AND TRANSPORTATION OF BOTJLDERsi 18S 



certainly not on the ice in the autumn, and as the sea in the hay had 

 frozen over perfectly smoothly, there was only one way in which I 

 could rationally account for these large stones getting so placed. By 

 ohservation in the same locality in 1 853 — 4, I fully satisfied myself 

 as to the correctness of the theory which I now mention. 



The shores at Repulse Bay are in many places flat and shelving, and 

 .are thickly strewn with boulders of various sizes. The rise and fall 

 of the tide is from six to eight feet, so that there is a considerable 

 extent of beach exposed at low water. In the latter part of September 

 when the sea begins to freeze, the ice settles down with the ebb and in 

 many cases rests upon the boulders, by which either holes are broken 

 through the ice corresponding to the boulders on which it rests, or it 

 is raised up in the form of a cone over where the stone lies. As the ice 

 acquires thickness a cavity is formed of the shape of the upper part 

 of the boulder, to which after a time the boulder adheres with suffi- 

 cient tenacity to raise it from its bed. After this the whole process is 

 simple. As the tide ebbs and flows, the boulder rises and falls with 

 the ice, and as the latter thickens it becomes completely embedded in 

 it. The ice in the locality where my observations were made, in the 

 month of April had attained a thickness of more than eight feet. For 

 a month or so after this, the thickness remains the same, as the evapo- 

 ration from the surface is about equal to the additional freezing under- 

 neath. The thaw in May and June goes on. so rapidly that by the 

 first week in July, the boulders, which in the previous autumn had 

 been below the ice, are now above it, supported on ice four feet or 

 more thick, and solid enough to be drifted by winds and currents 

 hundreds of miles before becoming too much wasted to carry its load. 



Pieces of rock much larger in size than those I have described may 

 be carried very great distances when they are attached to icebergs, 

 either by falling from or being torn out of the precipices where the 

 icebergs are formed ; and such transported blocks are doubtless strewed 

 all along the bed of the Atlantic, in the course over which the icebergs 

 float into more southern latitudes, until, melting in the gulf stream, 

 they drop the huge masses of rock, torn from the cliffs of Greenland 

 and the Arctic coasts, thousands of miles apart from the parent cliif 

 from which they have thus been severed. 



