13 
way has been done as thoroughly as Switzerland has, one cannot 
say where the hard working holiday-makers of England may not 
go for their summer vacation, tempted by some future enterprising 
Cook or Gaze. I admit that even Greenland may have glorious 
sights in spite of the general monotony of its scenery ; there are 
few places on this grand old earth of ours altogether devoid of 
attraction. Dr. Nansen, in describing his journey across the 
inland plateau, says: ‘‘ We saw only three things—that was snow, 
sun, and ourselves. One day was quite like another. But still, 
even this part of the earth has its beauties, and I shall never for- 
get the glorious sunsets, and the nights on the snow and ice fields 
of Greenland, when the ever changing northern lights were 
scintillating perhaps brighter than anywhere else.” Grand, no 
doubt, but they can be seen elsewhere, and whether it was worth 
spending six weeks among the floating ice looking out for a land- 
ing place, and then after gettiN& ashore 250 miles south of where 
they had intended to land, travelling for two months in an un- 
washed condition painfully over the snow, must be left to the 
individual judgment. Yet we must bear in mind it was done, not 
for a holiday, but in the interests of science. 
A wild waste desolation of ice and snow, a bare fringe of habit- 
able land on the slightly sheltered west coast: all else—mountains, 
valleys and table lands levelled up by a huge cap or sheet of ice 
to a height of over 5,000 feet. Destitute alike of animal and plant 
life. with coast cliffs of ice hundreds of feet high, from which now 
and again break off -huge projections which are hurried by the sea 
currents away to the south, to the bewilderment and danger of the 
navigator across the North Atlantic. Such is the picture which 
has been drawn for us of this bleak, northern, silent land. 
Can you transfer this picture to England? Can you imagine 
our fertile plains, our “valleys standing so thick with corn that 
they laugh and sing,” reduced to the condition of Greenland? All 
our hills submerged under a field of snow and ice, a death-like still- 
ness overshadowing it all? It seems an impossibility, yet that is 
just what I ask you to do this evening, and to believe that not so 
very long ago (as the geologist reckons time), it was a veritable 
fact—a fact which is verifiable at the present moment. I am 
quite aware that it is disputed by some persons. Just as, a few 
years ago, a book was written to prove the earth was not a globe, 
but a flat circular plain ; just as we have read thai the Gulf Stream 
~ does not come across the Atlantic to our shores; just as some one 
lately has attempted to prove |that sap goes down a tree, but not 
up, as the benighted botanists teach us; so a book is promised us 
shortly, bearing the title of «« ihe Glacial Nightmare,” showing 
that geologists are as benighted as the botanists and the astronomers. 
