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north, offers a remarkably accessible region where glaciers of the 

 old Irish type remain. This island, as it happened, was not easily 

 reached in 1910, when an unusual amount of drift ice from the 

 pole prevented the entry of large steamers to its fjords. Baron de 

 Geer, however, Professor of Geology at the University of Stockholm, 

 had organised an expedition of some seventy geologists, in con- 

 nection with the International Geological Congress in Stockholm, 

 and he carried this expedition through, with exceptional skill and 

 seamanship, in a light Baltic steamer of 890 tons. The reader of 

 the paper to the Belfast Field Club had the advantage of repre- 

 senting the Royal College of Science for Ireland on this excursion. 

 One of the points specially noted was the existence of ice- 

 sheets several miles wide in Spitsbergen under almost arid con- 

 ditions, the precipitation being believed to be only about seven 

 inches per annum. The weathering of the plateau-edge, which 

 forms the characteristic feature of the coast of the great Ice Fjord, 

 reminds one everywhere of the dry lands of Arizona. Snow 

 gathers in the notches, and enlarges them by melting in the sun 

 and freezing again at night, a crumbling surface being thus pro- 

 duced, from which in time the snow and rocks slide down. 

 Gradually " cirques " arise, by this local excavation of the plateau, 

 and these compare very interestingly with the grand rock-hollows, 

 Coumshingaun and a hundred others, among the Irish hills, which 

 have also been eaten out by frost, while local glaciers occupied 

 their floors. The ice presents itself in Spitsbergen as local glaciers, 

 but also as broad sheets occupying the lowlands, leaving serrated 

 hills above, and moving forward actively over the raised beaches 

 and tundras to the sea. At its melting margins it reveals the 

 immense burden of rock carried throughout its mass, and some of 

 the sheets are almost black with included "boulder-clay." Since 

 1896, the Sefstrom Glacier has invaded Cora Island and has again 

 shrunk back, appearing now with a face four miles broad along 

 the coast. A relic of the ice remains on the island, associated 

 with a red boulder-clay which is full of marine shells. The valves 



