Who is there that does not remember the beautiful scene in Sir Walter Scott's "Talisman," where the noble Saladin, under the guise of an ordinary Emir, converses with Sir Kenneth, the disguised Prince of Scotland? Wondering at the weight and power of his late adversary's steed, Saladin asks why Kenneth uses in the desert an animal which sinks over the fetlock at every step.

AND

,"

"Thou speakest rightly, Saracen-rightly, according to thy knowledge and observation,' replies Kenneth, perhaps a little under the influence of self-satisfaction in his own greater knowledge; "but my good horse hath ere now borne me in mine own land over as wide a lake as thou seest yonder spread out behind us, yet not wet one hair above his hoof!"

TROPICAL.

upper particles sinking as the atmospheric air cools them, and the lower rising, to be themselves cooled, and descend, until the whole mass is lowered to forty degrees of Fahrenheit's thermometer; then a change takes place, and the whole process is reversed. From that point, until the water reaches freezing point (thirtytwo degrees Fahrenheit), the surface cooling, makes the particles become lighter, instead of heavier; consequently, instead of sinking they float, and thus the surface becomes the coldest part, and changes into ice. Were it otherwise -were the first process, of the coldest particles going to the bottom continued, the result would be that seas, ponds, and streams would solidify from the bottom, until the whole became such masses as the heat of many summers would fail to liquidize: this state of things would affect the temperature of the earth, so that our sumHow could he think otherwise than that he mers would become cold and cheerless, and the was being given a taste of "traveller's won- winters long and severe; and there would be no ders?" How could he, who had lived all his life saying where the effects would cease. Here in the Tropics, believe that there existed a condi- then we perceive God's prescience, and His tion of the element water in which its character-loving-kindness towards the works of His hands, istics were wholly changed, and under which in thus regulating atmospheric laws. that which he knew only as a yielding and unstable fluid would become a solid mass, capable of sustaining immense weights, and of affording a passage for man and horse over the surface of deep waters without in the least degree yielding beneath the pressure?

"It is justly spoken: list to a Frank, and hear a fable," is the reply of Saladin.

Had Saladin lived now, he would, however, not have been thus ignorant of the very existence of ice. He would, no doubt, have drunk his iced sherbet, and possibly have even sped over iron roads, or been conveyed over the rolling waters of the sea by means of vapourized water, to lands where little is to be seen but solidified water-water which, in many instances, has held its moveless, rock-like position unchanged for ages past, and which may probably remain bound in icy chains as long as the earth endures.

We see ice only in its least imposing and least wonderful form; yet even to us in this temperate clime there is enough in the history of the ice we see to give scope for thought, wonder, and praise, to the considerate mind; and if, in following out the subject, we give our attention to what travellers tell us of the ice wonders of Alpine and Arctic regions, and of what chemists and philosophers tell us of the marvels which attend the transformation of water into ice, we cannot fail to be struck with astonishment and delight. In nature's laboratory ice is thus produced. We will inquire hereafter how art simulates her action. It is a known fact that the colder particles of water descend, and take the lower position in both fresh and salt water; and that those of a higher temperature rise to, and float on the surface; and this process continues, the

Dr.-then Captain-Scoresby gives the following account of the process of freezing in the sea: The first appearance of ice, when in a state of detached crystals, is called by the sailors sludge, and resembles snow when cast into the water that is too cold to dissolve it. This smoothes the ruffled surface of the sea, and produces an effect like oil in preventing breakers. These crystals soon unite, and form a continuous sheet; but, by the motion of the waves they are broken in very small pieces, scarcely three inches in diameter. As they strengthen many of them coalesce, and form a larger mass. The undulations of the sea still continuing, these enlarged pieces strike each other on every side, whereby they become pounded and their edges turn up, whence they obtain the name of cakes, or pancakes. Several of these again unite, and thereby continue to increase, forming large flakes, until they become perhaps a foot in thickness, and many yards in circumference. *** When the sea is perfectly smooth the freezing process goes on more regularly, and probably more rapidly. During twenty-four hours' keen frost the ice will become an inch or two in thickness; and in less than forty-eight hours, capable of sustaining the weight of a man."

This is called bay ice, much of which is generated in the bays and islands of Spitzbergen.

Ice fields are often met with, of twenty or thirty miles in diameter, and in some instances extend to a length of fifty or a hundred miles, and frequently of from ten to fifteen feet in thickness. These are varied by high mounds, called hummocks, consisting of cakes of ice

heaped and piled on each other to a thickness of forty or fifty feet. Then there are icebergslarge, insulated peaks of floating ice. These are chiefly found about Hudson's Straits and Baffin's Bay and such neighbourhoods. Frobisher saw one which was thought to be ". near four-score fathoms above water;" and Sir E. Parry describes one that had nine unequal sides, and was aground in sixty-one fathoms, and was fifty-one feet in height above the water-that is, that it was in fact four hundred and twelve feet from base to summit, three hundred and sixtysix below, and fifty-one above the water.

The exceeding grandeur and beauty of these icebergs (named from two German words, eis, ice; and berg, hill) can be but feebly conceived by those who have not seen them. Some resemble palaces, churches, or old castles, with spires, towers, windows, and arched gateways of the purest marble, or, when lit up by the sun, of the fairest silver. Others appear like ships, trees, animals, or human beings-the production of some gigantic sculptor. When seen from a distance of a few miles they have very much the appearance of a mountainous country. Their colours are also extremely beautiful: some brilliant as burnished silver, others reflecting the colours of the rainbow-bright green, blue, and orange being the prevailing tints; and even at night their lustre enables them to be distinguished from afar.

above the other by great pressure, is comparatively flat.

"In quaintness of form and in brilliancy of colours these wonderful masses surpassed everything I had imagined; and we found endless amusement in watching their fantastic procession. At one time it was a knight on horseback, clad in sapphire mail, a white plume above his casque; or a cathedral window, with shafts of chrysoprasus, new-powdered by a snow-storm; or a smooth sheer cliff of lupis luzuli; or a banyan tree, with roots descending from its branches, and a foliage as delicate as the efflorescence of molten metal; or a fairy dragon that breasted the waters in scales of emerald; or anything else that your fancy chose to conjure up."

Of

Scoresby makes the words iceberg and glacier synonymous terms, but this is not usual. A glacier is usually considered to be a formation of ice on land, and an iceberg on the sea. the wonderful Alpine glaciers we have all heard, and probably a large proportion of our readers have seen some of them. These are formed by the snow of the upper regions melting beneath the summer influences, and the water thus produced filtering through and becoming frozen. This process is repeated year by year, and the vast fields of ice thus amassed continually make a gradual and imperceptible descent, proceeding ever with slow but noiseless motion into the Lord Dufferin, in his "Letters from High Lati- lower valleys-" a river of ice always wasting, tudes," thus describes his first sight of the ice: and always being renewed." Such a glacier is "By breakfast the sun reappeared, and we the Mer de Glace. A pretty little book called could see five or six miles ahead of the vessel."The Frozen Streams," thus describes it: It was shortly after this that, as I was standing in the main rigging, peering out over the smooth blue surface of the sea, a white twinkling spot of light suddenly caught my eye, about a couple of miles off the port bow, which a telescope soon resolved into a solitary isle of ice, dancing and dipping in the sunlight. As you may suppose, the news soon brought every body on deck; and when almost immediately afterwards a string of other pieces, glittering like a diamond necklace, hove in sight, the excitement

was extreme.

"There, at all events, was honest blue salt water frozen solid; and when, as we proceeded, the scattered fragments thickened, and passed like silver argosies on either hand, until at last we found ourselves enveloped in an innumerable fleet of bergs, it seemed as if we never could be weary of admiring a sight so strange and beautiful. It was rather in form and colour, than in size, that these ice islets were remarkable; anything approaching to an iceberg we neither saw, nor are likely to see. In fact, the lofty ice mountains, that wander like vagrant islands along the coast of America, seldom or never come to the eastward, or northward of Cape Farewell. They consist of land ice, and are all generated among bays and straits within Baffin's Bay, and first enter the Atlantic a good deal to the southward of Iceland; whereas the polar ice, among which we have been knocking about, is field ice, and except when packed one ledge

"On reaching the summit of the Montanvert the traveller first begins to appreciate the wild grandeur of the glacier. From a height of about two hundred and forty feet we look down upon the icy stream, and see it for about two leagues, following the windings of the valley, pent in between walls of rock, surmounted by a thousand pinnacles, which often rise beyond the clouds; the loftiest of which, the Aiguille Verte, is more than 13,000 feet above the level of the sea, and almost 7,000 feet above the grassy plat from which we now behold it."

Frequently-indeed, usually-there may be seen at the foot of the glacier an icy cavern, from which flows a rapid and intensely cold stream of water, caused by the waste of the ice consequent on a partial melting beneath the rays of the sun. These streams flowing down to the habitations of men, afford them unfailing supplies of water; and when the scorching summer sun has dried up all the usual springs whence their rills and brooks are supplied, then these glacier streams flow deeper, wider and cooler than before; indeed, the hotter the weather, the fuller and purer do they become. Many parts thus remind us of that "well of water springing up into everlasting life,” which God the Holy Spirit is to His people—a source of streams that never fail, of waters which waste not, which take not their rise from earth, and are not subject to its destructive influences; but rising high above, in the snowy mountains,

flow down ever pure, fresh, and abundant, when those fountains which spring from earth are dried up and wasted, and can yield no refreshment; and when the heat of the furnace of affliction is strongest, then are those free streams ever most abundant.

glaciers plunged down into the sea, the eye, no longer able to take in its glacial character, was content to rest in simple astonishment at what then appeared a lucent precipice of gray-green ice, rising to the height of several hundred feet above the masts of the vessel."

Of another of these marvellous ice-bound rivers our author gives us an account. It occurs in English Bay, one of the most northern parts of Spitzbergen, a land rarely trodden by voyagers.

"Down towards either horn run two ranges of schistose rocks, about 1,500 feet high; their sides almost precipitous, and the topmost ridge as sharp as a knife and rugged as a saw; the intervening space is entirely filled up by an enormous glacier, which, descending with one continuous incline from the head of a valley on the right, and sweeping like a torrent round the roots of an isolated clump of hills in the centre, rolls at last into the sea. The length of the glacial river, from the spot where it apparently first originated, could not have been less than thirty or thirty-five miles, and its greatest breadth, less than nine or ten; but so com

that it was as much as you could do to distinguish the further mountains peeping up above its surface. The height of the precipice, where it fell into the sea, I should judge to have been about one hundred and twenty feet. On the left a still more extraordinary sight presented itself a kind of baby glacier actually hung suspended half over on the hill side, like a tear in the act of rolling down the furrowed cheek of the mountain."

But if these glaciers of the Alps are worthy of notice, how much more wonderful are those which occur in the northern regions of the earth! We have some most interesting accounts of these from the pen of Captain Scoresby; but there are even more interesting described by Lord Dufferin, in his "Letters from High Latitudes," from which I have already quoted. His graphic powers seem to bring the wonders which he saw almost before our eyes; and it would be doing injustice to the subject to present it in other words than those with which his book supplies us. I must commence with his description of his first sight of the island of Jan Mayer, an almost unknown spot of land, lying in about 71 N. latitude, which gives us a new idea of the glories of ice. He first, whilst holding a night-watch, beheld the mists which had hitherto encircled them lift, and then "the heavy wreaths of vapour seemed to be imper-pletely did it fill up the higher end of the valley ceptibly separating; and in a few minutes more the solid roof of gray suddenly split asunder, and I beheld through the gap, thousands of feet over head, as if suspended in the crystal sky, a.cone of illuminated snow." But ere he could summon his friends from below to observe this grand sight with him, the mist had again closed, and there was nothing to be seen. In patient waiting they, however, held on; and their patient waiting was rewarded. "A few more minutes, and slowly, silently, in a manner But these wonderful glaciers, Lord Dufferin you could take no count of, its dusky hem tells us, are by no means the largest in the (the vapour's) first deepened to a violet tinge; island; and according to Dr. Scoresby, there are then gradually lifting, displayed a long line of several which extend to forty or fifty miles in coast-in reality but the roots of Beerenberg-length, whilst the precipice formed by their fall dyed of the darkest purple; whilst, obedient to a into the sea is four hundred or five hundred common impulse, the clouds that wrapped its feet in depth. From one such he says he saw summit gently disengaged themselves, and left"a mass of ice, the size of a cathedral, thunder the mountain standing in all the magnificence of down into the sea, from a height of four hunhis 6,870 feet, gilded by a single row of pearly dred feet." vapour, from underneath whose floating folds "Who is able to abide His frost?" Wonderseven enormous glaciers rolled down into the ful, surpassing the conception of man, are these sea. The glaciers were quite an unexpected icy products of His hand and how much more element of beauty. Imagine a mighty river, of of wonder might we not expect to find in regions as great a volume as the Thames, started down bordering even more closely on the North Pole the side of a mountain, bursting over every im-regions which have hitherto kept firm the pediment, whirled into a thousand eddies, tumbling and raging on from ledge to ledge in quivering cataracts of foam, then suddenly struck rigid, by a power so instantaneous in its action, that even the froth and floating wreaths of spray have stiffened to the immutability of sculpture. Unless you had seen it, it would be almost impossible to conceive the strangeness of the contrast between the actual tranquillity of these silent crystal rivers, and the violent descending energy impressed upon their exterior. You must remember, too, all this is upon a scale of such prodigious magnitude, that when we succeeded subsequently in reaching the spot, where, with a leap like that of Niagara, one of these

barriers which separate them from the inhabited parts of the earth.

In these even comparatively southern districts all vegetation ceases when you get twenty feet above the level of the sea; but dull black mosses, which is all that enlivens even the more productive parts of Spitzbergen, scarcely deserves the name of vegetation. This barren district with its endless snows and ice, allows no burial to any poor mortal who may there lay him down and die. A grave in the snow is all that is afforded him; and from that grave in after years the snowy covering may be lifted by the fierce winds, and the poor whitened, but not decomposed body, be laid bare to view a