688 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [June 22, 
with a block of trap(?) so large that it looked, even at a distance, 
like a good-sized house. 
6. Life near the ice-fjords.—In the immediate vicinity of the 
Jakobshayn ice-fjord (and I take it as the type of the whole) ani- 
mals living on the bottom were rare, except on the immediate shore 
or in deep water; for the bergs grazed the bottom in moderately 
deep water to such an extent as almost to destroy animal and 
vegetable life rooted to the bottom. Im this vicinity bunches of 
algee were floating about, uprooted by the grounding bergs, and the 
dredge brought up so little material for the zoologist’s examination 
that, unless in deep water, his time was almost thrown away. Again, 
the heads of the inlets, unless very broad and open to the sea, are 
bare of marine life, the quantity of fresh water from the subglacial 
stream and the melting bergs being such as to make the neigh- 
bourhood (as in, the Baltic) unfavourable for sea-animals. Some 
inlets are said to be so cold that fish leave them. I have not been 
able to confirm this in the Arctic regions. When stream-emptying 
lakes fall into the head of these fjords, having salmon in them, then 
seals ascend into the lakes in pursuit of them. Other localities, 
owing to the capricious distribution of life, would be barer or more 
abundantly inhabited. Again, in shallow inlets, except for Crus- 
tacea or other free-swimming animals, the bottom, continually dis- 
turbed by the dropping of moraine or the ploughing up of bergs, 
would be unfavourable for life. Accordingly, if the bed of the Arctic 
Ocean in these places were raised, and we found the mouth of a 
valley with laminated beds of clay rich in Arctic shells, and the 
head bare of life, but still showing that the beds had been assorted 
by marine action, supposing we were (as in Scotland) ignorant, 
except by analogy, of the history of this, should we not feel justified 
in saying that the beds at the one place and the other were depo- 
sited under different conditions, and were in all likelihood of dif- 
ferent ages? How just that apparently logical inference would be 
I need scarcely ask. 
IL. Action oF SEA-IcE. 
We have in the previous section in the most outline form sketched 
the subject: of Greenland glacial action. As the object of this paper 
is not to form a summary of our knowledge on the subject, I have 
not entered into a discussion of any points on the physics of ice, fur- 
ther than was necessary to a right understanding of the subject in 
hand. Suffice it to say that all sea-ice forms originally from the 
“‘bay-ice” of the whaler, as the thin covering which first forms 
on the surfaces of the quieter waters is called, and that this “ bay- 
ice” is entirely fresh, the effect of arctic freezing temperature being 
to precipitate the salt. Hence, when we talk of the temperature 
requisite to freeze salt water, it is merely equivalent to saying that 
this temperature is requisite for the precipitation of the saline 
constituents of the water. The water of the arctic sea is, according. 
to Scoresby, of the specific gravity 1:0263. At this specific gra- 
