GLACIAL SYSTEM OF GREENLAND. 29 



interior ice-cap. I may, however, mention that in 1867.W6 were not 

 far enough north, or early enough in Davis Straits, to see anything 

 of the action of sea-ice, and that, though I saw the " inland ice " 

 close at hand for the first time that year, yet I added nothing to the 

 knowledge which my observations during a much more extended 

 voyage along the northern shores of Greenland and the western 

 shores of Davis Straits enabled me to gain as early as 1861. 

 Accordingly many of these descriptions are written almost verbatim 

 from my notes of that date, and the views I now enunciate were 

 formed at that period also. lam, in addition, not ignorant of the 

 remains of the glacial period in Scandinavia and Great Britain, as 

 well as in North America and other countries. Though the facts 

 here narrated will, in almost every case, be wholly derived from 

 my own observation, I wish it to be distinctly understood that I 

 do not present them as any thing new, but solely as the observa- 

 tions and conclusions of an independent student of the subject, and 

 as therefore of some value. If some of the facts here related are 

 already familiar to the reader from other sources, I can only plead 

 that few, if any, of them are yet sufficiently well understood, or 

 received into the commonwealth of knowledge as confirmed facts, not 

 to admit of being repeatedly described by independent observers. 



4. Glacier-System of Greenland. 



Greenland is in all likelihood a large wedge-shaped island, or 

 series of islands, surrounded by the icy Polar basin on its northern 

 shores, and with Smith Sound, Baffin Bay, Davis Straits, and the 

 Spitzbergen, or Greenland Sea of the Dutch, the " old Greenland 

 Sea " of the English whalers, completing its insularity on its western 

 and eastern sides. The whole of the real de facto land of this great 

 island consists, then, of a circlet of islets, of greater or less extent 

 circling round the coast, and acting as the shores of a great interior 

 mer de glace — a huge inland sea of fresh-water ice, or glacier, which 

 covers the whole extent of the country to an unknown depth. 

 Beneath this icy covering must lie the original bare ice-covered 

 country, at a much lower elevation than the surrounding circlet of 

 islands. These islands are bare, bleak, and more or less moun- 

 tainous, reaching to about 2000 feet ; the snow clears off, leaving 

 room for vegetation to burst out during the short Arctic summer. 

 The breadth of this outskirting land varies, as do the spaces 

 between the different islands. These inlets between the islands 

 constitute the fjords of Greenland, and are the channels through 

 which the overflow of the interior ice discharges itself. It is on 



