550 
ACCESS TO A 
Belcher may do every thing ; but I must repeat that I am far from sanguine as 
to tlieir success. The chances are against their reaching the open sea. 
It is to announce, then, another plan of search that I am now before you ; 
and as the access to the open sea forms its characteristic feature, I have given 
you the preceding outline of the physical characteristics of the region, in order 
to enable you to weigh properly its merits and demerits. 
It is in recognition of the important office which American geographers may 
perform toward promoting its utility and success, that I have made the society 
the first recipient of the details and outlines of my plan. 
Henry Grinnell, the first president and now a vice-president of this society, 
has done me the honor of placing his vessel, the Advance, at my disposition ; 
and the Secretary of the Navy has assigned me to " special duty" for the con- 
duct of the expedition. 
My plan of search is based upon the probable extension of the land masses 
of Greenland to the far north — a view yet to be verified by travel, but sustained 
by the analogies of physical geography. Greenland, though looked upon by 
Gi6seke as a congeries of islands cemented by interior glaciers, is, in fact, a 
peninsula, and follows in its formation the general laws which have been rec- 
ognized since the days of Forster as belonging to peninsulas with a southern 
trend. Its abrupt, truncated termination at Staaten-Hook is as marked as that 
which is found at the Capes Good Hope and Horn of the two great conti- 
nents, the Gomorin of Peninsular India, Cape South East of Australia, or the 
Gibraltar of Southern Spain. 
Analogies of general contour, which also liken it to southern peninsulas, are 
even more striking. The island groups, for instance, seen to the east of these 
southern points, answering to the Falkland Islands, Madagascar, Ceylon, New 
Zealand, the Bahamas of Florida, and the Balearics of the coast of Spain, are 
represented by Iceland otf the coast of Greenland. It has been observed that 
all great peninsulas, too, have an excavation or bend inward on their western 
side, a " concave inflection" toward the interior. Thus, South America be- 
tween Lima and Valdavia, Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, India in Cambaye, and 
Australia in the Bay of Nuyts, are followed by Greenland in the great excava- 
tion of Disco. Analogies of the same sort may offer when we consider those 
more important features of relief so popularly yet so profoundly treated by Pro- 
fessor Guyot. 
Greenland is lined by a couple of lateral ranges, metamorphic in structure, 
and expanding in a double axis to the N.N.W. andN.N.E. They present strik- 
ing resemblances to the Ghauts of India, being broken by the same great injec- 
tions of green-stone, and walling in a plateau region where glacial accumula- 
tions correspond to those of the Hindostan plains. 
The culmination of these peaks in series indicates strongly their extension 
to a region far to the north. Thus from the South Cape of Greenland to Disco 
Bay, in lat. 70°, the peaks vary in height from 800 to 3200 feet. Those of 
Proven, lat. 71°, are 2300, and those observed by me in lat. 76° 10', gave sex- 
tant altitudes of 1380 feet, with interior summits at least one third higher. 
The same continued elevation is observed by the whalers as high as 77°, and 
Scoresby noted nearly corresponding elevations on the eastern coasts, in lat. 
73°. The coast seen by Inglefield, to the north of 78°, was high and com- 
manding. 
