The fragment which has been broken off, as above described, is known as an _iceberg_. This iceberg is dissolved but slowly as it drifts south with the arctic current, often reaching as far as the Banks of Newfoundland before it disappears entirely. Often it endangers vessels crossing the ocean, and it deposits at the bottom of the sea its burden of rock and sand, as it melts down. The Banks of Newfoundland have received constant accessions in this way. It was in like manner that those great boulders which we find upon plains, like our Western prairies, were deposited at a period when they were the bed of the ocean, and icebergs drifted that way from the Arctics. And thus it will be seen that the Alpine glaciers and the Greenland glaciers, although disappearing by different direct processes, come to the same final end—the mountain-snows reach their natural home in the sea at last. Many of the Greenland glaciers are of amazing extent. There is one sixty miles wide. Its front is in the water, and it is washed by the waves like any other coast-line. The rock-cliffs on either side of it are very lofty, from five hundred to a thousand feet. The ice-cliffs are from fifty to three hundred. Below the surface of the water this wall of ice extends downward to the bottom, and in places the depth is over two thousand feet. This great glacier, the largest known, lies at the head of Smith’s Sound, and was discovered by Dr. Kane, who called it the Great Humboldt Glacier. Another, twenty miles across, may be seen in North Greenland, in the fiord of Aukpadlartok. This I have surveyed, and shall have occasion to refer to it hereafter. There are several that are five miles over; others two and three, and indeed of every size, down to the very diminutive one that might be called an ice rivulet. Many of them have reached the sea, as already stated—some of them ages ago, others very recently; others have not yet flowed so far; but in all cases the flow is steady, and the accumulation within the inland reservoir goes on. The flow of a glacier may be likened to the great flood which sweeps down the valley from a broken dam. Though it comes very slowly, it comes very surely. It is irresistible. It moulds itself to the hill, it swells up over an acclivity, it pours over a cliff, and pursues its course with a strength and impulse that is grand and terrible to behold. And it is not noiseless, for its movement is attended with constant breaks, sometimes extending through its entire body. The sound occasioned thereby is truly appalling. The glacier is, therefore, often an object of real terror. The whole region is, in fact, full of startling wonders and novelties of nature. Its history is replete with violent convulsions. Once those were of fire, for the country shows evidence of volcanic heat; now they are of frost. The Land of Desolation is worthy of more consideration than it has ever yet received from the learned and curious, or even the adventurous.