368 ICEBERGS. [CHAP. XL. 



questions had excited the curiosity of the captain 

 and officers of the ship, who assured me they had 

 never seen any stones on a berg, observing, at the 

 same time, that they had always been so eager to 

 get out of their way, and in such a state of anxiety 

 when near them, that such objects might easily have 

 been overlooked. I had scarcely gone below ten 

 minutes, when one of the passengers came to tell me 

 that the captain had seen a black mass as large as a 

 boat on an iceberg, about 150 feet high, which was 

 very near. By aid of a glass, it was made out dis 

 tinctly to be a space about nine feet square covered 

 with black stones. The base of the berg on the side 

 towards the steamer was 600 feet long, and from the 

 dark spot to the water s edge, there was a stripe of 

 soiled ice, as if the water streaming down a slope, as 

 the ice melted, had carried mud suspended in it. In 

 the soiled channel were seen two blocks, each about 

 the size of a man s head. Although I returned in 

 stantly to the deck when the berg was still in sight, 

 such was then the haziness of the air, and the ra 

 pidity of our motion, that the dark spot was no 

 longer discernible. Such instances of the transporta 

 tion of rocks by ice, occurrences most interesting to 

 geologists, were first recorded by Scoresby, in the 

 northern hemisphere ; but from the accounts given 

 me by Sir James Ross and Dr. Joseph Hooker, they 

 are evidently much more common in the icebergs 

 drifted from the Antarctic than from those of the 

 Arctic regions. 



When we were among the ice, the temperature oi 

 the water was 45 Fahrenheit. On the day before 



