36G THE GERMAN ARCTIC EXPEDITION. 



slope of rubbish fell forty- six feet over the outer edge 

 of the glacier. The icy stream, from its azure colour 

 and its transparency, we named " Pasterze," and the 

 heights above, which, to carry out the analogy, we called 

 " Grossglockner," rose in confused towering groups ; 

 though we missed the characteristic feature of our Alps, 

 the sharpness of the ice edges. This circumstance may 

 be explained by the fact that the ice of the Greenland 

 glaciers is not so sohd and glassy as ours. It resembles 

 more last year's ice, and for this reason cracks and 

 fissures are not so frequent as with us ; for a long time 

 the edges, from thaws and evaporations, have rounded off; 

 and, lastly, the very formation of the ice is not so sharp 

 and defined as in our glaciers. We found the ice so 

 smooth that it was with difficulty we reached the heights. 



To a certain extent it was from here that we first 

 really overlooked the glacier. It was formed from five 

 great tributaries, which were partly engulfed on the 

 high plateaus of the mountain range, and sinking between 

 the steep walls of the Fjord. Perhaps these gigantic 

 breaches in the walls of the Fjord might be partly the 

 result of thousands of years' erosion. More distinctly 

 than anything else, however, did the glorious polish on 

 the Hornblend-gneiss and the walls, composed of epidote 

 granite, entitle us to assume that at one time the whole 

 of the Fjord must have been filled with this Greenland 

 "Pasterze;" for in the back-ground it reaches to 720 

 feet above the level of the sea, and sinks towards the 

 exit of the Sound down to 520 feet. 



In our Alps primary glaciers end as soon as they come 

 into the region of 41° Fahr. mean temperature (Schla- 

 gintweit, Physikalische Geographie der Alpen ) ; in Green- 



