. Discovery. Science. DISCOVERY^ 269 separated from Grant Land, Grinnell Land, and Ellesmere Land by the narrow channels connecting Baffin's Bay with the Polar Sea : so narrow are the channels that Eskimo can easily pass across. It was doubtless by this route that the ancestors of the present Greenlanders reached the country. With Europe Greenland is closely connected geologically. In the remote past, at least, there was probably a vast continent, a northern Atlantis, stretching from what are now the highlands of Norway and Scotland to the Arctic regions of .\merica. Greenland is in a geologic
. Discovery. Science. DISCOVERY^ 269 separated from Grant Land, Grinnell Land, and Ellesmere Land by the narrow channels connecting Baffin's Bay with the Polar Sea : so narrow are the channels that Eskimo can easily pass across. It was doubtless by this route that the ancestors of the present Greenlanders reached the country. With Europe Greenland is closely connected geologically. In the remote past, at least, there was probably a vast continent, a northern Atlantis, stretching from what are now the highlands of Norway and Scotland to the Arctic regions of .\merica. Greenland is in a geological as also in a biological sense a connecting link between the Old and New Worlds. By far the greater part of the island, so far as it is possible to ascertain the structure of a land almost completely covered by ice, consists of coarsely crystalline rocks mainly of igneous origin and of an antiquity that is inconceivably remote. The cliffs on some parts of the coast are built up of limestones, sandstones, shales, and old pebble beaches containing the remains of animals and plants charac- teristic of several geological periods and clearly indi eating climatic conditions within the .-Vrctic Circl. much more genial than those at the present day. Even in the extreme north, on the shore of the Polar Sea, limestone rocks have been described by the Dani^h geologist Koch as " veritable coral reefs" of the- Palaeozoic era, the fourth era in geological time. Greenland is a mountainous plateau mainly com- posed of some of the oldest rocks in the world belongini^ to a stage in the history of the earth (the Archsan period) which is shrouded in mystery. Of the life of this period we have no certain knowledge. On the extreme northern coast, also at many places on the east and west coasts, the presence of thick series of ancient sediments and of rocks consistitig of accumu- lated masses of the calcareous skeletons of marine animals is evidence of recurrent subsidences of the land an
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