Sir H. H. Howorth—On the Arctic Lands. 305 
that less American drift wood has been brought to the northern 
shores of Iceland during late years, and an increased amount has 
been cast on its southern shores (7d. pp. 191-198). 
The evidence then is very strong and very concurrent against 
Iceland having shared in the so-called glacial conditions which 
marked Scandinavia and Britain. 
Let us now turn to Greenland. Greenland is now so over- 
whelmed with ice that even if it had had a former so-called glacial 
period we should not be easily able to disentangle and separate its 
traces from those of the Arctic conditions which now prevail there, 
so that we cannot adduce evidence there of the same kind as we can 
elsewhere, namely, old polished and striated rocks, boulders, ete. 
It is of course very well known that in Greenland there are 
undoubtedly considerable traces of polishing, scoring, ete., outside 
the range and reach of the living glaciers. Thus Nordenskiold 
refers to the extensive rounded, polished and grooved border of 
land which almost everywhere separates the inland ice from the 
extreme coast, and he goes on to argue that this points to the com- 
paratively recent retirement of the ice, and he adds, in addition, that 
none of the numberless small sea basins in North Greenland, in spite 
of the suitableness of the locality for moss vegetation, have yet become 
filled with turf even to the depth of a few feet, showing, to use his 
own words, that the slip of ice-free land is but a child of yesterday. 
I admit completely Nordenskiold’s facts, but I cannot follow his 
inference.. As everyone knows, the coast of Greenland north of a 
certain latitude is rapidly rising from the sea, and the rounding 
and polishing and striating of the marginal land was the result 
not of the action of greatly increased land ice, but of that most 
effective scraper and polisher—shore ice, acting as it still does 
on this coast and also on the coast of Labrador. 
Now, apart from the smoothing down of this marginal land, I 
know of no direct evidence in Greenland of a former increased 
development of ice, but the reverse. 
The presence of pinnacles and pillars of rock standing up with a 
perfectly free space round them, seem here, as in Iceland, to be quite 
inconsistent with the former existence of an ice-sheet on a much 
greater scale than now exists. Kane speaks of three pillars of green- 
stone which he calls ‘‘Three Brothers’ Turrets.” These are situated 
near Dallas Bay. At Sunny Gorge again, north of 79°, he speaks 
of a solitary column or minaret tower as sharply finished as if it had 
been cast for the Place Venddéme; the length of the shaft is 480 
feet, rismg on a plinth itself 280 feet high, and he named it 
“Tennyson’s Monument.” 
These would surely have long ago been ground down and swept 
away if a great mass of ice corresponding to that which we postulate, 
when we speak of an ice-age, had formerly prevailed in Greenland. 
The evidence, such as we have it, of tradition and of archeology 
goes to show that the climate of Greenland has been growing more 
and more severe within historic times. Its glaciers have undoubtedly 
been growing and extending over districts where formerly a much 
DECADE III.—VYOL X.—NO. VII. 20 
