THEIR SITE. 
447 
the Arctic circle. This tenriination, which, like Good 
Hope and Comorin, illustrates Foster’s law of South- 
trending peninsulas, is abrupt and precipitous. The 
influences of the surrounding sea give to its climate 
an insular character, and seem to prevent any great 
glacier accumulation. 
As we travel, however, to the north, those great in- 
dentations known as the Fiords, which penetrate the 
metamorphic ridges at right angles to their long axes, 
serve as conduits to the interior ice. The settlements 
atjBaal’s River and Godhaah, the earliest inhabited 
upon the coast, and near the region of the ancient Ice- 
landic colonists, are the seats of large glaciers. These 
do not abut directly upon the sea; hut, as far as my 
inquiries extended, issue in troughs that enter the 
fiords from the north and south, and are connected 
with those great reservoirs, or mers de glace, which, 
like vast table-lands, occupy the unknown interior. 
The North and South Stromfiords, about Holsteinberg, 
receive similar glaciers; and the annual hunts for the 
reindeer, which seem to have carried the Esquimaux 
back from the coast, have disclosed great masses of 
ice, at whose bases the animals escaping from the 
musquitoes fall an easy prey to the hunter. 
When we reach the latitude of 69 °, where the green- 
stone dikes begin to modify the gneissoid character of 
the ranges, the glaciers approach more nearly to the 
actual coast. The crystalline schists, however, con- 
tinue with lofty headlands as far as Wilcox Point; 
and it was only here, where the mean level of the 
coast seemed to be reduced, that the great glacier, 
properly speaking, began. 
Taking a headland near Wilcox Point, which was 
known to be fifteen hundred feet above the level of the 
