_The Inland Ice._--The whole interior of Greenland is completely covered by the so-called inland ice, an enormous glacier forming a regular shield-shaped expanse of snow and glacier ice, and burying all valleys and mountains far below its surface. Its area is about 715,400 sq. m., and it is by far the greatest glacier of the northern hemisphere. Only occasionally there emerge lofty rocks, isolated but not completely covered by the ice-cap; such rocks are known as _nunataks_ (an Eskimo word). The inland ice rises in the interior to a level of 9000, and in places perhaps 10,000 ft. or more, and descends gradually by extremely gentle slopes towards the coasts or the bottom of the fjords on all sides, discharging a great part of its yearly drainage or surplus of precipitation in the form of icebergs in the fjords, the so-called ice-fjords, which are numerous both on the west and on the east coast. These icebergs float away, and are gradually melted in the sea, the temperature of which is thus lowered by cold stored up in the interior of Greenland. The last remains of these icebergs are met with in the Atlantic south of Newfoundland. The surface of the inland ice forms in a transverse section from the west to the east coast an extremely regular curve, almost approaching an arc of a wide circle, which along Nansen's route has its highest ridge somewhat nearer the east than the west coast. The same also seems to be the case farther south. The curve shows, however, slight irregularities in the shape of undulations. The angle of the slope decreases gradually from the margin of the inland ice, where it may be 1 deg. or more, towards the interior, where it is 0 deg. In the interior the surface of the inland ice is composed of dry snow which never melts, and is constantly packed and worked smooth by the winds. It extends as a completely even plain of snow, with long, almost imperceptible, undulations or waves, at a height of 7000 to 10,000 ft., obliterating the features of the underlying land, the mountains and valleys of which are completely interred. Over the deepest valleys of the land in the interior this ice-cap must be at least 6000 or 7000 ft. thick or more. Approaching the coasts from the interior, the snow of the surface gradually changes its structure. At first it becomes more coarse-grained, like the _Firn Schnee_ of the Alps, and is moist by melting during the summer. Nearer the coast, where the melting on the surface is more considerable, the wet snow freezes hard during the winter and is more or less transformed into ice, on the surface of which rivers and lakes are formed, the water of which, however, soon finds its way through crevasses and holes in the ice down to its under surface, and reaches the sea as a sub-glacial river. Near its margin the surface of the inland ice is broken up by numerous large