Geographical Colleclions^ 38^1 



of their slaves after the 12th of August 1816 ; which in the course of a few years 

 must put an end to the state of slavery which had subsisted on Ceylon for more 

 than three centuries." — LU. Gaz. 



Remarks on several Icebergs which have been met with in considerably 

 Imo latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere, by Capt. Horsburgh, Hydrogra- 

 pher to the East India Company, were communicated to the Royal Society at the 

 Meeting of the 4th i-ebruary last — The journal of the ships belonging to the 

 East India Company, the author observes, during the whole of the last century, 

 contain no accounts of icebergs having been seen in the course of their naviga- 

 tion in the southern hemisphere, although several of these ships proceeded into 

 the parallels of latitude 40°, 41°, and 42°. But, during the last two years, it 

 appears that icebergs have occasionally been met with by several ships in their 

 passage, very near the Cape of Good Hope, between the latitudes of 36° and 39°. 

 The particulars relating to these observations are detailed in the paper. The 

 most remarkable occurred in the voyage of the brig Eliza from Antwerp, bound 

 to Batavia, which, on the 28th of April 1828, fell in with five icebergs in lati- 

 tude 37° 31' S., longitude 18° 17' E. of Greenwich. They had the appearance 

 of church steeples, of a height from 250 to 300 feet ; and the sea broke so vio- 

 lently against these enormous masses, that it was at first suspected that they might 

 be fixed on some unknown shoal, until, on sounding, no bottom could be dis- 

 covered. 



It is remarkable, that, in general, icebergs seem to be met with in low lati- 

 tudes nearly at the same period of the year, namely, in April and 3Iay, in both 

 the northern and southern hemispheres, although the seasons are reversed in these 

 two divisions of the globe. In order to account for the origin and accretion of 

 the southern icebergs, the author thinks it probable, that there exists a large tract 

 of land near the antarctic circle, somewhere between the meridian of London and 

 the 20th degree of east longitude, whence these icebergs have been carried in a 

 N. and N.E. directions, by the united forces of current, winds, and waves, pre- 

 vailing from S.S.W. and S.W. Bouvet's and Thompson's islands are not of 

 sufficient magnitude ; and Sandwich land ond Kerguelin's island are too remote 

 to be the source of the icebergs lately observed in the vicinity of the Cape. From 

 their unprecedented descent during the last two years, it is most probable that 

 the disruption of these masses of ice from the places of their formation, was the 

 effect of some powerful cause, of rare occurrence, such as an earthquake or vol- 

 cano, which has burst forth and convulsed the inaccessible regions of the south, 

 leaving no other testimonials of the event than some few fragments of ice, scat- 

 tered at a distance in the Indian Ocean. 



Esslingen Society for Botanical Excursions. — In the 16th Volume of the 

 Bulletin des Sciences, we observed an armouncement that the Society of Esslin- 

 gen proposed to send out a botanist, in 1829, to explore the Pyrenees, and that 

 another would be charged to collect for the shareholders the plants of Dalmatia, 

 many of which are new. We have now the greatest satisfaction in stating, from 

 an article in the Hesperus (24th Jan. 1830,) that the projects of the Society 

 have been executed with the greatest success. The notice contains an enume- 

 ration of the principal plants collected in the two countries visited in 1829, 

 amongst which there are a number which botanists must be anxious to have in 

 their herbariums, especially when the specimens have been so well selected and 

 prepared as those which M. Endress has brought from the Pyrenees. This zeal- 

 ous traveller has many times braved the greatest dangers, and even death, to 

 procure the most curious species of the Eastern Pyrenees, in which part alone he 

 has made his collections. The Society being about to explore the other portions 

 of the Pyrenees, we shall thus have a very complete collection of the Flora of this 



