596 PAYER ON FRANZ- JOSEPH LAND. 



ex.— Franz-Joseph Land. 



(1.)^ — Notes on the Land discovered by the Atjstro-Hungarian 

 Expedition under Lieut. Weyprecht and Lieut. Payer, 

 in 1872-4. — By Julius Payer. 



[By Permission, from the R. Geograph. Soc. Proceedings, 

 November 1874, xix. pp. 17, &c.] 



At p. 24 Lieut. Payer says " The newly discovered country 

 (Franz-Joseph Land) equals Spitzbergen in extent, and consists 

 of several large masses of land — Wilczek Land in tlie east, Zichy 

 Land in the west, which are intersected by numerous fjords and 

 skirted by a large number of islands. A wide sound — Austria 

 Sound — separates these masses of land. It extends north from 

 Cape Hansa to about lat. 82° N., where Eawlinson Sound forks off 

 towards the north-east. The latter we were able to trace with 

 the eye as far as Cape Buda-Pest. 



^' The tide rises about 2 feet in Austria Sound, and exercises but 

 a small effect^ merely causing the bay-ice to break near the 

 coasts. 



'' Dolerite is the prevailing rock. Its broad, horizontal sheets, 

 and the steep table-mountains, which recall the Ambas of 

 Abyssinia, impart to the country its peculiar physiognomy. Its 

 geological features coincide with those of portions of North- 

 eastern Greenland. A Tertiary coal-bearing sandstone occurs 

 in both; but only small beds of Brown-coal Avere discovered. 

 On the other hand amygdaloid rocks, which are so frequent in 

 North-eastern Greenland, were not met with in Francis-Joseph 

 Land ; and, whilst the rocks in the south were frequently aphani- 

 tic in their texture, and resembled true basalt, those in the north 

 were coarse-grained and contained nepheline. 



"It is an established fact that portions of North-eastern Green- 

 land, Novaya Zemlya, and Siberia, are being slowly upheaved ; 

 and it was therefore very interesting to meet with Raised Beaches 

 along the shores of Austria Sound, which attested that a similar 

 upheaval was taking place there. 



" The mountains, as a rule, attain a height of 2,000 or 3,000 

 feet, and only towards the south-west do they appear to attain an 

 altitude of 5,000 feet. The extensive depressions between the 

 mountain-ranges are covered with glaciers, of those gigantic pro- 

 portions only met with in the Arctic Regions. Only in a few 

 instances were we able to determine the daily motion of the 

 glaciers by direct measurements. On the coast they usually form 

 mural precipices, 100 to 200 feet in height. The Dove Glacier 

 on Wilczek Land is undoubtedly one of the most considerable of 

 the Arctic Regions. The glaciers visited by us were characterised 

 by their greenish-blue colour, the paucity of crevasses, and extra- 

 ordinarily coarse-grained ice, a small development of moraines, 



