'298 REMARKS AND OPINIONS. 



both, without being able clearly to recognize the 

 stratification, a kind of rock, which, as far as our 

 knowledge extends, only Link has reckoned among 

 rock, viz. ice, pure solid ice. 



The profile, where, being indented by the sea, it 

 comes to sight, reaches to the height of eighty 

 feet at the most, and the highest ridge of the 

 hill scarcely double. Over the ice is a covering of 

 blueish clay (or loam), from two to three inches thick, 

 and immediately over that a kind of turf scarcely 

 a foot deep. The vegetation is perfectly the same 

 as on the alluvial sand and clay soils. The earth 

 thaws only a few inches deep everywhere, and it 

 is not to be ascertained, by digging, what soil it is. 

 The mould, which falls down from the ice-hills, 

 protects their foot, and a stop is put to farther 

 devastation when under this falling earth a decli- 

 vity is formed, which reaches from the foot to the 

 summit. The length of the profile, in which the 

 ice is exposed to sight, may be about a musket- 

 shot. But it is evident, in the forms of the over- 

 grown declivities of the shore, that the same kind 

 of mountain (ice) occupies a much greater extent. 



We are already acquainted, from several travels, 

 with similar ice-ground in the nortii of Asia and 

 America, and among these, particularly, the rocks 

 of ice, covered with vegetation at the mouth of the 

 Lena, out of which the mammoth, the skeleton of 

 which is now in St. Petersburg, was thawed, and 

 on which a cross was erected by Adams, to whom 



