Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/923

 summer in the Danish possessions in Greenland, at a post situated in close proximity to the great ice-fjord of Jakobshavn, one of the chief sources of icebergs in Mid-Greenland — and that with my companions (Messrs. E. Whymper, A. Tegner, C. Olswig, and J. Fleischer, and an intelligent Eskimo, since dead, named Amak, a native of Claushavn) I attempted a journey over this great interior ice-cap, travelling on foot further than any of the party. I may, however, mention that in 1867 we were not far enough north, or early enough in Davis Straits, to see any thing of the action of sea-ice, and that, though I saw the " inland ice " close at hand for the first time that year, yet I added nothing to the knowledge which my observations during a much more extended voyage along the northern shores of Greenland and the Western shores of Davis Straits enabled me to gain as early as 1861. Accordingly many of these descriptions are written almost verbatim from my notes of that date, and the views I now enunciate were formed at that period also. I am, in addition, not ignorant of the remains of the glacial period in Scandinavia and Great Britain, as well as in North America and other countries. Though the facts here narrated will, in almost every case, be wholly derived from my own observation, I wish it to be distinctly understood that I do not present them as any thing new, but solely as the observations and conclusions of an independent student of the subject, and as therefore of some value. If some of the facts here related are already familiar to the reader from other sources, I can only plead that few, if any, of them are yet sufficiently well understood, or received into the commonwealth of knowledge as confirmed facts, not to admit of being repeatedly described by independent observers.

I. Glacier-system of Greenland.

Greenland, if Petermann's not unreasonable hypothesis regarding its connexion with Wrangell's Land, north of Behring's Strait, is not to be received, is in all likelihood a large wedge-shaped island, surrounded by the icy polar basin on its northern shores, and with Smith's Sound, Baffin's Bay, Davis Straits, and the Spitzbergen, or Greenland Sea of the Dutch, " the old Greenland Sea" of the English whalers, completing its insularity on its western and eastern sides. The whole of the real de facto land of this great island consists, then, of a circlet of islets, of greater or less extent, circling round the coast, and acting as the shores of a great interior mer de glace — a huge inland sea of freshwater ice, or glacier, which covers the whole extent of the country to an unknown depth. Beneath this icy covering must lie the original bare ice-covered country, at a much lower elevation than the surrounding circlet of islands. These islands are bare, bleak, and more or less mountainous, reaching to about 2000 feet; the snow clears off, leaving room for vegetation to burst out during the short Arctic summer. The breadth of this outskirting land varies, as do the spaces between the different islands. These inlets between the islands constitute the fjords of Greenland, and are the channels through which the overflow of the interior ice discharges it-