ATMOSPHERIC DEPOSITS. 
389 
the gable-end and the roof of a house. I am sorry I 
have lost the sketch I made of them. 
Once, well on in November, while walking toward 
Barlow's Inlet with old Blinn, we came to a cross 
perched on a rounded dune, and sonorous when struck ; 
and I remember, long after day had returned to us, 
during some of my walks upon the floes, coming to a 
little grave-yard of ice-tablets. They needed no in- 
scription to record that winter had been. The two 
sketches that follow are of one of these monuments ; 
the second drawing shows the action of gravity on the 
block after some weeks of exposure. It was more than 
fifty feet long. 
It will readily be seen that these actions, renew- 
ed at intervals throughout many months, would es- 
sentially change the topography of our ice-country. 
In fact, although I have compared the primary and 
elemental forms of each floe to parts of a tesselated 
pavement, our great ice-field was one vast, broken, 
a^nd confused mosaic- work, composed of ice-fields of 
difierent ages and thicknesses, and marked at their 
lines of junction by uplifted ridges of equally- varying 
dimensions. 
Except that atmospheric deposit or hoar-frost, which 
seems in these Arctic regions to take the place of a 
more direct precipitation, we had no snow until late 
in November. Then we had those fine, dust-like 
