Ice-beds on Eschscholtz Bay y"] 



of a brownish sandstone, lay upon the shoal left dry by the receding 

 sea. With these were also porphyritic pebbles. 



" Parts of some of the tusks, where they had been imbedded in the 

 clay and sand, were coloured blue by phosphate of iron, and many of 

 the teeth were stained in the same manner. The circular layers of 

 the tusks in the more decayed specimens were distinctly separated 

 b}' a thin vein of fibrous gypsum. 



" In those parts of the bay where there are no cliffs, the waves 

 are kept at a distance from the land by a gravelly beach, which they 

 have thrown up for a considerable extent round the entrance of the 

 streams which come down the valleys. These beaches have formed 

 rounded flats containing marshes or lakes : not unfrequently a rather 

 luxuriant herbage covers their surface. The land behind them 

 rises in a gentle slope. Great part of the shore of Kotzebue Sound is 

 made up of a diluvial formation, similar to that on the south shore 

 of Eschscholtz Bay. From Hut Peak to Hotham Inlet it exhibits 

 many cliffs similar to those just described, and also others with a 

 uniform and steep slope, partly covered with verdure, and partly 

 exposing the dry sand and clay which compose them. The most 

 elevated cliffs form the projecting headland of Cape Blossom, and 

 abound in ice, notunthstanding their southern aspect, particularly 

 at Mosquito station and Cape Blossom. In their neighborhood I 

 observed the natives had recently formed coarse ivory spoons from 

 the external layer of a fossil elephant's tusk. The ice here in the end 

 of September showed itself more abundantly than it did in the middle 

 of the same month on the cliff's in Eschscholtz Bay which have a 

 northern aspect. 



" INIr. Collie then proceeds to explain still further his ideas of the 

 manner in which masses and sheets of pure ice may have been col- 

 lected in hollows and fissures on and near the front of the cliff' in 

 Eschscholtz Bay. 



" ' 1st. By the accumulation of snow drifted into hollows sub- 

 jacent to the overhanging stratum of black boggy soil that forms the 

 brink of the cliff', and subsequently converted into ice by successive 

 thawing and freezing in spring and summer. 



[600] " ' 2dly. They may have been formed from water collected 

 in deep fissures and cavities that intersect the falling cliff near its 

 margin. The inclined position of the land immediately above this 

 margin of peat, and the annual undermining which is produced by 

 the thawing of the frozen mud beneath it, produce occasional land 

 slips and movements of the edge of the cliff' towards the sea ; these 

 cause cracks and fissures of the soil in various directions, but chiefly 



