26. Of all the ice-formations in the Arctic Seas, icebergs are the most enormous. “It is well known that ice is not by any means so heavy as water, but readily floats upon its surface. Consequently whenever a glacier enters the sea, the dense salt water tends to buoy it up. But the great tenacity of the frozen mass enables it to resist the pressure for a time. By and by, however, as the glacier reaches deeper water, its cohesion is overcome, and large fragments are forced from its terminal front and floated up from the bed of the sea to sail away as icebergs.”[3] This process is sometimes called “the calving” of the glaciers; and the direction of the cleavage is a pre-indication of the forms of the masses when detached. The characteristic features of icebergs are their simple outline, differing widely from the fantastic shapes which the fragments of sea-ice tend to assume; their great height as compared with their breadth—their greenish-blue colour—their distinct stratification—their slight transparency—and the roughly-granulated character of their ice. Icebergs with long, sharp-pointed peaks, like those exhibited in numerous illustrations, have no real existence. It is only fragments of field-ice, raised up by pressure, exposed to the action of waves and the process of evaporation which are transformed into fantastic shapes. Icebergs are generally of a pyramidal or tabular shape, and in time they are usually rounded off into irregular cones. They vary in height from 20 to 300 feet. Sir John Ross (1818) mentions an iceberg of 51 feet; Baffin (1615) of 240 feet; Parry (1819) of 258 feet; Kane (1853) of 300 feet; and Hayes (1861) one 315 feet high, the depth of which below the water-line he estimated at half a mile. On the coast of East Greenland, Scoresby once counted 500 icebergs, some of which reached the height of 200 feet; and during the second German North-Pole expedition, we saw many at the mouth of the Kaiser Franz-Josef fiord which measured 220 feet in height. In Austria Sound, and on the east coast of Kron-Prinz Rudolph’s land, their altitude varied from 80 to 200 feet. From the covering of mist which envelops them, icebergs generally appear much higher than they really are, and their depth below the surface is not so considerable as is generally supposed. In an iceberg 200 feet above the water, a total height of 600 to 800 feet may, as a mean, be inferred. It is only glaciers of a very great size which shed icebergs; smaller glaciers, like those of Novaya Zemlya, only strew the sea with a multitude of fragments which resemble broken sea-ice. Hence the appearance of icebergs is connected with the proximity to glacier-covered lands, and with the currents which prevail along their coasts. Baffin’s Bay, Smith’s Sound, East Greenland, the South-East of Greenland, Austria Sound, are the principal places where they collect together and lie like fleets before the entrances of bays and gulfs.