About ninety miles north-east of Rensselaer Bay lies the great Humboldt Glacier, which seems to serve as a connecting-link between the Old World and the New. It lies between the 79th and 80th parallels north, and between the 64th and 65th meridians west, skirting the shore of Peabody Bay, which is a bold indentation of the east coast of Kane Sea. It was discovered in Dr. Kane’s expedition, and is probably one of the grandest spectacles in the Arctic world. Dr. Kane acknowledges himself unable to do justice to its magnificent aspect. He can speak only of its “long, ever-shining line of cliff diminished to a well-pointed wedge in the perspective;” of its “face of glistening ice, sweeping in a long curve from the low interior, the facets in front intensely illuminated by the sun.” This line of cliff rises, like a solid wall of glass, three hundred feet above the water-level, with an unknown, unfathomable depth below it; and its curved face, _sixty miles in length_, disappears into unknown space at not more than a single day’s railroad-travel from the Pole. The interior with which it communicates, and from which it issues, is an unexplored _mer de glace_, an ice-ocean, of apparently boundless dimensions. Such is the “mighty crystal bridge” which connects the two continents of America and Greenland. We say, continents; for Greenland, as Dr. Kane remarks, however insulated it may ultimately prove to be, is in mass strictly continental. Its least possible axis, measured from Cape Farewell to the line of the Humboldt Glacier, in the neighbourhood of the 80th parallel, gives a length of upwards of twelve hundred miles,--not materially less than that of Australia from its northern to its southern cape. Imagine the centre of such a continent, says Dr. Kane, occupied through nearly its whole extent by a deep, unbroken sea of ice, that gathers perennial increase from the watershed of vast snow-covered mountains and all the precipitations of the atmosphere upon its own surface. Imagine this, moving onward like a great glacial river, seeking outlets at every fiord and valley, rolling icy cataracts into the Atlantic and Greenland seas; and, having at last reached the northern limit of the land that has borne it up, pouring out a mighty frozen torrent into unknown Arctic space. “It is thus,” remarks Dr. Kane, “and only thus, that we must form a just conception of a phenomenon like this great glacier. I had looked in my own mind for such an appearance, should I ever be fortunate enough to reach the northern coast of Greenland. But now that it was before me, I could hardly realize it. I had recognized, in my quiet library at home, the beautiful analogies which Forbes and Studer have developed between the glacier and the river; but I could not comprehend at first this complete substitution of ice for water.