THE ICY CURRENT. 
263 
warmth of tropic climes, the Gulf Stream—as it has 
now come to he called, then pours its genial floods 
across the North Atlantic, laving the western coasts of 
Britain, Ireland, and Norway, and investing each shore 
it strikes upon, with a climate far milder than that 
enjoyed by other lands situated in the same latitudes. 
Arrived abreast of the North Cape, the impetus of 
the current is in a great measure exhausted. 
From causes similar—(though of less efficacy, in 
consequence of the smaller area occupied by water,) to 
those which originally gave birth to the ascending energy 
of the Antarctic waters, a gelid current is also generated 
in the Arctic Ocean, which, descending in a south¬ 
westerly direction, encounters the already faltering Gulf 
Stream in the space between Spitsbergen and Nova 
Zembla. A contest for the mastery ensues, which is 
eventually terminated by a compromise. The warmer 
stream, no longer quite able to hold its own, splits into 
two branches, the one squeezing itself round the North 
Cape, as far as that Yarangar Fiord which Russia is 
supposed so much to covet, while the other is pushed 
up in a more northerly direction along the west coast of 
Spitsbergen. But although it has power to split up the 
