deep fjords, and are split up into icebergs long before
they reach it. It is desirable that those who write on the origin of
icebergs, should take into consideration the fact that icebergs are
only formed at places where a violent motion takes place in the mass
of the ice, which again within a comparatively short time results in
the excavation of the deep ice-fjord. The largest iceberg, which, so
far as I know, has been _measured_ in that part of the Polar Sea
which lies between Spitzbergen and Wrangel Land, is one which
Barents saw at Cape Nassau on the 17/7th August 1596. It was sixteen
fathoms high, and had grounded in a depth of thirty-six fathoms. In
the South Polar Sea icebergs occur in great numbers and of enormous
size. If we may assume that they have an origin similar to those of
Greenland, it is probable that round the South Pole there is an
extensive continent indented by deep fjords.

2. _Glacier Ice-blocks._ These, which indeed have often been
called icebergs, are distinguished from true icebergs not only
by their size, but also by the way in which they are formed.
They have seldom a cross section of more than thirty or forty
metres, and it is only exceptionally that they are more than ten
metres high above the surface of the water. They originate from the
"calving" of glaciers which project into the sea with a straight and
evenly high precipitous border. Such glaciers occur in large numbers
on the coasts of Spitzbergen, and they are there of the same height
as similar evenly-cut glaciers on Greenland. According to the
statement of the Dane PETERSEN, who took part both in KANE'S
expedition in 1853-55 and in Torell's in 1861, the glaciers, for
instance, at Hinloopen Strait in Spitzbergen, are fully equal, with
respect to their size and the height of their borders above the
sea-level, to the enormous and much bewritten Humboldt glacier in
Greenland. In Spitzbergen too we find at two places miniatures of
the Greenland ice-currents, for instance the glacier which filled
the North Haven in Bell Sound, another glacier which filled an old
Dutch whaling haven between Recherche Bay and Van Keulen Bay, a
glacier on the north side of Wablenberg Bay and perhaps at that part
of the inland ice marked in my map of the expedition of 1872 as a
bay on the east coast of North-east Land. It is even possible that
small icebergs may be projected from the last-mentioned place, and
thence drift out into the sea on the east coast