1884.] 
Greenland Expedition. 
25 
direction of the watercourses, springing not from land, but 
m me ting ice, and moving in beds of ice; they seem to 
poin south-west and north-west as if divided by a crest in- 
dicatmg an elevation west to east below the ice. I pointed 
out. similarities in the outlines of the Artfdc sedtion with 
Airica, Greenland corresponding to Africa east of 9 0 W. long. 
r., and the Archipelago to Africa west of it, and the eleva- 
tion might be compared to equatorial Africa. 
I was and am still of opinion that southern is higher than 
northern Greenland; that the elevations west and east de- 
c me going north, the eastern again rising as a peninsula or 
island chain between 85° and 87° N. lat. ; that the ice slowly 
travels north ; that the depressions west and east inside the 
bordering; mountains, having an elevated plateau between 
them, unite in the east going north, determining and follow- 
ing a river bed I compared to the Nile, whereas the north- 
west becomes a plateau widening and descending towards 
the north. b 
The ice-field at the south, occasionally eased by glacier 
arms over watercourses through rents of the mountain- 
borders in west and east, slowly proceeds north-east through 
e wi e valley of the polar Nile, which has its dry seasons 
and its inundations of icebergs and lifting pushing water, 
the bergs moving at its mouth west of the north-eastern 
peninsula out to sea, where they are first driven north, then 
west, and drift decaying through the different channels of 
the Archipelago towards and into the Atlantic. I believe in 
the open sea of Dr. Kane, and in the same sea covered with 
o and new drift-ice as seen by the party sent out by Capt. 
•Mares, because I believe in a periodicity and oscillation of the 
ice motion and drift in the Arftic as well as in the Antarctic 
regions (pp. 279 and 281). 
As. equatorial Africa has its dry and wet seasons, and the 
Nile its low and high water, so has Greenland its great de- 
position of moisture at the south and its periodic ice motion 
m the north-east along the eastern river-bed and depression. 
And as south-western Greenland outside the western 
mountain-range has its moist climate and its pastures, so 
has the . north-western plateau, like that neighbouring the 
Nile at its west, a comparative dryness which keeps it freer 
from the formation of perennial ice and a scanty vegeta- 
tion,— as confirmed by Dr. Kane’s and Capt. Nares’s expe- 
riences (p. 127), who even speak of musk oxen near their 
winter-quarters. 
We may then assume that the bones of reindeer seen by 
Baron Nordenskjceld were those of stragglers from “ herds ” 
VOL. VI. (THIRD SERIES.) ' D 
