February 21, 10 A. M.--During the night we skirted the pack, steaming slowly westward. Now we are steaming south-west by the compass, whose variation is here 39° west. The prow is cutting clear, blue waters entirely free of ice. Along the horizon, from the north to the south-west, there is a marked ice blink. In the south-east, just over the horizon barely visible, is the edge of the pack. There are one hundred and ten icebergs visible from the mast head; of this number ten are true table-topped masses ranging, in height, from one hundred to two hundred and fifty feet, and in length from a thousand feet to one mile. All of the others were of the usual arctic type, with fantastic towers of every conceivable shape. Some five or six had the form of an easy chair, others that of a giant couch, still others assumed the forms of human faces. Some of the forms were particularly striking and needed no explanation; but at nearly every hour of the day some one went into raptures about a fetching figure, which generally required a vivid, and often a poetic imagination with a liberal artistic license. It is curious that the eye generally sees what the mind intends to picture. An illustration of this point is the different forms which we ascribe to these icebergs. The Captain points to a berg, not particularly attractive to anyone, but he insists in describing upon it the face and the form of a beautiful woman, chiseled in walls of alabaster. We look, and try to be interested while Lecointe grows enthusiastic, but we see only dead white cliffs. There are some irregularities, a few delicate blue lines, some suggestive hummocks, and various dark cavities; but these we see in every berg, and with our different mental attitudes we fail to recognise the ascribed topography of a human figure. We dare not, however, admit our ignorance, for such a lack of sympathetic support, especially on a sentimental subject, would be equal to a challenge for a duel on the _Belgica_. The naturalist comes along next, he is always realistic, sometimes poetical, but never sentimental. Upon a small tabular berg there is a shapeless mass of ice-blocks, and these blocks are so piled that one cannot help but notice them. To me the thing seemed like a marble statue of England’s Prime Minister, Salisbury, raised upon a huge, rounded block of granite. I heard Arctowski suggest the Egyptian Sphinx, but Racovitza insisted upon the likeness of a polar bear and some one shouted, “It moves!” At once the picture became real, and the sailors refused to believe that it was not a living bear. Racovitza’s imagination was accepted by all, for to doubt him was to have humorous abuse and sarcastic caricatures heaped upon us for weeks. There was, however, one man with a glass. He looked intently for an hour at the thing without saying much. This was Michotte, the cook. After we had all finished our discussions, and had come to a general agreement about