684 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL society. [June 22, 
owing to the smaller specific gravity of the fresh water, rises to the 
surface, as Dr. Rink describes, “like springs”—though I do not 
suppose that he considers (as some haye supposed him to do) that 
that water was in reality spring-water, or of the nature of springs. 
Here are generally swarms of Entomostraca and other marine 
animals, which attract flights of gulls, which are ever noisily fight- 
ing for their food in the vicinity of such places. 
We lived for the greater portion of a whole summer at Jakobshayn, a 
little Danish post, 69° 13’N., close to which is the great Jakobshayn 
ice-fjord, which annually pours an immense quantity of icebergs into 
Disco Bay. In Giesecke’s time’ this inlet was quite open for boats ; 
and Nunatak (a word meaning a “land surrounded by ice”) was 
once an Eskimo settlement. There is an old man (Manyus) living 
at Jakobshavn whose grandfather lived there. The Tessiusak, an 
inlet of Jakobshayn ice-fjord, could then be entered by boats. 
Now-a-days Jakobshavn ice-fjord is so choked up by bergs that 1t is 
impossible to go up in boats, and such a thing is never thought of. 
The Tessiusak must be reached by a laborious journey over land ; 
and Nunatak is now only an island surrounded by the inland ice, at 
a distance—a place where no man lives, or has, in the memory of 
any one now living, reached. I believe that this has been mainly 
owing to the inlet having got shoaled by the deposit of glacier-clay 
through the rivers already described. I have little doubt that, 
Graah’s dictum?” to the contrary notwithstanding, a great inlet once 
stretched across Greenland at this place, as represented on the old 
maps, but that it also has now got choked up with consolidated 
bergs. In former times the natives used to describe pieces of tim- 
ber drifting out of this inlet, and even tell of people coming across ; 
and stories yet linger among them of the former occurrence of such 
proofs of the openness of the inlet. All that we know is, that such 
a transcontinental passage, if ever it existed, is now shut up. The 
glacier and the ice-stream have not changed their course, though, 
if the shoaling of the inlet* goes on (and if the glacier continues at 
its head, nothing is more certain), then it is just possible that the 
friction of the bottom of the inlet may overcome the force of the 
glacier, and that the ice may seek another course. As the neigh- 
bourhood is high and rocky, this is hardly possible with the present 
contour of the land. At the present day, the whole neighbourhood 
of the mouth of the glacier is full of bergs, and often we should be 
astonished on some quiet sunshiny day, without a breath of wind in 
the bay, to see the “‘ice shooting out” (as the local phrase is) from 
the ice-fjord, and to wake up with the little bay in front of our door 
in Jakobshayn Kirke covered with huge icebergs, so that we had to 
put off our excursion to the other side of the inlet; and the natives 
would stand hungry on the shore, as nobody would dare put off in 
his kayak to kill seals, afraid of the falling of the bergs. In a few 
1 “Greenland,” Brewster’s Encyclop.,and App. to Scoresby’s Greenland Voyage. 
? Reise til Oskysten af Gronland, 1832, and transl. 1837. 
3 These inlets are, in fact, the “ friths” of these ice-rivers. Indeed the term 
is actually used by some authors. 
