GEOLOGY. 649 



sides, more frequently islands of ice, driven by the violence 

 of tempests, seem, every instant, on the point of engulfing 

 the vessels, or of inclosing them within their prodigious 

 masses. 1 Then we have, besides, the monotonous descrip- 

 tions of those long and trying winters passed amid dark- 

 ness and snow, under latitudes where man has to struggle 

 on all sides against a cold which freezes mercury. Here 

 the sole event which sometimes breaks in upon the uni- 

 formity of life is the visit of some Esquimaux tribe, men 

 of iron, who alone resist this frightful climate, and who, 

 incredible as it may seem, prefer it to happier countries. 

 Their appalling nights, six months long, their huts of snow, 

 their dresses of skins, which give them the look of beasts, 

 have more charms for them than all the sweets of civiliza- 

 tion and all the benefits of a sun which daily ripens rich 

 harvests. 



It was one of the boldest explorers of these boreal regions 

 that discovered the waves of the new ocean bejond the 

 barrier of ice which bars the path to the pole against our 

 vessels. 



Breaking up of an Iceberg. " We have just witnessed what was for the mo- 

 ment a perfect cataract of ice, with all its motion and many times its noise. Quick 

 as lightning and loud as thunder, when bolt and thunder come at the same instant, 

 there was one terrific crack, a sharp and silvery ringing blow upon the atmos- 

 phere, which I shall never forget nor ever be able to describe. The spectacle was 

 nearly as startling as the explosion. At once the upper face of the berg burst 

 out upon the air as if it had been blasted, and swept down across the great cliff a 

 huge cataract of green and snowy fragments, with a wild crashing roar, followed 

 by the heavy, sullen thunder of the plunge" into the ocean, and the rolling away of 

 the high-crested seas, and the rocking of the mighty mass back and forth, in the 

 effort to regain its equilibrium." After Icebergs with a Painter. By the llev. L. 

 L. Noble Tk. 



