APPLICATION OF FACTS REGARDING ICE-ACTION. 57 



used as food and clothing, and the oil consumed in the country, 

 it may not be irrelevant in this light to present the following 

 list of a portion of tbe annual exports of the Danish settlements in 

 1855 ■}— 



9569 barrels of seal-oil. 

 47,809 seal-skins. 



6346 reindeer-skins. There is on record the fact of 30,000 being 

 exported in one year. 

 1714 fox-skins. 



34 bear-skins (the animal being almost extinct in Danish Green- 

 land). 



194 dog-skins (in addition to the numerous teams used by the 

 natives). 



3437 lbs. rough eider-down. 

 5206 lbs. of feathers. 



439 lbs. of narwhal ivory (the natives also using up much for 

 their implements). 



51 lbs. of walrus ivory (the walrus being little pursued). 

 And 3596 lbs. of whalebone (very few of the Balcena mysticetus 

 being killed). 



Add to this that, when the Danes came to Greenland first, there 

 was a population not much less than 30,000 ; and to this day there 

 lives within the Danish possessions a healthy, hearty race of up- 

 wards of 10,000 civilised intelligent hunters of narwhal, seal, and 

 reindeer, with schools and churches within sight of the eternal 

 inland ice, and with a long night of four months, which, perhaps, 

 Scotland had not during the glacial epoch. I do not believe, how- 

 ever, that our shores were inhabited then ; but still I see no reason 

 why they could not have been ; and, with the bright skies and warm 

 sunshiny days of a Greenland summer fresh in my memory, I 

 cannot bring myself to believe in the poetically gloomy pictures 

 pseudo-scientific writers have delighted to draw of the leaden skies, 

 the misty air, and unutterable dreariness of our Scottish shores in 

 that incalculably distant period when glaciers ran through our 

 valleys from the inland ice, and icebergs crashed in our romantic 

 glens, then fjords of that glacial coast. 



1 For this return I amindebted tomyfriend Dr. Kink, themosl eminent autho 

 rity on all matters connected with Greenland. See also my monographs ol 

 Greenland Mammals in the ' Proceedings of the Zoological Bocietyof London for 

 1868, and in ' Petermann's Geographische Mittheilungen,' L869. 



