Ice-needles to Ice-mountains 



bergs come together, and an unfortunate ship 

 happens to lie between, it should be smashed 

 like an egg-shell. In Baffin's Bay Dr. Kane 

 once counted a pack of two hundred and eighty 

 bergs, most of them being between two and three 

 hundred feet high. 



The " birth " of such oceanic hills has been 

 watched by travellers, at the moment of their 

 breaking off from a glacier-foot, with no small 

 interest, and also with no small danger, if they 

 chanced to be within reach of the terrific billows 

 started by such an event. 



Sometimes icebergs come into existence differ- 

 ently. If the glacier comes to an end, not in but 

 above the sea, the mass breaks off above with 

 its own weight, and plunges downward, to float 

 away on its new career. This was lately wit- 

 nessed in far southern seas, and the travellers 

 barely escaped with their lives, so tremendous 

 was the rush of the ocean-wave following the 

 plunge of the new mountain. 



A great deal of carrying work is done by 

 icebergs. Many and many a block of stone or 

 rock not to speak of supplies of gravel and 

 sand and mud is borne by them to mid-ocean, 

 and there dropped. In the Atlantic they seldom 

 get further south than the neighbourhood of 



87 



