678 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. © [June 22, 
ward to any distance; and with a very slight pitch or slope it would 
slide forward along the incline.” To this let me ada that if the floor 
on the margin of the heap of grain was undulating, the stream of 
grain would take the course of such undulations. The want, there- 
fore, of much slope in a country, and the absence of any great moun- 
tain-range, are of very little moment “ to the movement of land-ice, 
provided we have snow enough” ’. 
As the ice reaches the coast it naturally takes the lowest level. 
Accordingly it there forks out into glaciers or ice-rivers, by which 
means the overflow of this great ice-lake is sent off to the sea. ‘The 
length and breadth of these glaciers varies according to the breadth 
or length of the interspace between the islands down which it 
flows’. If the land projects a considerable way into the great ice- 
lake, then the glacier is a long one; if the contrary is the case, then 
it is hardly distinguished from the great interior ice-field, and, as in 
the case of the great glacier of Humboldt in Smith’s Sound, the inte- 
rior ice may be said to discharge itself almost without a glacier. 
The face of Humboldt’s glacier is in breadth about sixty miles. 
This, therefore, I take to be the interspace between the nearest ele- 
vated skirting land on either side. It thus appears that, between the 
inland ice and the glacier, the difference is one solely of degree, not 
of kind, though, for the sake of clearness of description, a nominal 
distinction has been drawn. The glacier, as I have said, will usu- 
ally flow to the lowest elevation. Accordingly it may take a valley 
and gradually advance until it reaches the sea. In the course of 
ages this valley will be grooved down until it deepens to the 
sea-level. The sea will then enter it, and the glacier-bed of former 
times will become one of those fjords which indent the coast of 
Greenland and other northern countries often for many miles; or 
these may be much more speedily produced by depression of the 
land, such as I shall show is at present going on. By force of the 
sea the glacier proper will then be limited to the land, and its 
old bed become a deep inlet of the sea, hollowed out and grooved 
by the icebergs which pass outwards, until in the course of time, by 
the action of a force which I shall presently describe (§ 4), the 
fjords get filled up and choked again with icebergs, in all probability 
again to become the bed of some future glacier stream®. Where 
there is no fjord at hand, or where these defiuents are not sufficient 
to draw off the surplus supply of ice, the “ inland ice” will “boil” 
over the cliffs, overflowing its basin, and appear as hanging glaciers, 
whence every now and again huge masses of ice (the aérial 
1 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. xxiv. 1865, p. 166. 
2 Properly speaking, according to the ordinary nomenclature, the whole of 
the ice, from the “ névé” downwards, should be called “glacier ;”’ but as we have 
not yet penetrated sufficiently far into the interior to observe where the “néyé” 
ends and the “ glacier” begins, I have for the sake of distinctness adopted the 
above arbitrary nomenclature. 
’ The origin of fjords is more fully developed in a memoir by the author on 
‘The formation of Fjords, Cafions, Benches, &c.,” in Proc. Roy. Geog. Soe. 
vol. xiv. 1869; Journal, vol. xxxix.; and in his “ Das Innere der Vancouver 
Insel,” Petermann’s ‘ Geographische Mittheilungen,’ 1869, pp. 94, 96. 
