EXISTING GLACIERS. 19 



in lofty, perpendicular cliffs. In a few places the rocks 

 broke through their icy covering, by which alone we could 

 be assured that land formed the nucleus of this, to appear- 

 ance, enormous iceberg."* 



Again, speaking of the region in the vicinity of the 

 lofty volcanoes Terror and Erebus, between ten thousand 

 and twelve thousand feet high, the same navigator says : 



" "We perceived a low, white line extending from its 

 extreme eastern point, as far as the eye could discern, 

 to the eastward. It presented an extraordinary appear- 

 ance, gradually increasing in height as we got nearer to 

 it, and proving at length to be a perpendicular cliff of 

 ice, between one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet 

 above the level of the sea, perfectly flat and level at the 

 top, and without any fissures or promontories on its even, 

 seaward face. What was beyond it we could not imagine ; 

 for, being much higher than our mast-head, we could not 

 see anything except the summit of a lofty range of moun- 

 tains extending to the southward as far as the seventy- 

 ninth degree of latitude. These mountains, being the 

 southernmost land hitherto discovered, I felt great satis- 

 faction in naming after Sir Edward Parry. . . . Whether 

 Parry Mountains again take an easterly trending and 

 form the base to which this extraordinary mass of ice is 

 attached, must be left for future navigators to determine. 

 If there be land to the southward it must be very remote, 

 or of much less elevation than any other part of the coast 

 we have seen, or it would have appeared above the barrier." 



This ice-cliff or barrier was followed by Captain Eoss 

 as far as 198° west longitude, and found to preserve very 

 much the same character during the whole of that dis- 

 tance. On the lithographic view of this great" ice-sheet 

 given in Eoss's work it is described as " part of the South 

 Polar Barrier, one hundred and eighty feet above the sea- 



* Quoted by Whitney in Climatic Changes, p. 314. 



