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distinctly, without doubt, in landscape pictures from the W. 

 coast, yet indications of it are not wanting even here, though 

 I have not had an opportunity of seeing any pictures from the 

 innermost parts of the Qords in a sufficient number for entering 

 nearer into the question. Now it is true that the same phe- 

 nomenon is very evident also in the inner parts of the Norwegian 

 fjords, and, broadly speaking, Norway is, as we know, itself a 

 plateau land, whose peaks and mountain masses often show, 

 within the same district, a striking correspondence in their 

 height. So far a comparison between Greenland and Norway 

 may be justified. But Greenland forms a far broader mass 

 than either Norway or the whole Scandinavian peninsula, while 

 again erosion and valley-forming forces, following on the re- 

 tirement of the land ice, have, at least in the coastal districts 

 of W. Scandinavia, contributed greatly to render the contrast 

 still greater between mountains and valleys. With the impression 

 I received of the topography of Greenland, with respect to the 

 quick transitions from the peaks of the coast strip and the 

 plateau shaped mountain masses of the territory within the fjords, 

 it seems to me most probable that the country still further 

 inland rather forms a fairly continuous high plateau, though it 

 must in any case be imagined as cut up by a number of deep 

 main valleys. For various reasons I think we may assume that 

 this plateau type is here even more widely extended than in 

 other similar stretches of old mountainous country, which were 

 once covered with land ice, as, for instance, Labrador and 

 Scandinavia. 



This brings us to the question of the origin of such high 

 plateaus and of the effects of the land ice in the interior of 

 an extensive mountainous district. — If the valley systems 

 were not strongly developed before the advance of the ice, and 

 the ice-cover therefore from the beginning embraced large parts 

 of the land, while only the higher peaks stuck out as nunataks, 

 such land ice should have a great levelling tendency on the 



