An interesting episode of this expedition was the experience of the crew of the ship Hansa, which was caught in the ice and destroyed. The crew, however, escaped by encamping on the ice-floe which had crushed the ship. From this, as it slowly floated towards the south through several degrees of latitude, they had opportunity to make many important observations upon the continent itself. As viewed from this unique position the coast had the appearance everywhere of being precipitous, with mountains of considerable height rising in the background, from which numerous small glaciers descended to the sea-level. In 1888 Dr. F. Nansen, with Lieutenant Sverdrup and four others, was left by a whaler on the ice-pack bordering the east of Greenland about latitude 65°, and in sight of the coast. For twelve days the party was on the ice-pack floating south, and so actually reached the coast only about latitude 64°. From this point they attempted to cross the inland ice in a northwesterly direction towards Christianshaab. They soon reached a height of 7,000 feet, and were compelled by severe northerly storms to diverge from their course, taking a direction more to the west. The greatest height attained was 9,500 feet, and the party arrived on the western coast at Ameralik Fiord, a little south of Godhaab, about the same latitude at which they entered. It thus appears that subsequent investigations have confirmed in a remarkable manner the sagacious conclusions made by the eminent Scotch geologist and glacialist Robert Brown in 1875, soon after his own expedition to the country. "I look upon Greenland and its interior ice-field," he writes, "in the light of a broad-lipped, shallow vessel, but with chinks in the lips here and there, and the glacier like viscous matter in it. As more is poured in, the viscous matter will run over the edges, naturally taking the line of the chinks as its line of outflow. The broad lips of the vessel are the outlying islands or 'outskirts'; the viscous matter in the vessel the inland ice, the additional matter continually being poured in in the form of the enormous snow covering, which, winter after winter, for seven or eight months in the year, falls almost continuously on it; the chinks are the fiords or valleys down which the glaciers, representing the outflowing viscous matter, empty the surplus of the vessel--in other words, the ice floats out in glaciers, overflows the land in fact, down the valleys and fiords of Greenland by force of the superincumbent weight of snow, just as does the grain on the floor of a barn (as admirably described by Mr. Jamieson) when another sackful is emptied on the top of the mound already on the floor. 'The floor is flat, and therefore does not conduct the grain in any direction; the outward motion is due to the pressure of the particles of grain on one another; and, given a floor of infinite extension and a pile of sufficient amount, the mass would move outward to any distance,