FOSSIL REMAINS. 
601 
water consolidated into ice within fissures and cavities, caused by the subsidence 
and falling forwards of the frozen mud; Sdly, From water trickling down the 
external surface of the cliff, and freezing as it descended. To these the theory 
of Lieutenant Belcher would add a fourth process, by which a horizontal bed of ice 
is formed between a superficial bed of peat and the subjacent mud. These hanging 
masses of ice, whatever may be their origin, appear to have been so abundant at 
the time of the Russian expedition to this coast, as to have made Kotzebue 
and Eschscholtz imagine the entire cliff behind them to be an iceberg ; an opinion 
which all the English officers agree in considering to be erroneous, since the 
view and descriptions of the cliff on the south shore of Eschscholtz Bay, given 
at p. 219 of the English translation of Kotzebue’s Voyage, do not correspond 
with the state of this coast when it was subseqnently visited by the crew of the 
Blossom. 
The following are Captain Kotzebue’s observations respecting it * : “ We 
had climbed much about, without discovering that we were on real icebei’gs. 
Dr. Eschscholtz found part of the bank broken down, and saw, to his astonishment, 
that the interior of the mountain consisted of pure ice. At this news we all went, 
provided with shovels and crows, to examine these phenomena more closely, and 
soon arrived at a place where the bank rises almost perpendicularly out of the 
sea to the height of a hundred feet, and then runs off, rising still higher : we saw 
masses of the purest ice, of the height of a hundred feet, which are under a cover 
of moss and grass, and could not have been produced but by some terrible revo- 
lution. The place, which by some accident had fallen in, and is now exposed to 
the sun and air, melts away, and a good deal of water flows into the sea. An 
indisputable proof that what we saw was real ice is the quantity of mammoth’s 
teeth and bones which were exposed to view by the melting, and among which I 
myself found a very fine tooth. We could not assign any I’eason for a strong 
smell, like that of burnt horn, which we perceived in this place. The covering of 
these mountains, on which the most luxuriant grass grows to a certain height, is 
only half a foot thick, and consists of a mixture of clay, sand, and earth ; below 
which the ice gradually melts away, the green cover sinks with it, and continues 
to grow.” 
Mr. Collie’s experiments, which I have before allnded to, in digging both 
horizontally and vertically through the ice and peat into frozen mud, show that, at 
the points where they were made, the cliff formed no part of any iceberg. 
Still more decisive is the important fact, that on the two occasions when it was 
* Kotzebue’s Voyage of Discovery, Vol. I. p. 220. 
4 H 
