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mencement of the glacial condition of the country. The clays, 
which, notwithstanding the present slow subsidence, are still 
500 feet above the sea-level, were due to glacial agency, and 
must have been deposited when the areas in which they occur 
were far below the sea. They are occupied, too, by shells of 
the same species as now live in Greenland waters, and thus 
denote that the climate has not changed. 
The existing ice-sheet, which so completely covers the land — 
concealing alike the tops of the mountains and the valleys 
which separate them — is eloquent of time. It represents, not 
the accumulated total snows of ages, but the sum of the annual 
surpluses — the remnants of the yearly precipitation which the 
conjoined actions of evaporation, ice-flow, and sub-glacial 
streams have failed to remove — the hoarded capital resulting 
from the excess of ice-income over expenditure in every form. 
And yet this income is estimated at no more than ten inches 
annually, so that the yearly savings must have been very in- 
considerable in themselves — probably an inch or two, at most. 
Their aggregate is vast, merely because the time of accumu- 
lation has been very protracted. 
It is obvious that the geologist’s chance of finding fossils is 
limited to the outskirting land. Here, however, and especially 
near Atanekerdluk, on the western coast, opposite Disco Island, 
in latitude 70° 1ST. — termed North Greenland by Dr. Heer — he 
has been eminently successful, as has been already remarked. 
From the Eeport of Professor Heer, it appears that the 
specimens collected by Mr. Whymper and Dr. Brown contained 
89 species of plants, of which 20 were entirely new to science ; 
that we are now acquainted with a total of 137 species from 
the same beds and localities ; and that the deposits which 
yielded them belong to what is known to the geologist as the 
Miocene age — a period very remotely ancient, no doubt, when 
measured by even the largest unit employed in human history, 
but not very far back in the vast antiquity of the world. It was 
separated from the close of that era in which our chalk beds were 
formed, by a period termed the Eocene, and, in all probability, 
by an earlier but unrepresented interval. It was long prior, 
on the other hand, to the first appearance in the world of any 
existing species of quadrupeds, and though some of the kinds 
of shell-fish now living were also living then, upwards of fifty 
per cent, of the species forming the present molluscous fauna 
date from times less ancient than those represented by the 
plant-beds of Atanekerdluk. 
Plants of the same kind and of the same age have been found 
also in Iceland, and even in Spitzbergen in latitude 78° 56' N., 
and are wonderfully calculated to revolutionise our notions of 
the climate of the Arctic regions. That it cannot always have 
