1870.] BROWN—PHYSICS OF ARCTIC ICE. 687 
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 imlet 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, a long 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 from 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 icebeg, 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 transporting-power of bergs, as I saw but few of them with 
any earth, rocks, or other land-matter on them. Though still believ- 
ing that this has been exaggerated to support their theories by some 
writers ignorant, unless by hearsay, of the nature of icebergs’, I am 
inclined to think that I was in error. 
Towards the close of my voyage, in 1861, I had occasion to 
ascend to the summit of many bergs when the seamen were water- 
ing the vessel from the pools of water on their summits; and I 
almost invariably found moraine, which had sunk by the melting 
of the ice into the hollows, deep down out of sight of the voyager 
sailing past, but which would have been immediately deposited 
if the berg had been capsized. In 1867 I saw many bergs with 
masses of rocks on them, and only at the mouth of the Waygatz one 
1 [ have found, however, that much of the “discoloration” in bergs is caused 
by the brown leaves of the Cassiope tetragona and other plants, growing among 
the rocks abutting on the glaciers, and blown down upon them. 
