grinding on the rocks and stone-covered bottom at all depths from the centre of the channel, we may form some conception of the effects of these huge polishers of the sea floor. Of the bergs which pass outside of the straits, many ground on the banks off Belle-Isle. Vaughan has seen a hundred large bergs aground at one time on the banks, and they ground on various parts of the banks of Newfoundland, and all along the coast of that island. As they are borne by the deep-seated cold current, and are scarcely at all affected by the wind, they move somewhat uniformly in a direction from north-east to south-west, and when they touch the bottom, the striation or grooving which they produce must be in that direction. In passing through the straits in July, I have seen great numbers of bergs, some low and flat-topped, with perpendicular sides, others convex or roof-shaped, like great tents pitched on the sea; others rounded in outline or rising into towers and pinnacles. Most of them were of a pure dead white, like loaf sugar, shaded with pale bluish green in the great rents and recent fractures. One of them seemed as if it had grounded and then overturned, presenting a flat and scored surface covered with sand and earthy matter. At present we wish to regard the icebergs of Belle-Isle in their character of geological agents. Viewed in this aspect, they are in the first place parts of the cosmical arrangements for equalizing temperature, and for dispersing the great accumulations of ice in the Arctic regions, which might otherwise unsettle the climatic and even the static equilibrium of our globe, as they are believed by some imaginative physicists and geologists to have done in the so-called glacial period. If the ice islands in the Atlantic, like lumps of ice in a pitcher of water, chill our climate in spring, they are at the same time agents in preventing a still more serious secular chilling which might result from the growth without limit of the Arctic snow and ice. They are also constantly employed in wearing down the Arctic land, and aided by the great northern current from Davis's Straits, in scattering stones, boulders and sand over the banks along the American coast. Incidentally to this work, they smooth and level the higher parts of the sea bottom, and mark it with furrows and striæ indicative of the direction of their own motion.