268 
POrULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
from the Danish authorities. The fossils they brought home 
were submitted to Professor Heer, the eminent botanist of 
Zurich, whose report on them has already been named. 
Greenland is in all likelihood a large wedge-shaped island, 
covered everywhere in the interior with a sheet of ice of un- 
known depth. The coast-line surrounding this vast mer de 
glace is of variable breadth, and has the aspect of a circlet of 
bare bleak islands rising to the height of about two thousand 
feet, and separated by deep inlets or fjords, which are the 
channels through which the overflow of the interior ice finds 
its way to the sea. During the short Arctic summer the snow 
clears off this outskirting land, on which the population of 
Greenland lives and the Danish trading-ports are built. 
Though a familiar subject of conversation among the colonists 
from the earliest times, very few of them have ever visited the 
great interior sea of ice ; whilst the natives have a great horror 
of it, not only because of the dangers it presents, but from a 
belief that it is inhabited by evil spirits of monstrous forms. 
At the inlets, where the interior ice sometimes reaches the sea, 
it presents 6 ice-walls,’ varying in height from one thousand to 
three thousand feet, according to the depth of the valley* 
This wall is always steep, because bergs are continually break- 
ing off from it, thus rendering approach to it very dangerous, 
on account, not only of the falling ice, but of the waves which 
it produces. One of these faces, known as Humboldt’s Glacier, 
is about sixty miles broad. 
Once fairly on the ice in the interior, a dreary scene meets 
the view — one great ice-field, unbroken in all directions, except 
in those in which the outskirting land is seen. The traveller, 
however, finds it traversed with crevasses , the bottom of which 
he is unable to see, or to reach with his sounding-line. The 
surface of the field rises continuously but gently, the gradient 
diminishing towards the interior. In the winter it must be 
covered with a deep layer of snow, and the surface must be 
smooth as a glassy lake ; but in the summer this covering is 
converted into water, which, in the form of streams, finds its 
way to the sea, directly by flowing on the surface to the edge, 
or indirectly by falling into the crevasses , and thence by sub- 
glacial routes. As is the case with glaciers generally, the sur- 
face of the ice is ridged and furrowed ; and so far as observations 
have gone, this increases towards the interior. Nowhere is 
there to be seen on it a trace of any living thing, or a patch of 
earth, or a stone, or, in short, anything whatever to remind one 
of the outer world. An afternoon breeze blows over it regu- 
larly with such piercing bitterness, that the explorers found 
their Eskimo dogs crouched under the lee of the sledge for 
shelter. 
