J. D. Dana—Flood of the < nmu-rtit-Kt Iii^r Valley. 99 

 pparent depression, 



bypoth< 



?sis. Since 



the am 



Lount of tl 





of the rise 



in the earth's curvi 



would' 



follow from 



such a c 



hange in th 



of gravity, would i 



increase 



northward 



of the i 



sine of the latitude, 



it follows 



very nearly in the ratio 

 that if the amount at 

 Montreal were 520 feet, as the facts reported show, they should 

 have been about 507 feet at Lewiston, Maine, 491 feet at Point 

 Shirley, Mass. (near Boston), and 480 feet along the north 

 shore of Long Island Sound. But, instead of the amounts 

 507, 491 and 480 feet, the actual levels observed are 200, 75 or 

 80, and 25 to 15 feet.* 



Further, the hypothesis,— calculating again from the Mon- 

 treal level, 520 feet^— would give hardly 730 feet for the regipn 

 about the North Pole, and 720 for latitude 81° to 82°, or that 

 of Grinnell Land and Northern Greenland; while in the latter 

 region, Feilden and De Eance found sea-shells (Pecten Gram- 

 landi<:us } A.starO h/reale, Mya Vruncita, Saxicava rugosa, etc.) 

 in beach-made deposits at different levels up to 1000 feet.f 

 But this is not all the divergence of the facts from Greenland 

 terraces. For, in the part of Danish Greenland called Southern 

 Greenland (between the parallels of 60° and 67° 40'), the part 

 best known, no heights of terraces or elevated beaches have been 

 reported above 350 feet. Dr. Rink, one of the Greenland ex- 

 plorers as well as Government Inspector for many years of 

 Southern Greenland, mentions, in his latest work on Danish 

 Greenland (1877), the occurrence, in this part of the semiconti- 

 nent, of terraces at a height of 100 feet, rising in some places 

 to 200 feet, and nothing of higher level. Mr. A. Kornerup, 

 Geologist of Lieutenant Jensen's Expedition of 18784 ob- 

 served terraces at several points, and describes a series, near 

 the parallel of 63° 10' N., to the north of Fiskernaes, the 

 highest of which was 101 meters, and another in 63° 5' N., of 

 106 meters (348 feet) as the maximum height. Nbrdenskiold, 

 in connection with his exploration in the vicinity of Jakobs- 

 havn, in 1870,§ observed shell beaches up to a height of 100 

 feet near 69° 10' N. Hayes, in his "Open Polar Sea," gives (p. 

 402) 110 feet as the height of terraces at Port Foulke, near 

 78° 10' N., north of Cape Alexander. Kane describes, in vol- 

 ume ii of his Arctic Explorations (p. 80) a series of terraces in 

 78° 40', the highest of which was 480 feet above the sea. 

 Three degrees in latitude north of the last region occur the 

 beaches at 1,000 feet, mentioned above. The discrepancy is 

 * The height of the beds at Point Shirley is made 75 or 80 feet by Professor 



