88 MORTON'S SLEDGE JOURNEY 



writers and so recently admitted by himself, seems now to him at variance with 

 the regulated and progressive actions of nature." 



By this I conclude that Dr. Kane had not seen my work on North 

 Greenland, or, at all events, that part of it which treats of the ex- 

 tension of the land-ice and the origin of the floating icebergs, and 

 wherein it states — 



" But from what has been already mentioned, it must be evident that the 

 icebergs must not be considered as breaking loose and falling down from 

 precipices ; one might rather say that they lift themselves," &c. &c. 



That Kane did not know this is certainly very striking to me, as 

 the literature which treats of the glaciers of the Polar lands, and 

 especially those of Greenland and the origin of the icebergs, is not 

 great. Dr. Kane had sought information respecting the nature of 

 the country in our Danish colonies, and as my above-mentioned 

 work is cited in his own, if not by himself, still by his assistant, 

 Charles Schott, in the Appendix XIII., p. 426.\ He says also, at 

 page 150, that the height of the ice- wall at the nearest point was 

 about 300 feet, measured from the water's edge. As a consequence 

 thereof the floating icebergs, which lay before it and were detached 

 from this ice-wall, must have been, on the average, above 300 feet, 

 if they should be imagined as formed by an elevation during the 

 time of being detached. 



1 have accurately measured many frozen icebergs, particularly in 

 the winter, on Omenak fjord, and I have thereby come to the result 

 that the common height of the larger ones, and especially of those 

 that may be supposed to lie, in some measure, in the original position 

 which they had had after their breaking loose, was somewhat more 

 than 100 feet. I have also measured them as high as 150 feet, and 

 I have seen some that I should estimate at 200 feet high ; but this 

 was when there were points or edges that had come to jut upwards 

 by the mighty ice-block having turned and changed its position in 

 the water. That the whole of the collected mass of icebergs before 

 the Humboldt glacier should have been considerably more than 

 300 feet in height generally — the highest, consequently, even 500 

 feet — I can certainly not disprove ; but I must strongly doubt. 



We now come 2 to the remarkable sledge expedition of Morton 

 and Hans, on which they first passed the whole exterior margin of 

 the great glacier, with the icebergs lying before, and those torn 

 from it and floating about ; they then drove farther towards the 

 north, found the ice more and more unsafe, and were at last inter- 



1 See also 'Journal of Royal Geographical Society,' vol. xxiii. p. 145. — Eu. 



2 See vol. i. pp. 2SU-310 of Kane's Work. 



