A GREENLAND GLACIER.
In this way the great arctic glaciers are formed, and take up their slow and solemn march to the sea. At what rate they advance is not known, but their movement like that of a river is much more rapid in the centre of the mass than at the sides, where contact with the earth retards its onward movements. In the Alps, where the nature and actions of great frozen streams have been studied with care, the movements of the different glaciers are found to be unlike. Some reach a speed of five hundred feet a year, but a great proportion of this is made during the summer heat. Since the summer in the arctic regions is so very short, it is fair to infer that the arctic glaciers move more slowly than this.
The speed of the Glacier des Bossons was exactly measured in a strange manner. In 1820 three guides fell into a chasm in the ice at the foot of Mt. Blanc and disappeared. In the years 1861, 1863 and 1865, the glacier delivered up their remains at its termination, three and a quarter miles from where they perished. In 1860 a glacier of the Austrian Alps which is of very slow motion laid bare the frozen body of a mountaineer, clad in an ancient dress which had not been worn by the peasantry for centuries.
ARCTIC NAVIGATION.
In spite of all these dreary wastes of ice, the arctic ocean is by no means devoid of life. The waters of the polar seas are renowned for their clearness. Off the Greenland coast the bottom can plainly be seen at a depth of five hundred feet, and the tangled masses of seaweed which grow upon it. Through these clear waves can be seen many varieties of sea life. The surface currents of the Gulf Stream bring hither tiny molluscs in such quantities that at times the waters are colored by them. In and out among them swim schools of the Greenland whale, swallowing them as they swim by the hundred thousand.
It is no quiet haven of rest for the whale. His great enemy, man, knows only too well his favorite resort, and here every year braving the dangers of ice and cold come fleets of whaling ships seeking the almost certain return of their hardy labors, even though it may involve, as it generally does, a winter of enforced idleness in some ice-bound bay.
Smaller members of the whale family abound, too, in vast numbers. Sometimes venturing too near the shores of inhabited islands, they are intercepted in their attempts to escape to the open sea by the natives, who surrounding them in canoes, drive them with blows of the oar and with stones toward the shore, where they are stranded and die in vast numbers. On the Faroe Islands, in this way on one occasion, eight hundred were captured, a fortune which does not often happen, but is peculiarly happy since it renders certain a winter of plenty.