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way has been clone as thoroughly as Switzerland has, one cannot 

 say where the hard working holiday-makers of England may not 

 go for their summer vacation, tempted by some future enterprising 

 Cook or Gaze. 1 admit that even Greenland may have glorious 

 sights in spite of the general monotony of its scenery ; there are 

 few places on this grand old earth of ours altogether devoid of 

 attraction. Dr. Nansen, in describing his journey across the 

 inland plateau, says : " We saw only three things — that was snow, 

 sun, and ourselves. One day was quite like another. But still, 

 even this part of the earth has its beauties, and I shall never for- 

 get the glorious sunsets, and the nights on the snow and ice fields 

 of Greenland, when the ever changing northern lights were 

 scintillating perhaps brighter than anywhere else." Grand, no 

 doubt, but they can be seen elsewhere, and whether it was worth 

 spending six weeks among the floating ice looking out for a laud- 

 ing place, and then after getting ashore 250 miles south of where 

 they had intended to land, travelling for two months in an un- 

 washed condition painfully over the snow, must be left to the 

 individual judgment. Yet we must bear in mind it was done, not 

 for a holiday, but in the interests of science. 



A wild waste desolation of ice and snow, a bare fringe of habit- 

 able land on the slightly sheltered west coast : all else — mountains, 

 valleys and table lands levelled up by a huge cap or sheet of ice 

 to a height of over 5,000 feet. Destitute alike of animal and plant 

 life, with coast cliffs of ice hundreds of feet high, from which now 

 and again break off huge projections which are hurried by the sea 

 currents away to the south, to the bewilderment and danger of the 

 navigator across the North Atlantic. Such is the picture which 

 has been drawn for us of this bleak, northern, silent land. 



Can you transfer this picture to England ? Can you imagine 

 our fertile plains, our " valleys standing so tljick with corn that 

 they laugh and sing*" reduced to the condition of Greenland ? All 

 our hills submerged under a field of snow and ice, a death-like still- 

 ness overshadowing it all ? It seems an impossibility, yet that is 

 just what I ask you to do this evening, and to believe that not so 

 very long ago (as the geologist reckons time), it was a veritable 

 fact — a fact which is verifiable at the present moment. I am 

 quite aware that it is disputed by some persons. Just as, a few 

 years ago, a book was written to prove the earth was not a globe, 

 but a flat circular plain ; just as we have read thao the Gulf Stream 

 does not come across the Atlantic to our shores ; just as some one 

 lately has attempted to prove -that sap goes down a tree, but not 

 up, as the benighted botanists teach us ; so a book is promised us 

 shortly, bearing the title of " ihe Glacial Nightmare," showing 

 that geologists are as benighted as the botanists and the astronomers. 



