corroborate the glacial theory as 

 a whole. But I cannot agree with the supposition, that merely a change 

 of climate, a rise of the annual mean temperature, sliould have caused the 

 ice to recede in such a remarkable degree. The ice-fjords bear sufflcient 

 evidence of the large surplus of ice still produced by the interior. Should 

 it happen that the bottom of the sea in front of them was raised so as to 

 hinder the icebergs from going adrift and being dispersed, the fjords as 

 well as the adjoining outshoots would soon again be leveled with the in- 

 terior under the same icy covering. The ice-fjords, as we have seen, 

 afford the drainage of the continent, but this at all events requires the ex- 

 istence of valleys or channels which are able to gather and conduct the 

 downpour of snow and rain in a congealed state to the sea, in the same 

 manner as in the ordinary way it is carried off by rivers. But the beds 

 occupied by such ice streams and concealed under the common surface of 

 the inland-ice of course must be submitted to changes far more consider- 

 able than those of river beds. Consequently new outlets may be opened 

 to conduct and discharge the excessive production of ice into the ocean, 

 and this, I believe, in some measure may account for the ice crust having 

 disappeared from tracts formerly buried under it. 



Ancient Vegetation of Greenland. — Over an extensive tract of 

 Greenland, mountains are found containing remains of plants which prove 

 that the spot occupied by them in remote ages had a climate like that of 

 Southern Europe, and some of them, like that of Madeira. In speaking of 

 ages, we here refer to geological time, counted by many thousands of 

 years, and changes since-have taken place on a large scale as regards the 

 configuration and distribution of land and sea, but it can be considered as 

 a matter of fact that the area here in question has been occupied by tracts of 

 land or perhaps groups of islands covered with the vegetation of a warm 

 latitude. Its remains occuring in layers of sandstone and shale, accom- 

 panied by beds of coal, have attracted peculiar attention by the investiga- 

 tions of Professor Heer in Zurich, to 'whom the collections were sent in 

 order to be determined. In 1866, Heer explained his reasons for conclud- 

 ing that the fossils laid before him belonged to plants that had grown on 

 the very spot where the remains were found, or in its immediate vicinity 



