86 GLACIERS. 



land,"— that which he presumes to have discovered on this expe- 

 dition. The reality is, that wherever one attempts to proceed np 

 the fjords of Greenland, the interior appears covered with ice ; hut 

 there is no reason whatever to assume that this applies to the 

 central part of the country, in which one, on the contrary, just as 

 well may assume that there are high mountain-chains, which pro- 

 trude partly from the ice. A remarkable movement is found in this 

 ice-mass ; but this is so far from having a kind of main direction 

 after the central axis of the land towards the Humboldt glacier, 

 that this arm of the ice, on the contrary, seems to belong to those 

 that are in a less degree of motion, whereas the greatest agency 

 takes place around Jakobs-havn ice fjord, Omenak fjord, and others. 

 Farther, this movement can only be measured by the masses of ice 

 that pass annually out of these fjords, and of which one can only 

 obtain a tolerable conception by remaining for a long time at the 

 mouths of the fjords. These ice- fjords point out probably the rivers 

 of the original land, now buried under ice. Whereas no conclusion 

 can be drawn from the ice itself and the appearance of its branches 

 that go down to the sea, for it is almost quite uniform everywhere 

 from Julianehaab to Upernivik. 



The author, in concluding his remarks, says it was first when he 

 saw Humboldt glacier that Forbes's and Studer's idea of the like- 

 ness between the glacier and the river began slowly to dawn on 

 him ; but the same species of glacier, which these celebrated natu- 

 ralists have examined on the Alps and in Norway, is found in many 

 places on outer-Greenland, or what I would call ice-free Greenland. 

 These Kano had seen at Disko, near Upernivik, and other places, 

 before he reached " Humboldt glacier." In order to examine its 

 significance in comparison with the rest of the branches of inland 

 ice, he must have made observations and calculations of how many 

 icebergs it annually yielded to the sea, as from its ajipearance he 

 could scarcely form any opinion. By seeing such a branch of in- 

 land ice, on -account of the uniform ice-plateau whence it issues, one 

 gets a smaller impression of its similarity with a river than by 

 seeing the Alpine glaciers and the glaciers on the outer coast of 

 Greenland, as these just fill up clifts which — to judge from their 

 form — must be beds of watercourses. Those arms of inland ice, 

 which send scarcely any ice into the sea, show, on the contrary, 

 about the same appearance as those that send out annually thousands 

 of millions of cubic feet of ice into the sea, and therefore must be 

 supposed to be maintained by river territories of many hundred 

 geographical square miles. 



I now proceed to examine its signification as a sort of connecting 



