34 THE DEFLUENTS OF THE INLAND ICE-FIELD. 



the probabilities are in favour of the negative." There are no ice- 

 berg " streams " on the east coast of Greenland, and bergs are rare off 

 that coast. If there were many icebergs, the field of floe-ice which 

 skirts that coast, and which has prevented exploration except in 

 very open seasons, would soon be broken up by the force with which 

 the bergs, breaking off from the land, would smash through the ice- 

 field, and, acting as sails, help, by the aid of the winds, as elsewhere, 

 to sweep it away. I am therefore of opinion that the great ice- 

 field slopes from the east to the west coast of Greenland, and that 

 any bergs which may be seen on that coast are frorn local glaciers, 

 or from some unimportant defluent of the great interior ice. Nor 

 do I think a range of mountains at all necessary for the formation 

 of this huge mer de glace ; for this is an idea wholly derived from 

 the Alpine and other mountain-ranges where the glacier system is 

 a petty affair compared with that of Greenland. I look upon Green- 

 land and its interior ice-field in the light of a broad-lipped shallow 

 vessel, but with chinks in the lips here and there, and the glacier, 

 like viscous matter ] in it. As more is poured in, the viscous matter 

 will run over the edges, naturally taking the line of the chinks as 

 its line of outflow. The broad lips of the vessel, in my homely simile, 

 are the outlying islands or " outskirts ;" the viscous matter in the 

 vessel the inland ice, the additional matter continually being poured 

 in in the form of the enormous snow covering, which, winter after 

 winter, for seven or eight months in the year, falls almost con- 

 tinuously on it ; the chinks are the fjords or valleys down which 

 the glaciers, representing the outflowing viscous matter, empty the 

 surplus of the vessel. In other words, the ice floats out in glaciers, 

 overflows the land, in fact, down the valleys and fjords of Greenland, 

 by force of the superincumbent weight of snow, just as does the grain 

 on the floor of a barn (as admirably described by Mr. Jamieson) 

 when another sackful is emptied on the top of the mound already 

 on the floor. " The floor is flat, and therefore does not conduct the 

 grain in any direction ; the outward motion is due to the pressure 

 of the particles of grain on one another ; and, given a floor of infinite 

 extension, and a pile of sufficient amount, the mass would move 

 outward to any distance ; and with a very slight pitch or slope it 

 would slide forward along the incline." To this let me add that if 

 the floor on the margin of the heap of grain was undulating, the 

 stream of grain would take the course of such undulations. The 

 want, therefore, of much slope in a country, and the absence of any 



1 While, for the sake of illustration, speaking of ice as " viscous matter," I must 

 not be understood as giving support to the " viscous theory " of glacier motion. 



