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APPENDIX. 
2dly. They may have been formed from water collected in deep fissures and 
cavities that intersect the falling cliff near its margin. The inclined position of the 
land immediately above this margin of peat, and the annual undermining which 
is produced by the thawing of the frozen mud beneath it, produce occasional land 
slips and movements of the edge of the cliff towards the sea ; these cause cracks 
and fissures of the soil in various directions, but chiefly parallel to the external 
face of the cliff. When these fissures descend through the black boggy soil of 
the surface into the frozen mud below, they become receptacles for the formation of 
ice, since the water that oozes into them is congealed upon their sides until it en- 
tirely fills them with a wall or dyke of solid ice. The fall of a mass of . mud from 
the outer side of one of these walls would expose this ice, forming a case over the 
inner side of the fissure in which it was accumulated. 
3dly. The manner in which an extensive facing of pure ice may be formed 
on these cliffs, by water during the summer trickling down their frozen surface 
from the soil above, and becoming converted to ice in the course of its descent, 
has been described by Captain Beechey (pages 258 and 3S0). 
Lieutenant Belcher, in his notes, proposes another theory to explain the 
occurrence of masses of pure ice immediately below the margin of peat on the top 
of the cliff on the southern shore of Eschscholtz Bay. He conceives that between 
the superficial bed of spongy peat, and the mass of frozen mud which forms the 
body and substance of this cliff, the water oozing downwards through the peat, 
during the thaw of each successive summer, is stopped at the point where it comes 
into contact with the perpetually frozen earth below, and there accumulates into a 
thick horizontal sheet of pure transparent ice, and that it is the broken edge of this 
icy stratum which becomes exposed in the margin of the cliff during the process 
of slow and gradual destruction which it is continually undergoing. 
This opinion, however, is I believe peculiar to Lieutenant Belcher. The 
experiment made by Mr. Collie in boring horizontally into the cliff, through a 
vertical face of ice, until he penetrated the frozen mud behind it, shows, that in 
this case the ice was merely a superficial facing of frozen water, consolidated as it 
descended the front of the cliff ; and his further experiments in digging verti- 
cally downwards, in two places, through the peat into frozen mud, and finding no 
traces of any intermediate bed of ice appear unfavourable to any hypothesis as to 
the formation of a stratum of pure ice between the superficial peat and subjacent 
mud. 
It has just been stated that Captain Beechey and Mr. Collie propose three 
different solutions to explain the origin of these hanging masses of ice near the 
upper margin of vertical cliffs ; 1st, That they may have been formed from snow 
drifted into hollows of the cliffs, and subsequently converted into ice ; 2dly, From 
