IGG 
president’s address. 
tliis fertile region are equally extraordinary. To the northward 
an ice-cap of several thousand square miles hursts through every 
gap in the Garfield and Conger mountains in the shape of large 
glaciers, one of wliich, Henrietta Nesmith, has a front of five 
miles and a perpendicular face from one hundred and fifty 
to two hundred feet higli. . . . The unexpected and un- 
favourable orographical features in Greenland which disappointed 
Nordenskidld in his search for such physical conditions a thousand 
miles further south, here likewise prevail over the ice-clad 
country, but give way in the fertile belt. Tlie winter’s scanty 
snow scarcely covers this favoured country, while its abrupt 
intersecting fiords and deep narrow valleys offer most favourable 
conditions for the action of the constant summer sun and the 
complete drainage of its rapid torrents.” ^ In a paper on “ Inter- 
Glacial Epochs,” which the Koyal Dublin Society did me the 
honour to publish in 1878, I pointed out the extraordinary 
difference now existing between the fertile belt of Grinnell Land 
and the opposite shore of Greenland now covered by a mer tie tjlacc. 
Taking into consideration the proofs of very rapid iqiheaval in 
Grinnell Land, drift-wood at a height of five hundred feet still 
retaining its power of flotation, and beds containing the remains of 
IMollusca now found in the adjacent sea, in a state of wonderful 
preservation, at altitudes of over a thousand feet, the conviction 
is forced upon mo, that this extraordinary state of things in the 
most northern region of the earth yet explored liy man, is due to 
the rate of emergence of the land exceeding the growth of the 
descending ice-cap. 
I am afraid that, in giving this slight sketch of my views on the 
Glacial epoch, I have somewhat digressed, but in doing so I have 
endeavoured to show that a Glacial episode would be the natural 
sequence of a large continental area occupying the present Polar 
Lasin. The (question of the spreading southward of the flora and 
fauna from the Polar area is so intimately connected with it, that 
it appears to mo almost impossible to avoid this subject, kly 
* Orccly, Annual Address, Soot. Leo. Soc. 1885. 
