II.] THE PEBBLES IX THE STEEET. 55 



and ploughing the sea-bottom as they drag along it. 

 These bergs carry stones and dirt, often in large 

 quantities ; so that, whenever a berg melts or capsizes, 

 it strews its burden confusedly about the sea-floor. 



Meanwhile the fine mud which is flowing out from 

 under the ice goes out to sea likewise, colouring the 

 water far out, and then subsiding as a soft tenacious 

 ooze, in which the stones brought out by the ice are 

 imbedded. And this ooze so those who have 

 examined it assert cannot be distinguished from the 

 brick-clay, or fossiliferous boulder-clay, so common in 

 the North. A very illustrious Scandinavian explorer, 

 visiting Edinburgh, declared, as soon as he saw the 

 sections of boulder-clay exhibited near that city, that 

 this was the very substance which he saw forming in 

 the Spitzbergen ice-fiords.* 



I have put these facts as simply and baldly as I can, 

 in order that the reader may look steadily at them, 

 without having his attention drawn off, or his fancy 

 excited, by their real poetry and grandeur. Indeed, 

 it would have been an impertinence to have done 

 otherwise ; for I have never seen a live glacier, by land 

 or sea, though I have seen many a dead one. And 

 the public has had the opportunity, lately, of reading 

 so many delightful books about " peaks, passes, and 

 glaciers," that I am bound to suppose that many of my 

 readers know as much, or more, about them than I do. 



* See a most charming paper on " The Physics of Arctic Ice," 

 by Dr. Robert Brown of Campster, published in the Quarterly Journal 

 of the Geological Society, June, 1870. This article is so remarkable, 

 not only for its sound scientific matter, but for the vividness and 

 poetic beauty of its descriptions, that I must express a hope that the 

 learned author vfill some day enlarge it, and publish it in a separate 

 form. 



