Our traveller records that twice a day, in Magdalena Bay and Bell Sound, he was an eye-witness of this partial ruin of the extremity of the glaciers. Their fall was accompanied by a noise like that of thunder; the swollen sea rushed upon the shore in a succession of gigantic waves; the gulf was covered with icebergs, which, caught in the swirl and eddy, issued out of the bay, like immense fleets, to gain the sea beyond, or were stranded here and there at points where the water was shallow. The icebergs seen by M. Martins were not, however, of any surprising magnitude; he estimates their average height at thirteen to sixteen feet. We have seen that those of Baffin Bay are tenfold more considerable and imposing; but then, in that bay the temperature of the sea is below 32°; the glacier does not melt when it enters the water; it sinks to the bottom of the sea; and the portions detached from it are all of greater height than even the submerged part of the icebergs which drift to and fro in the bays and gulfs of Spitzbergen. * * * * * We may follow up this description with some observations by Lieutenant Bellot, the chivalrous young Frenchman who perished in one of the expeditions despatched in search of Sir John Franklin and his companions. He is speaking of the masses of ice his ship encountered soon after doubling Cape Farewell, the south point of Greenland, and he remarks, that as Baffin Bay narrows towards the south, the icebergs, first set in motion higher up the bay by the northern gales, necessarily tend to accumulate in the gorge thus formed, and so to impede and block up Davis Strait, even when the higher waters are quite free. It is only through a series of alternate movements of advance and recession that the bergs finally pass beyond the barrier, and float out into the Atlantic, to undergo a slow process of dissolution.