t rises from the sea. The process is at once gradual and
comparatively quiet. The idea of icebergs being discharged, so
universal among systematic writers, and so recently admitted by myself,
seems to me at variance with the regulated and progressive action of
nature. Developed by such a process, the thousands of bergs which
throng these seas should keep the air and water in perpetual commotion--
one fearful succession of explosive detonations and propagated waves.
But it is only the lesser masses falling into deep waters which could
justify the popular opinion. The enormous masses of the Great Glacier
[of Greenland] are propelled step by step, and year by year, until,
reaching water capable of supporting them, they are floated off, to be
lost in the temperatures of other regions...

"The height of the ice-wall at the nearest point was about three hundred
feet, measured from the water's edge; and the unbroken right line of its
diminishing perspective showed that this might be regarded as its
constant measurement. It seemed, in fact, a great icy table-land,
abutting with a clean precipice against the sea. This is, indeed,
characteristic of all those arctic glaciers which issue from central
reservoirs, or _mers de glace_, upon the fords or bays, and is
strikingly in contrast with the dependent or hanging glacier of the
ravines."

Elsewhere the same writer speaks of this glacier as a line of cliff,
rising in a solid glassy wall to a height of three hundred feet above
the water-level, and with an _unfathomable_ depth below it; and its
curved face, sixty miles in length, from Cape Agassiz to Cape Forbes,
vanished into unknown space at not more than a single day's rail-road
travel from the pole. The interior with which it communicated, and from
which it issued, was an unsurveyed _mer de glace_, or sea of ice, of
apparently boundless dimensions; and from one part of this great cliff
he _saw_ long lines of huge bergs floating slowly away.

Here, we think, is ice enough and of sufficient dimensions to account
for the largest bergs that were ever beheld.

It will be at once seen, then, that icebergs, though found floating in
the sea, are not necessarily of the sea. They are composed entirely of
fresh water, and arctic ships can at any time procure a plentiful supply
of good soft drinkable water from the pools that are formed in the
hollows of the bergs.

The risk of approaching icebergs in the arctic regions is not s