FLORA. 197 
glaciers has left them exposed and devoid of vegetable 
earth, show naked their uncovered skeleton, and enable us 
to follow with invaluable distinctness all the details of 
stratification and superposition, which are sometimes so 
difficult to verify on the continent covered with alluvial 
deposits, and upturned by cultivation. 
“In Greenland, it is especially on the Island of Disco and 
along the coast stretching to the peninsula of Noursoak, 
that are situated the principal beds, towards the 70th? of 
North latitude, a little south of Upernavik, on the western 
coast of the region. It is there that Captain Inglefield, 
and Lieutenant Colomb, his second in command, on the 
return of their expedition in quest of Franklin, and after 
them Sir L. M‘Clintock, and Drs Torelly and Lyell, and 
in the summer of 1867 M. Whymper, made successively 
their collections. These were submitted by their present 
possessors to examination by Dr Heer. But an important 
part of the unveiling of the Greenland plants pertains also 
to the Swedish scientific expedition of 1870, and to Pro- 
fessor Nordenskjoeld, of Stockholm, whose name is more 
especially associated with Spitzbergen, which was visited by 
him, not only in connection with the two Swedish expedi- 
tions of 1868 and 1870, but previously in 1858, 1861, and 
1869, and again later, in 1872.’ Of this indefatigable and 
successsul explorer, Count Saporta, whose statement I am 
quoting, wrote in 1875:—‘M. Nordenskjoeld is a young 
savant, already famous, a true Frenchman of the North, 
who combines with the vivacity and sympathetic amenity 
of our race the spirit of thorough investigation, penetra- 
tion, scientific erudition, and perseverance of purpose, in 
which we are too often deficient. Familiar with the 
nature of the North, struggling against it and subduing 
it, not without an effort, he has explored, at the risk of 
life, a land bristling with ice-peaks, almost inaccessible, 
but from which he has known how to bring back cargoes 
of minerals and of fossils. Thanks to him and to MM. 
Malmgren, Torrel, and others, the past of Spitzbergen is as 
well known to us as thas of any country in Europe, it 
