382 
REVIEW. 
hummock ridges, which had so long bristled in every 
direction, were losing their sharpness or bending before 
the sunshine. We had seen this great field grow up 
from the bosom of the ocean ; and, traveling back in 
memory, it seemed but a few days since our sails 
swelled useless against the mast, as this ominous and 
unyielding barrier closed us in. 
What better type can we have of the universal prin- 
ciple of change than this solid immensity of varied ice, 
only three months ago a quiet liquid sea, and now 
resolving itself, under the resistless action of natural 
causes, into its normal element! The destructive and 
conservative energies, those great powers of displace- 
ment and renewal which sustain the equilibrium of 
the globe, may be seen, in an humble yet impressive 
scale, in the formation, growth, increase, degradation, 
and departure of this icy terra firma. The geological 
analogies exhibited by the changes in the configura- 
tion of this pack — changes involving the noblest dy- 
namic forces, as well as those slower actions now oper- 
ating upon the crust of our earth — would form a vol- 
ume for the comprehensive record of Von Buch or Mur- 
chison. 
Instead of sea and land, the two great reciprocat- 
ing agents and subjects of geological change, if for 
a moment you read sea and ice, hosts of analogies 
come crowding upon you, which, even to an unedu- 
cated observer like myself, assimilate the theoretical 
genesis of the one to the practical eye-seen growth of 
the other. The conversion of sea into ice, and of ice 
to sea, the excavation of valleys, the degradation of 
hills, the transfer of material to other unkindred sur- 
faces, the transition from dry ice-fields to marshes im- 
pregnated with salt, the anomalous influences of cur- 
