FORMATION OF ICEBERGS. 
57 
and a parent source of great elevation and extent, we 
have an explanation of the excessive advance of these 
glaciers. But the existence of an interior reservoir or 
fountain head, as the source from, which this protrud- 
ing supply is furnished, has an interesting hearing 
upon Forhes' beautifully simple views of a viscous 
movement. 
That such a movement takes place in the Grreen- 
land glaciers, I have, as I hope to show hereafter, 
ample reasons for believing ; and, although the abso- 
lute rate of this advance has never been a subject of 
educated observation, it Would not surprise me if the 
gelid flow of these glacial rivers exceeded during the 
summer season that of the Alps. 
The materials thus afforded in redundant profusion 
are rapidly converted into icebergs. The water at the 
bases of these cliffs is very deep — I have in my note- 
book well-established instances of three hundred fath- 
oms ; and the pyramidal structure of the trap is such 
as to favor a precipitous coast line. The glacier, thus 
exposed to a saline water base of a temperature above 
the freezing point, and to an undermining wave ac- 
tion, aided by tides and winds, is of course speedily 
detached by its own gravitation. I am enabled to give 
a perfectly reliable account of this rarely witnessed 
sight, the creation of an iceberg by debacle or ava- 
lanche. 
Up this fiord, at an island known in the Esquimaux 
tongue as Ekarasak, there lived a deputy assistant of 
the Royal Greenland Company, a worthy man by the 
name of Grundeitz. It seems that the deep water of 
Omenak's Fiord is resorted to for halibut fishing, an 
operation which is carried on at the base of the cliffs 
with very long lines of whalebone. While Mr. Grun- 
