No. 1.] MISCELLANEOUS. 127 



Havins; been fortunate enough to pass twelve months in the 

 most northern portion of the earth that civilized man has yet 

 visited, a region subjected to as rigorous extremes of cold as any 

 yet recorded, where the sun remains below the horizon at mid- 

 day for five months, where the mean annual temperature is — 

 3°'473, where a minimum of — 73"-75 was registered during the 

 month of March, and where for only three months of the year 

 the mean temperature rises up to and above the freezing point 

 of fresh water, viz. +32'^-455 in June; h 38^-356 in July; 

 + 31°-913 in August. I was impressed with the fact that this 

 region is undergoing less glaciation than Greenland, lying twenty 

 degrees of latitude to the southward in the parallel of Shetland, 

 and diliering remarkably from the northern part of Greenland, 

 lying between the same parallels, and separated by a narrow 

 water-way not twenty miles across. 



In Grinnell Land, from lat. 81'^-40' N. to lat. 83°-6' N., no 

 glaciers descend to the sea, no ice-cap buries the land ; valleys 

 from which the snow is in a great measure thawed during July 

 and part of August stretch inland for many miles, and the peaked 

 mountains, snow-clad during the greater portion of the year, in 

 July and August have great portions of their flanks which rise 

 to an altitude of 2,000 feet bared of snow. 



The opposite coast of Greenland presents a very different as- 

 pect, a mer-de-glace stretches over nearly its entire surface, its 

 fiords are the outlets by which its great glaciers protrude into the 

 sea. In Petermann Fiord the ice cap with its blue jagged edge 

 lying flush with the face of the lofty cliffs was estimated to be 

 forty feet thick. 



When we turn to the Flora and Fauna of Grinell Land the 

 difference is equally astonishing ; some fifty or sixty flowering 

 plants are found in its valleys, and between latitudes 82° and 83*^ 

 N., I have seen tracts of land so profusely decked with the blos- 

 soms of Saxifraga oppositifolia that the purple glow of our 

 heath clad moors was brought to my recollection. 



Musk oxen in considerable numbers frequent its shores ; the 

 Arctic fox, the wolf, and ermine, with thousands of lemmings 

 live and die there. The bones of these mammals, alonc>- with 

 those of the ringed seal {Phoca hispida), are now beiug deposited 

 in considerable quantities in the fluvio-marine beds now forming 

 in the bays and at the outlets of all the streams, or rather sum- 

 mer torrents of Grinnell Land. With these bones will be 



