40 MAN AND THE GLACIAL PERIOD. 



pack floating south, and so actually reached the coast only 

 about latitude 64°. From this point they attempted to 

 cross the inland ice in a northwesterly direction towards 

 Christianshaab. They soon reached a height of 7,000 

 feet, and were compelled by severe northerly storms to 

 diverge from their course, taking a direction more to the 

 west. The greatest height attained was 9,500 feet, and 

 the party arrived on the western coast at Ameralik Fiord, 

 a little south of Godhaab, about the same latitude at which 

 they entered. 



It thus appears that subsequent investigations have 

 confirmed in a remarkable manner the sagacious conclu- 

 sions made by the eminent Scotch geologist and giacialist 

 Robert Brown in 1875, soon after his own expedition to 

 the country. " I look upon Greenland and its interior 

 ice-field," he writes, "in the light of a broad-lipped, 

 shallow vessel, but with chinks in the lips here and 

 there, 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 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 continuously on it ; the chinks are 

 the fiords or valleys down which the glaciers, represent- 

 ing the outflowing viscous matter, empty the surplus of 

 the vessel — in other words, the ice floats out in glaciers, 

 overflows the land in fact, down the valleys and fiords 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 emp- 

 tied 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 



