be permanently covered with ice?

We find, first, an ice-cap or ice-sheet, fed by the winter's snows,
stretching over the higher land, and crawling downward and outward by
its own weight, along the valleys, as glaciers.

We find underneath the glaciers, first a moraine profonde, consisting
of the boulders and gravel, and earth, which the glacier has ground
off the hillsides, and is carrying down with it.

These stones, of course, grind, scratch, and polish each other; and
in like wise grind, scratch, and polish the rock over which they
pass, under the enormous weight of the superincumbent ice.

We find also, issuing from under each glacier a stream, carrying the
finest mud, the result of the grinding of the boulders against each
other and the glacier.

We find, moreover, on the surface of the glaciers, moraines
superieures--long lines of stones and dirt which had fallen from
neighbouring cliffs, and are now travelling downward with the
glaciers.

Their fate, if the glacier ends on land, is what was to be expected.
The stones from above the glacier fall over the ice-cliff at its end,
to mingle with those thrown out from underneath the glacier, and form
huge banks of boulders, called terminal moraines, while the mud runs
off, as all who have seen glaciers know, in a turbid torrent.

Their fate, again, is what was to be expected if the glacier ends, as
it commonly does in Arctic regions, in the sea. The ice grows out to
sea-ward for more than a mile sometimes, about one-eighth of it being
above water, and seven-eighths below, so that an ice-cliff one
hundred feet high may project into water eight hundred feet deep. At
last, when it gets out of its depth, the buoyancy of the water breaks
it off in icebergs, which float away, at the mercy of tides and
currents, often grounding again in shallower water, and ploughing the
sea-bottom as they drag along it. These bergs carry stones and dirt,
often in large quantities; so that, whenever a berg melts or
capsizes, it strews its burden confusedly about the sea-floor.

Meanwhile the fine mud which is flowing out from under the ice goes
out to sea likewise, colouring the water far out, and then subsiding
as a soft tenacious ooze, in which the stones brought out by the ice
are imbedded. And this ooze--so those who have examined it assert--
cannot be distinguished from the brick-clay, or fossiliferous
boulder-clay, so common in the North. A v