Greenland. 453 



This point is clear, that most of our country, as in 

 Greenland and Victoria Land now, was in the icy 

 period ground by a heavy weight of slowly moving and 

 long enduring glacier-ice, which I firmly believe was 

 the scooping power that originated most of the lake 

 scenery of our country. I go further, for in ice-worn 

 rocky regions, both north and south of the equator, the 

 farther north or the farther south we go the more do 

 lakes increase in number, and I am convinced, that this 

 fact is not a mere accidental coincidence, but is one of 

 the strongest proofs of the former existence of that 

 widespread coating of glacier-ice that in old times 

 moulded the face of so much of both hemispheres. 

 The day has been when Greenland was a mild and 

 fertile country, 1 and should such an episode return, its 

 land-surface will be varied by a prodigious number of 

 lakes, and should its fiords emerge, its splendid high- 

 land valleys will show many a long stretch of fresh water 

 dotted with islands, like some of the lakes of Sweden, 

 of Loch Lomond, and others in Scotland, or like Lake 

 Champlain in North America. 



This full theory, brought out in March, and pub- 

 lished in August 1862, of the origin of so many lakes 

 in the northern hemisphere, wherever there have been 

 either widespread continental or even isolated moun- 

 tain glaciers, was on the whole received with disfavour, 

 or ' faint praise,' in England and Switzerland when 

 first produced, and it fared but little better in the 

 north of Italy, where, however, it was then allowed that 

 it ' deserved the gravest attention,' and its general 

 principles have since been accepted by Grastaldi. Now 



before this was discovered I had proved them to be rock-bound 

 glacier lake-basins. 

 1 In Miocene times. 



