4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



said to be in part an expression of the real terrors of the arctic 

 regions, and in other part a mere fiction of the imagination. 

 What in Nature coukl be more terrorizing than those impending 

 bergs, fang-armed like the jaws of some antediluvian monster, 

 and rising hundreds of feet in height, which have been made to 

 do service in the annals of nearly all arctic navigators for a full 

 century or more I Yet how many are there who have in fact 

 seen these fantastic symbols of the north ? In our two cruises 

 among thousands of bergs of all conditions and sizes we saw 

 only monuments of quiet and impressive beauty nothing sug- 

 gestive of near or immediate catastrophe. A berg would tumble 

 here and there, another would groan under the weight of its own 

 dismemberment, and others would, perhaps, be licking up the 

 parts that the sea had torn from them ; but whatever it was, the 

 work was accomplished in a peaceable manner, with a seeming 

 consciousness that it had no regret for the results. Nor, indeed, 

 were the results of any magnitude. Travelers have graphically 

 described the commotion in the waters produced by the fall of 

 one of these vast ice mountains, of the cannon-like detonations 

 which were sent out by the snapping of the ice. I should com- 

 pare the sound more with that of not very intense or even dis- 

 tant thunder, and the agitation of the waters to the churning of 

 a heavily plowing steamship. There are, however, times when 

 the bergs appear in an angry mood. When the after-storm sends 

 them forth from their havens of rest, shooting billowy foam over 

 and through them it is then that they take on the mane of the 

 lion. The surging waters open out in front of them like the 

 parting in the path of a dolphin, and the bergs swing out tri- 

 umphantly into the rocking sea. Vain and hopeless would then 

 be the barring of the passage of the moving monster. 



The glaciers of Greenland, like their children, have their quiet 

 and angry moods. The flat ice sheets of the north, so firmly 

 consolidated that for miles scarcely a trace of a crevasse is to be 

 found, and whose inclination is such that over almost any part of 

 them railroading could readily be made possible, typify the quiet 

 phase of Nature wholly diff:"eront from that which is embodied 

 in the structural form of the majority of the glaciers of the south 

 and of those of Melville Bay, in which the crevasse character is 

 so largely developed. The struggles of Janssen, Nordenskjold, 

 Whymper, Peary, and Nansen would liardly be intelligible to 

 those whose first efforts in glacial climbing were realized among 

 the solid ice sheets of the north, whose only difficult points, as a 

 rule, are to be found not very far from the ocean front of the ice 

 sheet. With seemingly few exceptions all the larger Greenland 

 glaciers are rifted at their terminal falls, but the rifting, as in all 

 other glaciers, depends upon the slope of the bed, the extent of 



