FLORA. 197 



glaciers has left them exposed and devoid of vegetable 

 earth, show oaked their uncovered skeleton, and enable us 

 to follow with invaluable distinctness all the details of 

 stratification and superposition, which are sometimes so 

 difficult to verify on the continent covered with alluvial 

 deposits, and upturned by cultivation. 



' In Greenland, it is especially on the Island of Disco and 

 along the coast stretching to the peninsula of Noursoak, 

 that are situated the principal beds, towards the 70th of 

 North latitude, a little south of Upernavik, on the western 

 coast of the region. It is there that Captain Inglefield, 

 and Lieutenant Colornb, his second in command, on the 

 return of their expedition in quest of Franklin, and after 

 them Sir L. M'Clintock, and Drs Torelly and Lyell, and 

 in the summer of 1867 M. Whymper, made successively 

 their collections. These were submitted by their present 

 possessors to examination by Dr Heer. But an important 

 part of the unveiling of the Greenland plants pertains also 

 to the Swedish scientific expedition of 1870, and to Pro- 

 fessor Nordenskjoeld, of Stockholm, whose name is more 

 especially associated with Spitzbergen, which was visited by 

 him, not only in connection with the two Swedish expedi- 

 tions of 1868 and 1870, but previously in 1858, 1861, and 

 1869, and again later, in 1872.' Of this indefatigable and 

 successsul explorer, Count Saporta, whose statement I am 

 quoting, wrote inl875: 'M. Nordenskjoeld is a young 

 savant, already famous, a true Frenchman of the North, 

 who combines with the vivacity and sympathetic amenity 

 of our race the spirit of thorough investigation, penetra- 

 tion, scientific erudition, and perseverance of purpose, in 

 which we are too often deficient. Familiar with the 

 nature of the North, struggling against it and subduing 

 it, not without an effort, he has explored, at the risk of 

 life, a land bristling with ice-peaks, almost inaccessible, 

 but from which he has known how to bring back cargoes 

 of minerals and of fossils. Thanks to him and to MM. 

 Malmgren, Torrel, and others, the past of Spitzbergen is as 

 well known to us as that of any country in Europe, it 



