off into the ocean.[173] The number and dimensions of these bergs
is prodigious. Captain Sir John Ross saw several of them together in
Baffin's Bay aground in water fifteen hundred feet deep! Many of them
are driven down into Hudson's Bay, and accumulating there, diffuse
excessive cold over the neighboring continent; so that Captain Franklin
reports, that at the mouth of Hayes' River, which lies in the same
latitude as the north of Prussia or the south of Scotland, ice is found
everywhere in digging wells, in summer, at the depth of four feet! Other
bergs have been occasionally met with, at midsummer, in a state of rapid
thaw, as far south as lat. 40 degrees and longitude about 60 degrees
west, where they cool the water sensibly to the distance of forty or
fifty miles around, the thermometer sinking sometimes 17 degrees, or
even 18 degrees, Fahrenheit, in their neighborhood.[174] It is a
well-known fact that every four or five years a large number of
icebergs, floating from Greenland, double Cape Langaness, and are
stranded on the west coast of Iceland. The inhabitants are then aware
that their crops of hay will fail, in consequence of fogs which are
generated almost incessantly; and the dearth of food is not confined to
the land, for the temperature of the water is so changed that the fish
entirely desert the coast.

_Difference of climate of the Northern and Southern hemispheres._--When
we compare the climate of the northern and southern hemispheres, we
obtain still more instruction in regard to the influence of the
distribution of land and sea on climate. The dry land in the southern
hemisphere is to that of the northern in the ratio only of one to three,
excluding from our consideration that part which lies between the pole
and the 78 degrees of south latitude, which has hitherto proved
inaccessible. And whereas in the northern hemisphere, between the pole
and the thirtieth parallel of north latitude, the land and sea occupy
nearly equal areas, the ocean in the southern hemisphere covers no less
than fifteen parts in sixteen of the entire space included between the
antarctic circle and the thirtieth parallel of south latitude.

This great extent of sea gives a particular character to climates south
of the equator, the winters being mild and the summers cool. Thus, in
Van Dieman's Land, corresponding nearly in latitude to Rome, the winters
are more mild than at Naples, and the summers not warmer than those at
Paris