lod 
1870. | BROWN—PHYSICS OF ARCTIC ICE. 673 
summer in the Danish possessions in Greenland, at a post situated 
in close proximity to the great ice-fjord of Jakobshavn, one of the 
chief sources of icebergs in Mid-Greenland—and that with my com- 
panions (Messrs. E. Whymper, A. Tegner, C. Olswig, and J. Fleischer, 
and an intelligent Eskimo, since dead, named Amak, a native of 
Claushavn) I attempted a journey over this great interior ice-cap, 
travelling on foot further than any of the party. I may, however, 
mention that in 1867 we were not far enough north, or early enough 
in Davis Straits, to see any thing of the action of sea-ice, and that, 
though I saw the “inland ice” close at hand for the first time that 
year, yet I added nothing to the knowledge which my observations 
during a much more extended voyage along the northern shores of 
Greenland and the Western shores of Davis Straits enabled me to 
gain as early as 1861. Accordingly many of these descriptions are 
written almost verbatim from my notes of that date, and the views 
I now enunciate were formed at that period also. Iam, in addition, 
not ignorant of the remains of the glacial period in Scandinavia and 
Great Britain, as well as in North America and other countries. 
Though the facts here narrated will, in almost every case, be wholly 
derived from my own observation, I wish it to be distinctly under- 
stood that I do not present them as any thing new, but solely as the 
observations and conclusions of an independent student of the subject, 
and as therefore of some value. If some of the facts here related are 
already familiar to the reader from other sources, I can only plead 
that few, if any, of them are yet sufficiently well understood, or re- 
ceived into the commonwealth of knowledge as confirmed facts, not 
to admit of being repeatedly described by independent observers. 
I. Guacter-systEM OF GREENLAND. 
Greenland, if Petermann’s not unreasonable hypothesis regarding 
its connexion with Wrangell’s Land, north of Behring’s Strait, is not 
to be received, is in all likelihood a large wedge-shaped island, sur- 
rounded by the icy polar basin on its northern shores, and with 
Smith’s Sound, Baffin’s Bay, Davis Straits, and the Spitzbergen, or 
Greenland Sea of the Dutch, “the old Greenland Sea” of the English 
whalers, completing its insularity on its western and eastern sides. 
The whole of the real de facto land of this great island consists, then, 
of a circlet of islets, of greater or less extent, circling round the 
coast, and acting as the shores of a great interior mer de glace—a 
huge inland sea of freshwater ice, or glacier, which covers the whole 
extent of the country to an unknown depth. Beneath this icy cover- 
ing must lie the original bare ice-covered country, at a much lower 
elevation than the surrounding circlet of islands. These islands are 
bare, bleak, and more or less mountainous, reaching to about 2000 
feet ; the snow clears off, leaving room for vegetation to burst out 
during the short Arcticsummer. The breadth of this outskirting land 
varies, as do the spaces between the different islands. These inlets 
between the islands constitute the fjords of Greenland, and are the 
channels through which the overflow of the interior ice discharges it- 
