32 
Geology. 
gather justified, so far as the territory south of Melville Bay is con- 
cerned, but it is quite worthy of special note, in view of its im- 
portance to glacial investigations, that north of Melville Bay the 
border tract is a plateau, only here and there accentuated in a 
mountainous fashion. In the region of Inglefield Gulf the plateau 
is very pronounced and nothing really mountainous is presented. 
This plateau is about 2000 feet in height, varying through a mod- 
erate range above and below this. The undulations of its sum- 
mit rarely reach a thousand feet, and they have the characteris- 
tics of a rolling or hilly plain, rather than of mountainous corru- 
gation. The rise from the sea level is in part precipitous, due 
doubtless to coastal encroachment, but in larger part perhaps it 
is sloping and traversible in almost all directions. Upon the plain 
of this plateau the interior ice spreads itself out with little inter- 
ruption, except as valleys descending from the summit to the sea 
level draw out tongues from it. About half of these reach the 
water, while the other half terminate on the land. 
It is very possible that this plateau is but the outer edge of a 
very extensive and elevated plain underlying the interior of 
Greenland. Many students of Greenlandic phenomena have sug- 
gested the existence of such a plateau in the interior on purely 
theoretical grounds. This view may fairly be thought to find 
support in the observation that in this northern region, along a 
tract of some hundreds of miles, such a plateau actually emerges 
from beneath the inland ice and forms the border of the island. 
In addition to this upper plain, there is a lower one lying near 
the water’s edge, which is worthy of attention, because of its his- 
torical significance, though it has but a meagre expression. It is 
very closely analogous to the plain skirting Norway and recently 
described by Dr. Reusch as constituting a new feature in the to- 
pography of that long-studied region, i The lower coastal 
plain of Greenland is well seen in the vicinity of Godthaab, the 
capital of the southern division. Here it constitutes an undulat- 
ing peneplain abutting against a mountainous background. It 
descends gently toward Baffin Bay and its low undulations con- 
1 . Hans Reusch, Journal of Geology, May-June, 1894, pp. 347-349. 
