THE ARCTIC EXPEDITION : ITS SCIENTIFIC AIMS. 
157 
the expedition. Oftentimes discoveries are made when least 
expected. One discovery leads to another, and with the 
material at hand an accomplished naturalist can never fail to 
make interesting observations, and even deduce important 
generalisations which those at home, only acquainted with what 
has already been done, cannot even presage. Still there are a 
few points in various branches of science which it would be well 
that the naturalists should attend to, and which the Jeremiahs, 
who are never weary of crying that all is barrenness, should be 
aware still require solution, or more extended observations in 
regard to. Let us take geology. Over the North of Europe — 
most markedly in Great Britain — America, and in all likelihood, 
Asia also, are found certain remarkable deposits which are 
believed to date from one of the latest geological epochs, viz., 
that known as the glacial period, and are known to have been 
caused by ice. These deposits are very varied, but they may 
be referred to three great series, viz., great beds of stiff tena- 
cious clay, unfossiliferous, but mixed with rounded boulders most 
frequently scratched and ice-worn ; a series of finely-laminated 
clays, containing fossils, chiefly Arctic shells ; and lastly beds 
of sand and gravel and boulders, rounded and angular, 
scattered over the country, and belonging to formations not in 
the immediate vicinity ; indeed often far distant from the 
localities where these boulders and 66 travelled blocks” are 
found, showing that they may have been transported by some 
agency. This agency is now universally conceded to be ice 
in some form, most likely icebergs. Ice, again, must have 
been at work in forming the “ glacial beds ; ” but whether 
floating ice, or some great ice cap covering the whole country, 
is as yet undecided, though the preponderance of belief points 
to the latter as being the mode in which the ice was formed. 
Agassiz long ago pointed out that Scotland must have been 
swathed, hill and dale, mountain and valley, in such a great 
glacier covering. For long he was treated with incredulity, 
simply because we knew of no country which at the present 
time was in such a condition,* and therefore, reasoning on the 
great principles taught by Lyell, we could not accept such a 
hypothesis. We now know that Greenland is a country in 
exactly such a condition, and it is to it that we must look for 
an explanation of the glacial phenomena of Britain and the 
rest of the Northern hemisphere. The naturalists, by a 
thorough study of glacial phenomena in that great country of 
glaciers, can do much to solve the questions now under discus- 
* Yet'in 1780 Otho Fabricius wrote (“ Fauna Groenlandica,” p. 4 ), 11 inte- 
rioribus ob plagam glacialem continuam inhabitabilibus;” and Lars Dalager, 
among others, described the u inland ice.” 
