THE GREENLAND EXPEDITION OF 1895. 879 
but if reliance may be placed on topographic form, it seems clear 
that in both these places there are considerable stretches of coast 
over which no ice, except perhaps isolated glaciers, has descended 
in any recent time. This is the more noteworthy from the fact 
that the same regions now harbor very considerable glaciers, 
while the ice-caps which feed them approach very close to the 
outer edge of the upland. Fully a dozen glaciers, and the ice- 
cap above which nourishes them, were visible on the northeast 
side of Bylot Island, while about Dexterity Harbor there are 
very considerable glaciers, some of them descending nearly to 
the water level, separated from each other by serrate peaks 
which do not appear ever to have been over-ridden by ice, 
though the ice-cap today is no more than two or three miles 
distant. 
In view of the facts already mentioned concerning the topog- 
raphy of the Greenland coast, it seems to be impossible to avoid 
the conclusion’ that the Pleistocene ice-sheet of our continent 
did not have its starting point in Greenland. If reliance may be 
placed upon coastal topography, the phenomena observed on 
the American coast would seem to indicate further, that the 
great center of ice accumulation during the Pleistocene period 
was not on the most northerly lands on the west side of Baffin 
Bay. Had this been the case, Bylot Island, and the coast of the 
-mainland in the vicinity of Dexterity Harbor, would hardly have 
escaped glaciation at the same time that the Labrador coast and 
its outlying islands were subjected to the action of ice on an 
extensive scale; and had latitude (at least present latitude) been 
the determining factor in glaciation, the west coast of Greenland 
north of latitude 76° would hardly have suffered so slight an 
extension of its ice as its condition seems to indicate, while more 
southerly regions were less favored. 
It is to be borne in mind that the foregoing conclusion con- 
cerning the meager extension of ice-caps of the west coast of 
North Greenland and the east coast of America, in recent time, 
is based on general, rather than on detailed observation, and that 
Chamberlin, loc. cit., p. 219. 
