[Footnote AK: See Transactions of the Edinburgh Geological Society for February 18, 1886, vol. v, part ii, pp. 286-293.] The principal part of our information concerning the glaciers of Greenland north of Melville Bay was obtained by Drs. Kane and Hayes, in 1853 and 1854, while conducting an expedition in search of Sir John Franklin and his unfortunate crew. Dr. Hayes conducted another expedition to the same desolate region in 1860, while other explorers have to some extent supplemented their observations. The largest glacier which they saw enters the sea between latitude 79° and 80°, where it presents a precipitous discharging front more than sixty miles in width and hundreds of feet in perpendicular height. Dr. Kane gives his first impressions of this grand glacier in the following vivid description: "I will not attempt to do better by florid description. Men only rhapsodize about Niagara and the ocean. My notes speak simply of the 'long, ever-shining line of cliff diminished to a well-pointed wedge in the perspective'; and, again, of 'the face of glistening ice, sweeping in a long curve from the low interior, the facets in front intensely illuminated by the sun.' But this line of cliff rose in a solid, glassy wall three hundred feet above the water-level, with an unknown, unfathomable depth below it; and its curved face, sixty miles in length from Cape Agassiz to Cape Forbes, vanished into unknown space at not more than a single day's railroad-travel from the pole. The interior, with which it communicated and from which it issued, was an unsurveyed _mer de glace_--an ice-ocean to the eye, of boundless dimensions. "It was in full sight--the mighty crystal bridge which connects the two continents of America and Greenland. I say continents, for Greenland, however insulated it may ultimately prove to be, is in mass strictly continental. Its least possible axis, measured from Cape Farewell to the line of this glacier, in the neighbourhood of the eightieth parallel, gives a length of more than 1,200 miles, not materially less than that of Australia from its northern to its southern cape. "Imagine, now, the centre of such a continent, occupied through nearly its whole extent by a deep, unbroken sea of ice that gathers perennial increase from the water-shed of vast snow-covered mountains and all the precipitations of its atmosphere upon its own surface. Imagine this, moving onwards like a great glacial river, seeking outlets at every fiord and valley, rolling icy cataracts into the Atlantic and Greenland seas; and, having at last reached the northern limit of the land that has borne it up, pouring out a mighty frozen torrent into unknown arctic space!