If the dreary waste of the sandy desert, when the hot and suffocating blast sweeps over its parched surface, appears to the affrighted traveller invested with all the characters of sublimity, not less impressed with awe is the wanderer of polar regions, when, gazing on the heart-chilling magnificence of the interminable ice which surrounds him, he hears the sigh of the coming snow-storm, fraught with danger or with death. But at a time when repeated voyages and spirit-stirring narratives have rendered familiar to every one the beauties and the dangers of ice in every conceivable form of floe, of field, or of berg, and have excited sympathy for the sufferings or admiration of the daring of those who, to advance the cause of science, or to pursue for commercial purposes the mighty whale, have ventured within the precincts of that icy kingdom, it is not necessary to describe the solitary grandeur of a scene in which ice spreads like a sea beneath the feet, and rises as a mountain above the head. Not even, then, by the side of a cheerful fire, in these more temperate regions, shall we unnecessarily indulge in shudderings at the thought of distant powers of congelation, or enter further into the subject of polar picturesqueness. It is as a geological agent that we have now to contemplate ice in the various forms of fields and bergs, or of glaciers; its efficiency as a moving power being first considered. Scoresby justly denominates ice-fields “one of the wonders of the deep. They are often,” he says, “met with of the diameter of twenty or thirty miles; and when in a state of such close combination that no interstice can be seen, they sometimes extend to a length of fifty, or nearly a hundred miles.” The average thickness of these fields is from ten to fifteen feet, and their surface is varied by hummocks, which rise to a height of from forty to fifty feet. The weight of a piece of field ice, one mile square and thirteen feet thick, is, according to Scoresby’s estimate, 11,314,284 tons; and from the difference of specific gravity between ice and sea-water, this floating mass is sufficiently buoyant to support a weight of stones or other heavy bodies equal to 1,257,142, or in round numbers one million tons.