448 Probable injiiience of 



of the size of a small house. The fact was so curious that 

 he noted it in his journal. 



Fewer facts of this kind are mentioned in the narratives of 

 voyagers than might be supposed from the great transporting 

 agency which geologists have ascribed to floating icebergs. 



All the recorded facts of importance can be briefly pre- 

 sented. 



The most striking is that mentioned by Scoresby, who 

 speaks of five hundred icebergs, which he saw in the 70th 

 degree north latitude. Many of them contained strata of 

 earth and stones, and were loaded with beds of rock of great 

 thickness, of which the weight was conjectured to be from 

 fifty to a hundred thousand tons. This, it will be remem- 

 bered, was so far north as to be, probably, at no great distance 

 from the source of the iceberg. 



Weddel says that, when in latitude 61°, longitude 31, with 

 islands of ice his constant companions, he saw an island which 

 he supposed to be rock, and fully expected to find terra firma 

 in a short distance. It was not until passing within 300 

 yards, that they could satisfy themselves that it was not land ; 

 the north side was so thickly incorporated with black earth, 

 that hardly any one would have hesitated to pronounce it 

 land. 



Mr. Bynoe, the surgeon of the Beagle, informed Mr. Dar- 

 win that, more than twenty miles from the head of Sir G. 

 Eyer's Sound, they landed upon one of many floating masses 

 of ice, which were only two or three feet above the surface. 

 In the central part of the surface was a piece of granite, of 

 an angular form, partly imbedded. The ice had melted so as 

 to make a shallow pool of water around it. Mr. Sorrel, boat- 

 swain of the Beagle, said that he had seen, in the seas 

 around South Georgia, small icebergs, with mud and gravel 

 upon them, floating from the shore. Mr. Sorrel also saw, 

 to the eastward of the South Shetlands, an iceberg with a 

 considerable block of stone upon it. 



Captain Hunter informed Mr. Darwin that he had seen 

 numerous islands of ice in the neighborhood of South Georgia, 



