Sir H. H. Howorth—On the Arctic Lands. 3038 
to raise in the GronoarcaL Maaazine, I should like to devote a 
short space to this interesting and important subject. 
To begin with Iceland, the Mountains of Iceland when free from 
snow seem to me to unmistakably prove that there never was 
there what it is most patent there was in Scotland and Norway, 
namely, a great mass of ice occupying the high ground and polishing 
and smoothing the surface. The contour of the mountains is ragged 
and torn and splintered, and in some places, such as Allmanna-Gia, 
it is cut into the most fantastic shapes with projecting pinnacles. 
Again, the many blocks of stone found there on the surface of 
the rocks are not strangers and true erratics, but are all natives. 
Again, as Mr. Baring Gould, who has travelled much there and has 
written a graphic account of the Island, says: There are no traces 
of moraines there except at the skirts of modern glaciers, and he 
adds that only in one spot had he found unmistakable glacial 
grooving, namely, along the hill above Bjarg in Mith fjord, and he 
points out that what are really the results of the action of flowing 
water in polishing the surface had been mistaken by some for the 
action of ice. Thus in describing the so-called heithis or fell lands 
the same writer says: ‘‘ These heithies, being exposed to the action 
of snow water, are much torn and mangled, the rock being, in many 
places, quite polished by the streams from the thawed snows, as 
they slide over them. Mr. Chambers, in passing this same tract of 
moor from a different direction, saw similar polishings, and at once 
put them down to glacial action, and the furrows caused by the 
little rills to the striz of glacial grooving. I believe him to have 
been mistaken, for the following reasons: the rock is not smoothed 
except where the streams flow over it, and a slight node of rock 
three inches high is quite sufficient to divert the stria and alter the 
direction of the polished surface. A considerable removal of earth 
had taken place this spring, and I observed no marks of glacial 
smoothing on the rock upon which the soil had rested; it was 
ribbed and curdled like ordinary lava” (Iceland, its Scenes and 
Sagas, p. 63.) 
Again, turning from the mainland of Iceland to the islets and 
rocks which surround it the evidence is the same. These islets 
stand up in the form of splintered pinnacles and needles and form 
the best possible evidence that ice cannot have smothered and 
smoothed them as it did the Scottish isles. Thus the same writer 
says: “‘ Rock-needles, which abound on the coasts, are named 
Drangir by the natives. Some of these are very noble. The 
entrance of the Isa-fjord is guarded by one such, standing up from 
a platform of basalt high above the water; it goes by the name of 
the ‘Sentinel.’ A curious spire of rock above the Hérgardalr is 
illustrated on plate xi. There are needles in the Skaga-fjord off 
Drangey, and in the Breithi-fjord” (id. p. xxix.). The existence 
of these pinnacles and sharp angled rocks is inconsistent with the 
former existence of a great glacial covering. 
Lastly, the flora and the fauna of Iceland cannot, it seems to me, be 
explained by any other theory than that they are the shrunken relics 
