Page:The ocean and its wonders.djvu/174

 Bay, and beyond the most northerly point, in that direction, that had at that time been reached by any previous traveller, Dr. Kane made many interesting observations and discoveries. He seems to have penetrated deep into the heart of Nature’s northern secrets. Among other things, he ascertained the manner in which boulders are transported from their northern home.

The slow, creeping movement of glaciers, to which we have already referred, is one means whereby large boulders are formed. At the lower edge of one of the glaciers of Norway we saw boulders, thirty or forty feet in diameter, which had been rolled and forced, probably for ages, down the valley by the glacier, and thrust out on the sea-beach, where they lay with their angles and corners rubbed off, and their surfaces rounded and smoothed as completely as those of the pebbles by which they were surrounded.

Had these boulders been formed in the arctic regions, they might have been thrust out upon the thick solid crust of the frozen sea, which in time would have been broken off and floated away; thus rafting the boulders to other shores. The formation of boulders, and their positions, are facts that we have seen. Their being carried out to sea by ice-rafts is a fact that Dr. Kane has seen and recorded. On the wild rocky shores where his ship was set fast, there was a belt of ice lining the margin of the sea, which he termed the “ice-belt,” or the “ice-foot.”