290 
LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
its place is immediately supplied with an equal extent from the 
field to the westward. 
The question then that naturally occurs, is, whence does the 
polar sea, surrounded as it is by land, receive a sufficient supply 
of water to provide for the perpetual discharge that takes place 
through the strait of the Fury and Hecla? It cannot be from the 
torrents of melted ice and snow in the sea and surrounding shores 
and islands, which a pleasing but not very profound French 
writer thought sufficient to explain the ebbing and flowing of 
the tides. Capt. Franklin saw no such torrents, indeed so small 
is the quantity of moisture in the atmosphere in high latitudes, 
that it scarcely ever rains—no snow fell at Melville Island dur¬ 
ing a whole winter, and the spiculse which floated in the air, lay 
on the ground not more than a few inches ; at Winter Island per¬ 
haps eight inches, not a third part of the quantity, which fre¬ 
quently falls in many parts of Great Britain, nor perhaps, a sixth 
of that on the continent; yet it would be absurd to suppose that 
the North Sea, or St. George’s Channel was ever swelled by the 
melting of snow, neither can it be from the melting of ice in 
the polar sea, for that would diminish instead of increasing the 
bulk of water by the contraction of its dimensions when in a 
fluid state; we might just as well suppose that a piece of ice 
placed in a basin of water, would by melting cause the water to 
run over the edges. We might also ask why this melting of the 
ice produced a current out of the polar sea on one side of America, 
and into it on the other? The current must therefore originate 
out of the limits of the Polar sea, and which is in a great mea¬ 
sure proved to be the case, both by Capt. Parry and Capt. Ross. 
It is a rational conclusion, that from the great quantities of 
drift wood found on the shores of the Aleutian Islands, generally 
the growth of more southern climates, from its abundance on both 
shores of America and Asia still higher up, and from so much of 
it being intermixed in the ice of Behring’s Strait as to supply 
Captain Cook’s ships with fire wood, that the Pacific flows into 
the polar sea through Behring’s Strait; the fact has been corro¬ 
borated by Kotzebue, who found a constant current setting up the 
strait at the rate of two or three miles an hour, that on the Asia- 
