272 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
bear may be seen all the year round. The Danes, at their 
first visit, found a human population there of 30,000 ; and 
within their own possessions there is at present a healthy, 
intelligent, civilised race of hunters of not less than 10,000 
souls. Exclusive of home consumption, the annual exports of 
the settlements amounted in 1835 to 9,569 barrels of seal- 
oil, 47,809 seal skins, 1,714 fox skins, 34 bear skins, 194 
dog skins, 3,437 lbs. of eider down, 5,206 lbs. of feathers, 
439 lbs. of narwhal ivory, 51 lbs. of walrus ivory, and 3,596 lbs. 
of whalebone. 
G-eologists have long taught that, at least, the west coast of 
Greenland is slowly sinking below the sea. This doctrine is 
confirmed by Dr. Brown, who recapitulates the principal points 
of the evidence on which it rests. The following are amongst 
the facts he enumerates : — Near the end of the last century a 
small rocky island was observed to be entirely submerged at 
springtide high-water, yet on it were the remains of a house, 
rising six feet above the ground ; fifty years later the sub- 
mergence had so far increased that the ruins alone were ever 
left above water. The foundations of an old storehouse, built 
on an island in 1776, are now dry only at low water. The 
remains of native houses are in one locality seen beneath the 
sea. In 1758 the Moravian Mission establishment was founded 
about two miles from Fiskernsesset, but in thirty years they 
were obliged to move, at least once, the posts on which they 
rested their large omiaks , or seal-skin boats. Some of the 
posts may yet be seen under water. The dwellings of several 
Greenland families, who lived on Savage Point from 1721 to 
1736, are now overflowed by every tide. In one locality, the 
ruins of old Greenland houses are only to be seen at low water. 
A blubber house, originally built on a rocky islet about a 
furlong from the shore in Disco Bay, had to be removed in 
1867, as the floor was flooded at every tide, in consequence of 
the gradual sinking of the islet — a fact which had long been 
recognised. An adjacent island, on which the natives formerly 
encamped in considerable numbers during summer, has become 
so diminished in size through slow subsidence that there is at 
present room for no more than three or four skin tents. Dr. 
Brown estimates the rate of submergence at not more than five 
feet in a century. 
Proofs of an upward movement appear to be equally well 
established on the north coast, where Dr. Kane, in 1855, ob- 
served and described a series of old sea-beaches rising one over 
another to considerable heights above the sea-level. 66 1 have 
studies,” he says, “ of these terraced beaches at various points 
on the northern coast of Greenland. ... As these strange 
structures wound in long spirals around the headlands of the 
