It is impossible, we should say, for any one who has not had actual experience of the conditions of the Arctic world, to comprehend or imagine the immense quantity of ice upborne on its cold bleak waters. The mere enumeration of the floating bergs at times defies the navigator. Dr. Hayes once counted as far as five hundred, and then gave up in despair. Near by they stood out, he says, in all the rugged harshness of their sharp outlines; and from this, softening with the distance, they melted away into the clear gray sky; and there, far off upon the sea of liquid silver, the imagination conjured up the strangest and most wonderful groups and objects. Birds and beasts and human forms and architectural designs took shape in the distant masses of blue and white. The dome of St. Peter’s was recognizable here; then the spire of a village church rose sharp and distinct; and under the shadow of the Pyramids nestled a Byzantine tower and a Grecian temple. “To the eastward,” says Dr. Hayes, describing a similar scene, “the sea was dotted with little islets--dark specks upon a brilliant surface. Icebergs, great and small, crowded through the channels which divided them, until in the far distance they appeared massed together, terminating against a snow-covered plain that sloped upward until it was lost in a dim line of bluish whiteness. This line could be traced behind the serrated coast as far to the north and south as the eye could carry. It was the great _Mer de Glace_[7] which covers the length and breadth of the Greenland continent. The snow-covered slope was a glacier descending therefrom--the parent stem from which had been discharged, at irregular intervals, many of the icebergs which troubled us so much.” We have now brought together a sufficient number of data to assist the reader in forming a vivid conception of those monsters of the Polar Seas, the icebergs; and to enable him, unless he is very slow of imagination, to realize to himself what they _are_, and what their general aspect _is_. But we may add one interesting detail, noticed by Mr. Lament, the persevering seal-hunter, which is very generally overlooked. In the course of the brief Arctic summer the increased solar warmth has a perceptible effect upon the solid ice, and it becomes undermined and honeycombed, or, as the sailors call it, “rotten,” like a chalk cliff. It decays fastest, apparently, “between wind and water,” so that enormous caverns are excavated in the sides of the bergs.