_Ancylonema_ has evidently plenty to do. Another instance of the important part played by the insignificant in these regions is suggested by the colour of the sea. This varies from ultramarine blue to olive-green, from the purest transparency to striking opacity; and the changes are not transitory but permanent. These patches of dark water abound with diatoms, while the bluer the water the fewer are the diatoms; and where they are most numerous, there the animals that feed on them assemble in their greatest numbers. And these animals are jellyfish, entomostracans, and, to a greater extent, pteropods, their chief representative being _Clio borealis_. In short, the animals that feed on the diatoms are food of the Greenland whale, and where the waters are dark the whale-fishers thrive. "I know nothing stranger than the curious tale I have unfolded," says Dr. Robert Brown, who worked out this remarkable chain, "the diatom staining the broad frozen sea, again supporting myriads of living beings which crowd there to feed on it, and these again supporting the huge whale. Thus it is no stretch of the imagination to say that the greatest animal depends for its existence on a being so minute that it takes thousands to be massed together before they are visible to the naked eye." Cold as Greenland is, there was a time when matters were different. In token of this we have the Miocene fossils collected by Edward Whymper during his expedition from near Jakobshavn in 1867, which were described and illustrated by Oswald Heer in the _Philosophical Transactions_ for 1869. A look at these is a welcome relief after such a surfeit of ice. Here, as well preserved as in the leaf beds of Alum Bay, are the leaves and fruits of an unmistakable temperate flora. Magnolias, maples, poplars, limes, walnuts, water-lilies; myrica, smilax, aralia; sedges and grasses, conifers and ferns: these at the least were all growing in Greenland in its Miocene age. And even a thousand years ago the climate must have been milder than now, to judge by the farming reports of the colonists who seem to have been quite at home along the coast, which, with its innumerable islands and fiords, is as intricate as that of Norway. Searching for the ancient eastern settlement of the Norsemen, W. A. Graah, in 1829, wintered at Julianehaab, which in all likelihood is the site, although he knew it not. Possessed with the idea that it must be on the south-eastern coast, he devoted his attention to that region only, finding Eskimos who had never seen a white man and starting a trading intercourse which led to most of them migrating to the less inclement west. His work linked up with that of Scoresby, who in 1822 charted the main features of the sea-front from 69° to 75°. Ryder, seventy years afterwards, filled in the details of much of Scoresby's work, and found Eskimos further north, as Clavering had done in 1823, when in the _Griper_ during Sabine's observations at Pendulum Island.