south; and there can be no doubt that the general climate of parts of Europe and America is materially affected by this cause. It is considered probable by Scoresby that the influence of the Gulf stream extends even to the sea near Spitzbergen, where its waters may pass under those of melted ice; for it has been found that in the neighborhood of Spitzbergen, the water is warmer by 6° or 7° at the depth of one hundred and two hundred fathoms than at the surface. This might arise from the known law that fresh water passes the point of greatest density when cooled down below 40°, and between that and the freezing point expands again. The water of melted ice might be lighter, both as being fresh (having lost its salt in the decomposing process of freezing), and because its temperature is nearer the freezing point than the inferior water of the Gulf stream. The great glaciers generated in the valleys of Spitzbergen, in the 79° of north latitude, are almost all cut off at the beach, being melted by the feeble remnant of heat still retained by the Gulf stream. In Baffin's Bay, on the contrary, on the west coast of Old Greenland, where the temperature of the sea is not mitigated by the same cause, and where there is no warmer under-current, the glaciers stretch out from the shore, and furnish repeated crops of mountainous masses of ice which float off into the ocean.[173] The number and dimensions of these bergs is prodigious. Captain Sir John Ross saw several of them together in Baffin's Bay aground in water fifteen hundred feet deep! Many of them are driven down into Hudson's Bay, and accumulating there, diffuse excessive cold over the neighboring continent; so that Captain Franklin reports, that at the mouth of Hayes' River, which lies in the same latitude as the north of Prussia or the south of Scotland, ice is found everywhere in digging wells, in summer, at the depth of four feet! Other bergs have been occasionally met with, at midsummer, in a state of rapid thaw, as far south as lat. 40° and longitude about 60° west, where they cool the water sensibly to the distance of forty or fifty miles around, the thermometer sinking sometimes 17°, or even 18°, Fahrenheit, in their neighborhood.[174] It is a well-known fact that every four or five years a large number of icebergs, floating from Greenland, double Cape Langaness, and are stranded on the west coast of Iceland. The inhabitants are then aware that their crops of hay will fail, in consequence of fogs which are generated almost incessantly; and the dearth of food is not confined to the land, for the temperature of the water is so changed that the fish entirely desert the coast.