perature of the
uppermost stratum of water was also above the freezing-point, the
formation of ice was clearly a sort of hoar-frost phenomenon, caused by
radiation of heat, perhaps both upwards towards the atmosphere and
downwards towards the bottom layer of water, cooled below the
freezing-point.

The whole day we continued our voyage eastwards with glorious
weather over a smooth ice-free sea, and in the same way on the 1st
September, with a gentle southerly wind, the temperature of the air
at noon in the shade being +5.6 deg.. On the night before the 2nd
September the wind became northerly and the temperature of the air
sank to -1 deg.. Little land was seen, though we were still not
very far from the coast. Near to it there was a broad ice-free, or
nearly ice-free, channel, but farther out to sea ice commenced. The
following night snow fell, so that the whole of the deck and the
Bear Islands, which we reached on the 3rd September, were sprinkled
with it.

Hitherto, during the whole time we sailed _along the coast_, we had
scarcely met with any fields of drift-ice but such as were formed of
rotten, even, thin and scattered pieces of ice, in many places
almost converted into ice-sludge, without an "ice-foot" and often
dirty on the surface. No iceberg had been seen, nor any large
glacier ice-blocks, such as on the coasts of Spitzbergen replace the
Greenland icebergs. But east of Svjatoinos the ice began to increase
in size and assume the same appearance as the ice north of
Spitzbergen. It was here, besides, less dirty, and rested on a hard
ice-foot projecting deep under water and treacherous for the
navigator.

The ice of the Polar Sea may be divided into the following
varieties:--

1. _Icebergs._ The true icebergs have a height above the surface of
the water rising to 100 metres. They often ground in a depth of 200
to 300 metres, and have thus sometimes a cross section of up to 400,
perhaps 500 metres. Their area may amount to several square
kilometres. Such enormous blocks of ice are projected into the North
Polar Sea only from the glaciers of Greenland, and according to
Payer's statement, from those of Franz-Josef Land also; but not, as
some authors (GEIKIE, BROWN, and others) appear to assume and have
shown by incorrect ideal drawings, from glaciers which project into
the sea and there terminate with a perpendicular evenly-cut border,
but from very uneven glaciers which always enter the sea in the
bottoms of