NOTES FROM AN ARCTIC JOURNAL. 91 
denudation. The mud-beds in which the drift-wood had been 
originally imbedded preserved the Mollusca so effectually that, 
at an elevation of two hundred feet, I found the hinge-ligaments 
and syphons of Mya truncata attached to the shells, pieces of 
Laminaria which emitted the peculiar odour of sea-weed when 
dug out, and feathers of birds very little decayed. 
A series of thirteen samples of this drift-wood was submitted 
to Dr. R. M‘Nab for examination. Eleven proved to be coni- 
ferous, and two dicotyledons, both belonging to the same genus 
Populus and to the same species. The eleven coniferous woods 
represented species of Abies, Larix or Picea, and Taxus, the 
commonest form being some species of Picea. Dr. M‘Nab was 
not able to identify the species, but from a careful comparison of 
specimens is inclined to think them North American, and, as the 
annual rings are usually very well developed, the trees must have 
grown in the more temperate northern latitudes. Drift-wood 
was found by our Arctic explorers of the Franklin Search 
Expeditions in Melville Island and other parts of the Parry 
Archipelago, under precisely the same circumstances as we found 
it in Grinnell Land. Those observers, not being well acquainted 
with geological effects, came too hastily to the conclusion that 
the wood had grown in situ. This error has been accepted in 
later days by more than one eminent geologist, and has been 
adduced as a proof of a mild climate having prevailed within 
comparatively recent times in the Polar Regions. 
Among other interesting observations was the action of the 
heavy pack-ice when driven on shore by gales, or by the pressure 
of the ice from seaward. Some of the enormous masses, forty to 
fifty feet in thickness, were pushed on to the land, driving 
the gravel and earth before them in the shape of long mounds. 
On some of these ridges I discovered rounded pebbles, as 
unmistakably ice-scratched as those which we find in our Scotch 
and English boulder-clays. From the position in which I found 
them—namely, on the surface of the sides or slope on which the 
grounded hummocks had rested—I could not doubt that they 
had fallen from the bottom of the stranded floebergs when they 
dissolved in summer. Some of these floebergs had likewise been 
turned completely over during the turmoil of the elements, and 
their exposed surfaces were grooved and fluted in an analogous 
manner to that which we observe with rocks in glaciated districts, 
