It is a matter of little consequence to a navigator, whence the ice which supplies him with fresh water is produced. Leaving, therefore, these hypotheses relative to the formation of ice in frozen seas, it should be observed that the question, whether congealed sea-water will, when thawed, yield fresh water, has been satisfactorily decided by experiments made with every suitable attention. A quantity of sea-water having been taken up off the English coast, was exposed to a freezing atmosphere, and afforded an ice perfectly free from any taste of salt; and it has likewise been found, that not only sea-water, but water containing double the proportion of salt commonly found in our sea-water, and more than is contained in the sea-water of any climate, may be frozen by the cold prevailing in our atmosphere. [Illustration: ICEBERGS, OR ICE-ISLANDS.] ICE-ISLANDS. Ice-islands, or icebergs, as they are commonly called, is the name given by seamen to the huge, solid masses of ice which abound in the sea near or within the polar circles, and which often float down nearer to the equator, till they are gradually dissolved by the increasing warmth of the air and water. The cut gives a view of them as seen by Dr. Scoresby, who counted five hundred of them between latitude sixty-nine degrees and seventy degrees north, which were from one hundred to two hundred feet high, and from a few yards to a mile in circumference. Many of these fluctuating islands are met with on the coasts of Spitzbergen, to the great danger of the vessels employed in the Greenland fishery. In the midst of these tremendous masses, navigators have been arrested and frozen to death. In this manner the brave Sir Hugh Willoughby perished, with all his crew, in 1553; and in the year 1773, Lord Mulgrave, after every effort which the most accomplished seaman could make, to reach the termination of his voyage, was caught in the ice, and nearly experienced the same unhappy fate. The scene he describes, divested of the horrors attendant on the eventful expectation of change, was most beautiful and picturesque. Two large ships becalmed in a vast basin, surrounded on all sides by ice-islands of various forms; the weather clear; the sun gilding the circumambient ice, which was smooth, low, even, and covered with snow, except where pools of water, on a portion of the surface, shot forth new icy crystals, and on the smooth surface of the comparatively small space of sea in which they were hemmed. Such is the picture drawn by our navigator, amid the perils by which lie was surrounded.