FLOATING ICEBERGS. 



179 



mountain is only 6,200 feet high. In this Sound, about fifty icebergs 

 were seen at one time floating outwards, and one of them must have 

 been at least 168 feet in total height. Some of the icebergs were loaded 

 with blocks of no inconsiderable size, of granite and other rocks, different 

 from the clay-slate of the surrounding mountains. The glacier furthest 

 from the Pole, surveyed during the voyages of the Adventure and 

 Beagle, is in lat. 46 50', in the Gulf of Penas. It is fifteen miles long, 

 and in one part seven broad, and descends to the sea-coast. But even a 

 few miles northward of this glacier, in the Laguna de San Rafael, some 

 Spanish missionaries* encountered " many icebergs, some great, some 

 small, and others middle-sized," in a narrow arm of the sea, on the 



47 orf 



22nd of the month corresponding with our June, and in a latitude 

 corresponding with that of the Lake of Geneva I 



In Europe, the most southern glacier which comes down to the 

 sea is met with, according to Von Buch, on the coast of Norway, in 

 lat. 67. Now this is more than 20 of latitude, or 1,230 miles, nearer 

 the pole than the Laguna de San Rafael The position of the glacier! 

 at this place and in the Gulf of Penas, may be put even in a more 

 striking point of view, for they descend to the sea-coast, within 7 of 

 latitude, or 450 miles, of a harbour, where three species of Oliva, a 

 Voluta, and a Terebra, are the commonest shells, within less than 9" 

 from where palms grow, within 4i of a region where the jaguar and 

 puma range over the plains, less than 2^ from arborescent grasses, 

 and (looking to the westward in the same hemisphere) less than 2 

 from orchideous parasites, and within a single degree of tree-ferns 1 

 Agueros, " Desc. Hist, de Chiloe," p. 227. 



