oo heavily about the land,
distant as we were, to see more than the bare outline, but its broken
configuration gave good hope of numerous harbours, fiords, and creeks.
From Cape Home, we entered on a new and peculiar region of limestone
formation, lofty and tabular, offering to the seaboard cliffs steep and
escarped as the imagination can picture to be possible. By the
beautiful sketches of Parry's officers, made on his first voyage, we
easily recognized the various headlands; the north shore being now
alone in view; and indeed, except the mountains in the interior, we saw
nothing more of the south shore of Lancaster Sound after leaving
Possession Bay.

[Headnote: _ICEBERGS AND GLACIERS._]

Of Powell Inlet we saw an extensive glacier extending into the sound,
and a few loose 'berg pieces floating about. This glacier was regarded
with some interest; for, remarkably enough, it is the last one met with
in sailing westward to Melville Island.

The iceberg, as it is well known, is the creation of the glacier; and
where land of a nature to form the latter does not exist, the former is
not met with.

The region we had just left behind us is the true home of the iceberg
in the northern hemisphere. There, in Baffin's Bay, where the steep
cliffs of cold granitic formation frown over waters where the ordinary
"deep sea lead-line" fails to find bottom, the monarch of glacial
formations floats slowly from the ravine which has been its
birth-place, until fairly launched in the profound waters of the
Atlantic, and in the course of many years is carried to the warmer
regions of the south, to assist Nature in preserving her great laws of
equilibrium of temperature of the air and water.

At one period--and not a very distant one either--savans, and, amongst
others, the French philosopher St. Pierre, believed icebergs to be the
accumulated snow and ice of ages, which, forming at the poles, detached
themselves from the parent mass: this, as they then thought, had no
reference to the existence of land or water. Such an hypothesis for
some time gave rise to ingenious and startling theories as to the
effect which an incessant accumulation of ice would have on the globe
itself; and St. Pierre hinted at the possibility of the huge cupolas of
ice, which, as he believed, towered aloft in the cold heavens of the
poles, suddenly launching towards the equator, melting, and bringing
about a second deluge.

Had the immortal Cook been aware of