THE GREAT ICE AGE 35 1 



Mr. Vaughan, late superintendent of the Lighthouse at 

 Belle-Isle, has kept a register of icebergs for several years. He 

 states that for ten which enter the straits, fifty drift to the 

 southward, and that most of those which enter pass inward on 

 the north side of the island, drift toward the western end of 

 the straits, and then pass out on the south side of the island, so 

 that the straits seem to be merely a sort of eddy in the course 

 of the bergs. The number in the straits varies much in differ- 

 ent seasons of the year. The greatest number are seen in 

 spring, especially in May and June ; and toward autumn and 

 in the winter very few remain. Those which remain until 

 autumn are reduced to mere skeletons ; but if they survive 

 until winter, they again grow in dimensions, owing to the accu- 

 mulations upon them of snow and new ice. Those that we 

 saw early in July were large and massive in their proportions. 

 The few that remained when we returned in September were 

 smaller in size, and cut into fantastic and toppling pinnacles. 

 Vaughan records that on the 30th of May, 1858, he counted in 

 the Straits of Belle-Isle 496 bergs, the least of them sixty feet 

 in height, some of them half a mile long and 200 feet high. 

 Only one-eighth of the volume of floating ice appears above 

 water, and many of these great bergs may thus touch the 

 ground in a depth of thirty fathoms or more, so that if we ima- 

 gine four hundred of them moving up and down under the in- 

 fluence of the current, oscillating slowly with the motion of the 

 sea, and grinding on the rocks and stone-covered bottom at all 

 depths from the centre of the channel, we may form some con- 

 ception of the effects of these huge polishers of the sea floor. 



Of the bergs which pass outside of the straits, many ground 

 on the banks off Belle-Isle. Vaughan has seen a hundred large 

 bergs aground at one time on the banks, and they ground on 

 various parts of the banks of Newfoundland, and all along the 

 coast of that island. As they are borne by the deep-seated 

 cold current, and are scarcely at all affected by the wind, they 



