Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/948

 irrelevant in this light to present the following list of a portion of the annual exports of the Danish settlements in 1855 ' : —

9569 barrels of seal-oil.

47809 seal-skins.

6346 reindeer-skins. There is on record the fact of 30,000 being exported in one year.

1714 fox-skins.

34 bear-skins (the animal being almost extinct in Danish Greenland).

194 dog-skins (in addition to the numerous teams used by the natives).

3437 lbs. rough eider-down.

5206 lbs. of feathers.

439 lbs. of narwhal ivory (the natives also using up much for their implements).

51 lbs. of walrus ivory (the walrus being little pursued).

And 3596 lbs. of whalebone (very few of the Baloena mysticetus being killed).

Add to this that, when the Danes came to Greenland first, there was a population not much less than 30,000 ; and to this day there lives within the Danish possessions a healthy, hearty race of upwards of 10,000 civilized intelligent hunters of narwhal, seal, and reindeer, with schools and churches within sight of the eternal inland ice, and with a long night of four months, which, perhaps, Scotland had not during the glacial epoch. I do not believe, however, that our shores were inhabited then ; but still I see no reason why they could not have been ; and with the bright skies and warm sunshiny days of a Greenland summer fresh in my memory, I cannot bring myself to believe in the poetically gloomy pictures pseudo-scientific writers have delighted to draw of the leaden skies, the misty air, and unutterable dreariness of our Scottish shores in that incalculably distant period when glaciers ran through our valleys from the inland ice, and icebergs crashed in our romantic glens, then fjords of that glacial coast.

Thus, in the barest outlines, I have endeavoured to indicate what I believe to be the origin of the different glacier-remains of our own country. Many facts in support of the glacial-ice-cap theory could have been adduced ; but as these are already familiar to all geologists, it would merely be a waste of space to repeat them here, especially as this is not intended to be a treatise on glacial remains in Britain.

In closing the paper, I may briefly recapitulate the inferences to be drawn from what we see ; and in these inferences I agree almost entirely with Mr. Jamieson, so that it will be only a resume of what he has already, and in a much better manner, described.

1 For it I am indebted to my friend the Chevalier Rink, now of Copenhagen, the most eminent authority on all matters connected with Greenland, See also my monographs of Greenland Mammals in the ' Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London' for 1868, and in ' Petermann's Geographische Mittheilungen,' 1869.