Ice-beds on Eschscholtz Bay 79 



trickling down the external surface of the cliff, and freezing as it 

 descended. To these the theory of Lieutenant Belcher would add 

 a fourth process, by which a horizontal bed of ice is fomied between 

 a superficial bed of peat and the subjacent mud. These hanging 

 masses of ice, whatever may be their origin, appear to have been so 

 abundant at the time of the Russian expedition to this coast, as to 

 have made Kotzebue and Eschscholtz imagine the entire cliff behind 

 them to be an iceberg ; an opinion in which all the English officers 

 agree in considering to be erroneous, since the view and descriptions 

 of the cliff on the south shore of Eschscholtz Bay, given on page 219 

 of the English translation of Kotzebue's Voyage, do not correspond 

 with the state of this coast when it was subsequently visited by the 

 crew of the Blossom. 



[Dr. Buckland here gives Captain Kotzebue's observations quoted 

 on preceding page which are not here repeated.] 



" 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 im- 

 portant fact, that on the two occasions when it was [602] visited by 

 the English expedition, the patches of ice upon the cliff in question 

 were very few in number, and variable from one year to another ; 

 that the ' masses of the purest ice to 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 indu- 

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

 these materials. 



" It seems quite certain, therefore, that there must have been a 

 material change in the quantity of ice on the cliff in Eschscholtz Bay 

 in the interval between the visits of Lieutenant Kotzebue and Captain 

 Beechey ; and if we suppose that, during this interval, there was an 

 extensive thawing of the icy front that was seen by Kotzebue, but 

 which existed not at the time of Beechey's visit, we find in this 

 hypothesis a solution of the discrepancy between these officers ; since 

 what to the first would appear a solid iceberg, when it was glazed 

 over with a case of ice, would, after the melting of that ice, exhibit to 

 the latter a continuous cliff of frozen diluvial mud. Whilst the ice 

 prevailed all over the front of the cliff, any bones that had fallen 

 from it before the formation of this ice, and which lay on the under- 

 clift's or upon the shore, must, by an error almost inevitable, have 

 been presumed to fall from the imaginary iceberg. 



