THE JOURNAL OF JOHN BALLENY. 347 
voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, I have stated, on the authority of Captain 
Biscoe, that, during his several cruises in the Antarctic seas, he never 
once saw a piece of rock in the ice. An iceberg, however, with a con- 
siderable block lying on it, was met with to the east of South Shetland 
by Mr. Sorrell (the former boatswain of the Beagle) when in a sealing 
vessel. The case, therefore, here recorded is the second; but it is in 
many respects much the most remarkable one.* Almost every voyager 
in the Southern Ocean has described the extraordinary number of ice- 
bergs, their vast dimensions, and the low latitudes to which they are 
drifted. Horsburgh + has reported the case of several which were seen 
by a ship in her passage from India, in latitude 35° 55'S. If, then, but 
one iceberg in a thousand, or in ten thousand, transports its fragment, 
the bottom of the Antarctic Sea, and the shores of its islands,} must 
already be scattered with masses of foreign rock—the counterpart of the 
“erratic boulders” of the northern hemisphere. 
* See p. 357, 1. 6. 
+ ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ 1830, p. 117. 
t M. Cordier, in his instructions (‘ L’Institut,’ 1837, p. 283) for the voyage of the 
Astrolabe and Zélée, says that the shores of South Shetland were found, by the naturalist 
of an American expedition in 1830, covered with great erratic boulders of granite, which 
were supposed to have been brought there by ice. It is highly desirable that this fact 
should be inquired into if any opportunity should hereafter occur. : 
