The island of Spitzbergen, in latitude 76° to 81°, is favourably situated for the production of glaciers, by reason both of its high northern latitude, and of its relation to the Gulf Stream, which conveys around to it an excessive amount of moisture, thus ensuring an exceptionally large snow-fall over the island. The mountainous character of the island also favours the concentration of the ice-movement into glaciers of vast size and power. Still, even here, much of the land is free from snow and ice in summer. But upon the northern portion of the island there is an extensive table-land, upwards of two thousand feet above the sea, over which the ice-field is continuous. Four great glaciers here descend to tide-water in Magdalena Bay. The largest of these presents at the front a wall of ice seven thousand feet across and three hundred feet high; but, as the depth of the water is not great, few icebergs of large size break off and float away from it. Nova Zembla, though not in quite so high latitude, has a lower mean temperature upon the coasts than Spitzbergen. Owing to the absence of high lands and mountains, however, it is not covered with perpetual snow, much less with glacial ice, but its level portions are "carpeted with grasses and flowers," and sustain extensive forests of stunted trees. Franz-Josef Land, to the north of Nova Zembla, both contains high mountains and supports glaciers of great size. Mr. Payer conducted a sledge party into this land in 1874, and reported that a precipitous wall of glacial ice, "of more than a hundred feet in height, formed the usual edge of the coast." But the motion of the ice is very slow, and the ice coarse-grained in structure, and it bears a small amount only of morainic material. So low is here the line of perpetual snow, that the smaller islands "are covered with caps of ice, so that a cross-section would exhibit a regular flat segment of ice." It is interesting to note, also, that "many ice-streams, descending from the high _névé_ plateau, spread themselves out over the mountain-slopes," and are not, as in the Alps, confined to definite valleys. Iceland seems to have been properly named, since a single one of the snow-fields--that of Vatnajoküll, with an extreme elevation of only six thousand feet--is estimated by Helland to cover one hundred and fifty Norwegian square miles (about seven thousand English square miles), while five other ice-fields (the Langjoküll, the Hofsjoküll, the Myrdalsjoküll, the Drangajoküll, and the Glamujoküll) have a combined area of ninety-two Norwegian or about four thousand five hundred English square miles. The glaciers are supposed by Whitney to have been rapidly advancing for some time past.