EXISTING GLACIERS. 37 



pedition to the same desolate region in 1860, while other 

 explorers have to some extent supplemented their obser- 

 vations. The largest glacier which they saw enters the 

 sea between latitude 79° and 80°, where it presents a pre- 

 cipitous discharging front more than sixty miles in width 

 and hundreds of feet in perpendicular height. 



Dr. Kane gives his first impressions of this grand gla- 

 cier in the following vivid description : 



" I will not attempt to do better by florid description. 

 Men only rhapsodize about Niagara and the ocean. My 

 notes speak simply of the ' long, ever-shining line of cliff 

 diminished to a well-pointed wedge in the perspective ' ; 

 and, again, of ' the face of glistening ice, sweeping in a 

 long curve from the low interior, the facets in front in- 

 tensely illuminated by the sun.' But this line of cliff 

 rose in a solid, glassy wall three hundred feet above the 

 water-level, with an unknown, unfathomable depth below 

 it ; and its curved face, sixty miles in length from Cape 

 Agassiz to Cape Forbes, vanished into unknown space at 

 not more than a single day's railroad-travel from the pole. 

 The interior, with which it communicated and from 

 which it issued, was an unsurveyed mer de glace — an ice- 

 ocean to the eye, of boundless dimensions. 



" It was in full sight — the mighty crystal bridge which 

 connects the two continents of America and Greenland. 

 I say continents, for Greenland, however insulated it may 

 ultimately prove to be, is in mass strictly continental. Its 

 least possible axis, measured from Cape Farewell to the 

 line of this glacier, in the neighbourhood of the eightieth 

 parallel, gives a length of more than 1,200 miles, not ma- 

 terially less than that of Australia from its northern to its 

 southern cape. 



" Imagine, now, the centre of such a continent, occu- 

 pied through nearly its whole extent by a deep, unbroken 

 sea of ice that gathers perennial increase from the water- 

 shed of vast snow-covered mountains and all the precipi- 



