46 THE MORAINES. > 



lower face of a glacier, according to the heat of the day, some ma- 

 terial is always falling, a thimbleful of sand, it may be, trickling 

 down in the stream of water ; or a mass of stone, gravel, and earth 

 may thunder over the edge. If the glacier advances, it pushes this 

 moraine in front of it, or, it is possible, may creep over it and carry 

 it on as a moraine profonde. This moraine profonde consists of the 

 boulders, gravel, &c, which the glacier, grinding along, has carried 

 with it, and which, adhering to its lower surface, help to grind 

 down infrajacent rocks, and at the same time get grooved in a cor- 

 responding direction. If the Greenland glacier does not reach the 

 sea, then the programme of the Alpine glacier is repeated ; but 

 when the lower end breaks on reaching the head of the fjord, then 

 a different result ensues. The terminal moraine (if there is any ; 

 for none comes over the inland ice, which leads me to believe that 

 it does not rise in mountains ; and often the glacier is so short as 

 to take little or none from the sides of its valley) floats off on the 

 surface of the iceberg, and the moraine profonde either drops into 

 the sea, or is carried further on in the base of the iceberg : very 

 frequently this moraine profonde is composed of boulders and gravel, 

 and it is rare that they are not dropped before the berg gets out of 

 the fjord. The berg itself very often capsizes in the inlet, and de- 

 posits what load it may have on its surface or bottom at the bottom 

 of the sea ; and when it gets out of the inlet, as I have already 

 described, it often ranges itself in the outside ice-stream ; and if it 

 there capsizes, then the boulders lie on the bottom there, so that, 

 if the floor of the sea were raised up, along line of boulders would 

 be found imbedded in a tenacious bed of laminated clay, with fossil 

 shells and remains of other Arctic animals, skeletons of seals, heaps 

 of gravel here and there, and so on, in what would then be a mossy 

 valley, most likely the bed of some river. Again, allow me to re- 

 mark that a berg may not capsize by pieces breaking off from above 

 the water, but it may also lose its equilibrium (as is well known) 

 by being worn away, as is most frequently the case, at the base, 

 or (as is less known) by pieces calving off frorn below. If the berg 

 ground on a bank or shoal, or in any other water not deep enough 

 for its huge bulk to float in, it will often bring up from the bottom 

 boulders, gravels, &c, deposited by former bergs, and carry them on 

 until this material is deposited elsewhere ; when grounding, it will 

 graze over the submerged boulders, or rocks just under water, 

 grooving them in long grooves ; for an iceberg, it cannot be too often 

 remembered, is merely a mountain of ice floating in the sea. In my 

 earlier voyages in the Arctic regions I was rather inclined to under- 

 rate the tran sporting-power of bergs, as I saw but few of them with 



