342 APPENDIX, 



ing it : * " We had climbed much about, without discovering 

 that we were on real icebergs. Dr. Eschscholtz found part of 

 the bank broken down, and saw, to his astonishment, that the 

 interior of the mountain consisted of pure ice. At this news 

 we all went, provided with shovels and crows, to examine 

 these phenomena more closely, and soon arrived at a place 

 where the bank rises almost perpendicularly out of the sea to 

 the height of a hundred feet, and then runs off, rising still 

 higher : we saw masses of the purest ice, of the height of a 

 hundred feet, which are under a cover of moss and grass, and 

 could not have been produced but by some terrible revolution. 

 The place, which by some accident had fallen in, and is now 

 exposed to the sun and air, melts away, and a good deal of 

 water flows into the sea. An indisputable proof that what we 

 saw was real ice is the quantity of mammoth's teeth and bones 

 which were exposed to view by the melting, and among which 

 I myself found a very fine tooth. We could not assign any 

 reason for a strong smell, like that of burnt horn, which we 

 perceived in this place. The covering of these mountains, on 

 which the most luxuriant grass grows to a certain height, is 

 only half a foot thick, and consists of a mixture of clay, sand, 

 and earth; below which the ice gradually melts away, the 

 green cover sinks with it, and continues to grow." 



Mr. Collie's experiments, which I have before alluded to, 

 in digging both horizontally and vertically through the ice 

 and peat into frozen mud, show that, at the points where they 

 were made, the cliff formed no part of any iceberg. Still more 

 decisive is the important fact, that on the two occasions when 

 it was visited by the English expedition, the patches of ice 

 upon the cliff in question were very few in number, and varia- 

 ble from one year to another ; that the " masses of the purest 

 ice of the height of a hundred feet," which were seen by the 

 Russian officers, had entirely vanished ; and that nearly the 

 whole front of the cliff, from the sea at its base to the peat that 

 grew on its summit, presented a continuous mass of indurated 

 mud and sand, or of under-cliffs formed by the subsidence of 

 these materials. 



* Kotzebue's Voyage of Discovery, Vol. I. p. 220. 



