The most striking features in the polar landscape are the icebergs, and they are wholly derived from the land, the large icebergs from Greenland, from Spitsbergen much smaller ones. To understand their origin and movements we must turn to the great continental mass of Greenland. It consists of a vast ice-cap fringed by a strip of mountainous coast, which is penetrated by deep fjords and flanked by numerous off-lying rocks and islands. The area of Greenland is believed to be 512,000 square miles, of which 320,000 form the inland ice, and 192,000 represent the fringing margin of mountains not permanently ice-covered. The widest part is 900 miles across; at Disco in 70° N. it is 480 miles and thence the two coasts converge until they meet in a point at Cape Farewell in 59° 49′ N. The length of Greenland is 1400 miles. The Greenland ice-cap is by far the largest in the northern hemisphere--a continuous covering of snow, _névé_[1], or ice resting on land, known as the “Inland Ice.” From it descend glaciers or rivers of solid ice, coming from their sources in the ice-cap. The “Inland Ice” of Greenland rises to a height of 8000 feet, and the deep fjords run for 80 or 100 miles before they end at the foot of walls of ice rising abruptly from the water. These walls are the terminations of glaciers from the inland ice, which, constantly throwing off icebergs, are called discharging glaciers. There are eight principal discharging glaciers on the west coast of Greenland[2]. On the Greenland continent the snow, converted into ice by pressure, has in the course of ages filled all the valleys, covered the mountain tops, and formed a smooth plateau far above them, so that the thickness of the inland ice is measured by thousands of feet. The ice walls at the heads of the discharging glaciers are driven onwards by the force of gravity, the pressure of the superincumbent mass behind them being enormous. In some cases the rate of movement is as much as 28 yards in a day. A discharging glacier, on reaching the sea, has a thickness of at least a thousand feet. It continues to slide along the bottom until it reaches a point where the depth of the water has sufficient buoyant force to lift it. Still it continues its course. The action of the tides gives rise to fissures in the enormous mass, and at length the foremost part is broken off, and drifts away as an iceberg. The icebergs are discharged from the fjords in vast numbers, and are eventually carried by the current of Baffin’s Bay and Davis Strait into the Atlantic.