To this lump of ice the ship clung with the tenacity of a bosom friend, and followed it, literally, through thick and thin! There is something almost ludicrous, as well as striking, in McClure's account of their connection with this bit of ice. It conveyed them to their furthest north-east position, and back round the Princess Royal Islands--passed the largest within five hundred yards--returned along the coast of Prince Albert's Land--and finally froze in at latitude 70 degrees 50 minutes north, longitude 117 degrees 55 minutes west, on the 30th September; during which circumnavigation they received many severe "nips," and were frequently driven close to the shore, from which their dear friend the iceberg, small though he was, kept them off. Icebergs assume almost every conceivable form, and are seen of every size--sometimes, also, in great numbers. Scoresby mentions one occasion on which he was surrounded by bergs to the number of several hundreds. Now, all this ice that we have been speaking of, besides being, in a secondary way, a passive agent in the affairs of man (chiefly in barring his progress northward), is one of the most potent agents in the economy of nature. It is the means by which the world is kept cool enough for man and beast to dwell in. The polar regions--north and south--are, as it were, the world's refrigerators; tempering the heated air of the south, and, in connection with the torrid zone, spreading throughout the Earth those beneficial influences which gladden the sphere of man's temporal existence. CHAPTER ELEVEN. ICE AN AGENT IN TRANSPORTING BOULDERS--HOW THIS COMES ABOUT--DR. KANE'S OBSERVATIONS--LONG NIGHT IN WINTER AND LONG DAY IN SUMMER--EXTREME DARKNESS--INFLUENCE ON DOGS--INTENSE COLD--EFFECT ON THE SEA. There are many things in this world which, up to within a few years back, have been to men a source of surprise and mystery. Some of these problems have been solved by recent travellers, and not a few of them are referable to polar oceans and ice. In many parts of our coasts we find very striking and enormously large boulder-stones lying on the beach, perfectly isolated, and their edges rounded away like pebbles, as if they had been rolled on some antediluvian beach strewn with Titanic stones. These boulders are frequently found upon the loose sands of the sea-shore, far removed from any rocks or mountains from which they might be supposed to have been broken; and, more than that, totally different in their nature from the geological formations of the districts in which they are found. "Whence came these?" has been the question of the inquisitive of all ages, "and how came they there?" There may, for aught we know to the contrary, be more than one answer to these questions; but there is at least one which is quite satisfactory as to how and whence at least some of them have come. Ice was the means of conveying these boulders to their present positions.