ergs to the number of several hundreds.

Now, all this ice that we have been speaking of, besides being, in a
secondary way, a passive agent in the affairs of man (chiefly in barring
his progress northward), is one of the most potent agents in the economy
of nature. It is the means by which the world is kept cool enough for
man and beast to dwell in. The polar regions--north and south--are, as
it were, the world's refrigerators; tempering the heated air of the
south, and, in connection with the torrid zone, spreading throughout the
Earth those beneficial influences which gladden the sphere of man's
temporal existence.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

ICE AN AGENT IN TRANSPORTING BOULDERS--HOW THIS COMES ABOUT--DR. KANE'S
OBSERVATIONS--LONG NIGHT IN WINTER AND LONG DAY IN SUMMER--EXTREME
DARKNESS--INFLUENCE ON DOGS--INTENSE COLD--EFFECT ON THE SEA.

There are many things in this world which, up to within a few years
back, have been to men a source of surprise and mystery.

Some of these problems have been solved by recent travellers, and not a
few of them are referable to polar oceans and ice.

In many parts of our coasts we find very striking and enormously large
boulder-stones lying on the beach, perfectly isolated, and their edges
rounded away like pebbles, as if they had been rolled on some
antediluvian beach strewn with Titanic stones. These boulders are
frequently found upon the loose sands of the sea-shore, far removed from
any rocks or mountains from which they might be supposed to have been
broken; and, more than that, totally different in their nature from the
geological formations of the districts in which they are found. "Whence
came these?" has been the question of the inquisitive of all ages, "and
how came they there?"

There may, for aught we know to the contrary, be more than one answer to
these questions; but there is at least one which is quite satisfactory
as to how and whence at least some of them have come. Ice was the means
of conveying these boulders to their present positions.

It has been said that once upon a time a large part of this country was
under the dominion of ice, even as the polar regions and some of the
mountains and valleys of Norway are at the present day; that the
boulders we see in elevated places were conveyed thither by glacier
action; and that when the glacial period passed away, they were left
there on the hill-sides--sometimes almost on the mountain-tops. But
this is not