1870. ] BROWN—PHYSICS OF ARCTIC ICE. 677 
single break for upwards of twelve hundred miles’ of latitude and an 
average of four hundred miles of longitude, or from Cape Farewell 
to the upper extremity of Smith’s Sound, and from the west coast of 
Greenland to the east coast of the same country, a stretch of ice- 
covered country infinitely greater than ever was demanded hypothe- 
tically by Agassiz in support of his glacier-theory. 
2. The Defluents of this inland rce-field.—Are there any ranges of 
mountains from the slopes of which this great interior ice descends ? 
As I have said, we are not in a position to decide; but the probabilities 
are in favour of the negative. There are no iceberg “streams” on 
the east coast of Greenland; and bergs are rare off that coast. If 
there were many icebergs, the field of floe-ice which skirts that coast, 
and which has prevented exploration except in very open seasons, 
would soon be broken up by the force with which the bergs, break- 
ing off from the land, would smash through the ice-field and, acting 
as sails, help, by the aid of the winds, as elsewhere, to sweep it 
away. I am therefore of opinion that the great ice-field slopes 
from the east to the west coast of Greenland, and that any bergs 
which may be seen on that coast are from local glaciers or from some 
unimportant defluent of the great interior ice. Nor do I think a 
range of mountains at all necessary for the formation of this huge 
mer de glace; for this is an idea wholly derived from the Alpine and 
other mountain-ranges where the glacier system is a petty affair 
compared with that of Greenland. I look upon Greenland and its 
interior ice-field in the light of a broad-lipped shallow vessel, but 
with chinks in the lips here and; here, and the glacier, like viscous 
matter” in it. As more is poured in, the viscous matter will run 
over the edges, naturally taking the line of the chinks as its line of 
outflow. The broad lips of the vessel in my homely simile are 
the outlying islands or “ outskirts ;” the viscous matter in the 
vessel the inland ice, the additional matter continually being poured 
in in the form of the enormous snow covering, which, winter after 
winter, for seven or eight months in the year, falls almost continu- 
ously on it; the chinks are the fjords or valleys down which the 
glaciers, representing the outflowing viscous matter, empty the sur- 
plus of the vessel. In other words, the ice flows out in glaciers, 
overflows the land in fact, down the valleys and fjords of Greenland, 
by force of the superincumbent weight of snow, just as does the 
grain on the floor of a barn (as admirably described by Mr. Jamieson) 
when another sackful is emptied on the top of the mound already 
on the floor. ‘‘ The floor is flat, and therefore does not conduct the 
grain in any direction ; the outward motion is due to the pressure 
of the particles of grain on one another ; and, given a floor of infinite 
extension, and a pile of sufficient amount, the mass would move out- 
1 Rink, Journ. R. G.S. /.¢., says 800 miles; but throughout his valuable work 
he only speaks of the Danish portion of Greenland, of which it, professes solely 
to be a description. Jamieson and other writers seem to think that it is only 
North Greenland that is covered. All the country, north and south, is equally 
swathed in ice. 
2 While, for the sake of illustration, speaking of ice as ‘ viscous matter,’ I must 
not be understood as giving support to the ‘ viscous theory’ of glacier motion. 
