THE ANTARCTIC OCEAN. 665 



of land is this immense mass of ice piled ? It is a question not easy 

 to answer definitely, because no one has ever seen it. The idea has 

 generally been that the continent is high land. But it has been urged 

 with justness that, had the glaciers descended from a mountainous 

 country, they would bear upon their surfaces, or in their mass, stones 

 to indicate the sort of rock of which the mountains were made. But 

 such is not the case. It is said that stones are never found on the 

 Antarctic bergs, and Captain Cook states expressly his idea that the 

 bergs are formed at the mouths of rivers or cataracts, " because we 

 never found any of the ice which we took up in the least incorporated 

 or connected with earth." He goes on to say : " The ice-islands . . . 

 must be formed from snow and sleet consolidated, which gather by 

 degrees, and are drifted from the mountains. In the winter, the seas 

 or the ice-cliffs must fill up the bays if they are ever so large. The 

 fall of snow occasions the accumulation of these cliffs, till they can 

 support their weight no longer, and large pieces break off from these 

 ice-islands. We are inclined to believe that these ice-cliffs, where 

 they are sheltered from the violence of the winds, extend a great way 

 into the sea." 



The discovery, by Sir James Ross, of the Parry Mountains and 

 Mounts Erebus and Terror, in latitude 78, tended to confirm the pre- 

 vailing notion of a high and mountainous land forming the Antarctic 

 Continent. But the Parry Mountains are merely conjectural, having 

 been seen only at a distance, and it is well known that the coasts 

 charted by some navigators have been proved by subsequent ones to 

 have been either clouds merely or else islands of ice. The most re- 

 cent idea is, that the land about the pole consists of a cluster of low 

 islands, rising but little above the sea-level, but united by masses of 

 ice. The gradual accumulation of snow for centuries has raised a cap, 

 as before stated, seven miles thick, and from this cap the ice flows 

 away in all directions, forced onward by the pressure of the enormous 

 mass behind. 



The immense size of the icebergs seen in the Antarctic Ocean is 

 without a parallel elsewhere. Croll in a late essay gives a list of the 

 largest of which there is record, and we find they range from 400 to 

 1,000 feet above the water. The one 1,000 feet high was observed 

 in latitude 37 32' south, and was nearly five miles long. When 

 these bergs are first broken off and float away they all have the tabu- 

 lar form, but, as they grow old and drift northward into warmer airs 

 and waters, they become fissured and seamed in all directions ; pinna- 

 cles and domes and caverns appear, and they become beautiful objects. 

 Wilkes describes one as exhibiting " lofty arches of many-colored tints, 

 leading into deep caverns open to the swell of the sea, which, rush- 

 ing in, produced loud and distant thunderings. . . . Every noise on 

 board, even our own voices, reverberated from the massive and pure 

 white walls. These tabular bergs are like masses of beautiful ala- 



