Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/934

 owing to the smaller specific gravity of the fresh water, rises to the surface, as Dr. Rink describes, " like springs " — though I do not suppose that he considers (as some have supposed him to do) that that water was in reality spring-water, or of the nature of springs. Here are generally swarms of Entomostraca and other marine animals, which attract flights of gulls, which are ever noisily fighting for their food in the vicinity of such places.

We lived for the greater portion of a whole summer at Jakohshavn, a little Danish post, 69° 13' N., close to which is the great Jakohshavn ice-fjord, which annually pours an immense quantity of icebergs into Disco Bay. In Giesecke's time 1 this inlet was quite open for boats ; and Nunatak (a word meaning a " land surrounded by ice ") was once an Eskimo settlement. There is an old man (Manyus) living at Jakohshavn whose grandfather lived there. The Tessiusak, an inlet of Jakobshavn ice-fjord, could then be entered by boats. Now-a-days Jakobshavn ice-fjord is so choked up by bergs that it is impossible to go up in boats, and such a thing is never thought of. The Tessiusak must be reached by a laborious journey over land ; and Nunatak is now only an island surrounded by the inland ice, at a distance — a place where no man lives, or has, in the memory of any one now living, reached. I believe that this has been mainly owing to the inlet having got shoaled by the deposit of glacier-clay through the rivers already described. I have little doubt that, Graah's dictum 2 to the contrary notwithstanding, a great inlet once stretched across Greenland at this place, as represented on the old maps, but that it also has now got choked up with consolidated bergs. In former times the natives used to describe pieces of timber drifting out of this inlet, and even tell of people coming across ; and stories yet linger among them of the former occurrence of such proofs of the openness of the inlet. All that we know is, that such a transcontinental passage, if ever it existed, is now shut up. The glacier and the ice-stream have not changed their course, though, if the shoaling of the inlet 3 goes on (and if the glacier continues at its head, nothing is more certain), then it is just possible that the friction of the bottom of the inlet may overcome the force of the glacier, and that the ice may seek another course. As the neighbourhood is high and rocky, this is hardly possible with the present contour of the land. At the present day, the whole neighbourhood of the mouth of the glacier is full of bergs, and often we should be astonished on some quiet sunshiny day, without a breath of wind in the bay, to see the "ice shooting out" (as the local phrase is) from the ice-fjord, and to wake up with the little bay in front of our door in Jakobshavn Kirke covered with huge icebergs, so that we had to put off our excursion to the other side of the inlet ; and the natives would stand hungry on the shore, as nobody would dare put off in his kayak to kill seals, afraid of the falling of the bergs. In a few

1 " Greenland," Brewster's Encyclop., and App. to Scoresby's Greenland Voyage.

2 Reise til Oskysten af Gronland. 1832, and transl. 1837.

3 These inlets are, in fact, the " friths " of these ice-rivers. Indeed the term is actually used by some authors.