DEBATEABLE POINTS REGARDING GREENLAND. 73 



and found open water to the north, 1 would seem to point out that 

 the course of the expedition would then be clear. Such a feat in 

 geographical importance and naval enterprise would be only second 

 to the doubling of the northern termination of America — in other 

 words, to the discovery of the north-west passage as achieved by 

 M'Clure. 



10. Debateable Points regarding the Physical Structure of 

 Greenland. 



Attention need scarcely be called to the fundamental point of 

 all, viz., the improvement of our knowledge of the geography of the 

 coastdine ; to that, no doubt, the main efforts of the Expedition 

 will be devoted. We know, as has been shown, comparatively 

 little of the interior, and even the few expeditions which have 

 attempted to penetrate eastward have only reached a few miles 

 from the coast. Are there any mountains in the interior ? — a ques- 

 tion which I have ventured, reasoning from the facts before us, to 

 answer in the negative : but Dr. Rink, incomparably the greatest 

 of all authorities on Greenland, is (p. 58) by no means so positive 

 on this question ; perhaps he is right. What is the nature of the 

 soil under the ice ? Is it of the same character as the boulder-clay 

 of Britain ? The many points which ought to be investigated under 

 these heads will appear in the geological instructions or will be 

 evident to the reader after perusing the section on the " Green- 

 land Glaciers and Ice." 



Has the ice an abrading power ? This is almost perfectly cer- 

 tain ; yet some observers — and still more some theorists — have 

 attempted to deny this. Make every examination of the raised 

 beaches on the shores of Smith Sound, and try, if possible, to test 

 the question whether the shores of Smith Sound are actually rising, 

 or are falling like the southern coast. On this point Mr. James 

 Geikie, of the Geological Survey of Scotland — a most competent 

 authority on all questions touching glacial deposits — suggests to me 

 that " it would be very interesting to have determined whether the 

 raised beaches of Greenland give any indication of changes of climate, 

 such as having been observed in these deposits in Spitzbergen. 

 Great banks of Mytilus edulis, Cyprina islandica, and Littorina littorea, 

 occur in that island, and now are even found living in the Spitz- 

 bergen sea. It is true that Mytilus is occasionally seen attached to 

 algai in these regions, but such rare birds are but poor representa- 



1 Petermanu's ' Geographische Mittheilungen,' March 1875. 



