378 Scientific Intelligence — Hydrography. 



2-0000 



The salt obtained by the inhabitants is employed by them in 



the manufacture of soap ; and the process is carried on in every 



house with the aid of olive oil and of lime. The soap is very coarse 



and much mixed with earth and sand, and is entirely made by fe- 



7. Formati07i of young Ice. — The formation of young ice upon 

 the surface of the water is the circumstance which most decidedly 

 begins to put a stop to the navigation of the arctic seas, and warns 

 the seaman that his season of active operations is nearly at an end. 

 It is indeed scarcely possible to conceive the degree of hindrance oc- 

 casioned by this impediment, trifling as it always appears before it 

 is encountered. When the sheet has acquired a thickness of about 

 half an inch, and is of considerable extent, a ship is liable to be 

 stopped by it unless favoured by a strong and free wind ; and even 

 when still retaining her way through the water, at the rate of a mile 

 an hour, her course is not always under the control of the helmsman, 

 though assisted by the nicest attention to the action of the sails, but 

 depends upon some accidental increase or decrease in the thickness 

 of the sheet of ice, with which one bow or the other comes in con- 

 tact. Nor is it possible, in this situation, for the boats to render 

 their usual assistance, by running out lines or otherwise ; for, having 

 once entered the young ice, they can only be propelled slowly through 

 it by digging the oars and boat-hooks into it, at the same time break- 

 ing it across the bows, and by rolling the boat from side to side. 

 After continuing this laborious work for some time with little good 

 effect, and considerable damage to the planks and oars, a boat is 

 often obliged to return the same way that she came, backing out in 

 the canal thus formed to no purpose. A ship in this helpless state, 

 her sails in vain expanded to a favourable breeze, her ordinary re- 

 sources failing, and suddenly arrested in her course upon the ele- 

 ment through which she has been accustomed to move without re- 

 straint, has often reminded me of Gulliver tied down by the feeble 

 hands of Lilliputians ; nor are the struggles she makes to effect a 

 release, and the apparent insignificance of the means by which her 

 efforts are opposed, the least just or the least vexatious part of the 

 resemblance. — {Arctic Voyages of Discovery ^ by Sir John Barrow, 

 p. 157.) 



8. Force of the Waves in moving masses of Rock. — In the Frith 

 of Forth, at the Granton Pier works, on 19th December 1836, 



