ry,
between the sun and the ice. For the dark clay and the dark parts of
plants absorb the warm rays of the sun better than the ice, and
therefore powerfully promote its melting. They eat themselves down
in perpendicular cylindrical holes thirty to sixty centimetres in
depth, and from a few millimetres to a whole metre in diameter. The
surface of the ice is thus destroyed and broken up.

[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE INLAND-ICE OF GREENLAND. After a drawing
by S. Berggren, 23rd July, 1870. ]

[Illustration: GREENLAND ICE FJORD. After a design drawn and
lithographed by a Greenland Eskimo. ]

[Illustration: SLOWLY-ADVANCING GLACIER. At Foul Bay, on the west coast of
Spitzbergen, after a photograph taken by A. Envall, 30th August, 1872. ]

[Illustration: GLACIER WITH STATIONARY FRONT. Udde Bay, on Novaya
Zemlya, after a drawing by Hj. Theel (1875). ]

After the melting of the snow there appears besides a number of
inequalities, and the clefts previously covered with a fragile
snow-bridge now gape before the wanderer where he goes forward, with
their bluish-black abysses, bottomless as far as we can depend on
ocular evidence. At some places there are also to be found in the
ice extensive shallow depressions, down whose sides innumerable
rapid streams flow in beds of azure-blue ice, often of such a volume
of water as to form actual rivers. They generally debouch in a lake
situated in the middle of the depression. The lake has generally an
underground outlet through a grotto-vault of ice several thousands
of feet high. At other places a river is to be seen, which has bored
itself a hole through the ice-sheet, down which it suddenly
disappears with a roar and din which are heard far and wide, and at
a little distance from it there is projected from the ice a column
of water, which, like a geyser with a large intermittent jet in
which the water is mixed with air, rises to a great height.

Now and then a report is heard, resembling that of a cannon shot
fired in the interior of the icy mass. It is a new crevasse that has
been formed, or if one is near the border of the ice-desert, an
ice-block that has fallen down into the sea. For, like, ordinary
collections of water, an ice-lake also has its outlet into the sea.
These outlets are of three kinds, viz., _ice-rapids_, in which the
thick ice-sheet, split up and broken in pieces, is pressed forward
at a comparatively high speed down a narrow steeply-sloping valley,
where ice