what is most to our present purpose, the descent of these ice-bergs and ice-fields to the southward, in the winter months, proves the perpetuity of the southern current, and that those who have formed their notions of this current from the reveries of St. Pierre on the melting of the polar ice, have adopted very erroneous ideas on the subject. It is to be hoped, however, that the late unusual chills of the atmosphere will only prove a temporary inconvenience; in any case, we ought to be very thankful that, instead of an occasional chill from the passing ice to its place of dissolution, we are not visited, like Iceland, Newfoundland, and the eastern coasts of America, with an annual congeries of ice on our shores, which would unquestionably be the case had these frozen bodies of the arctic regions been borne by the currents, from the outlets of the polar sea, in any other direction than that which they now take.† We have been thus circumstantial with regard to the current, as its existence affords, in our opinion, the best hope for the success of the expeditions now engaged in exploring a passage into the Pacific; but there is another point not less important to be established, though still more obscure than that of the currents-we allude to an open polar basin, exempt from land or ice. Such an idea might well stagger those who had not directed their attention to the subject, and we were prepared to hear some Orleans the ice two inches thick, the ground covered with snow, and the thermometer down to 27°. At Malta they have been shivering with cold. Etna has presented one mass of snow which descended lower than usual, and the whole continent has been visited with unusual storms of wind and torrents of rain. As these phenomena have occurred with the wind from the westward, they are every where ascribed to the approach and melting of ice in the Atlantic. Navigators generally feel a cold stream of air from an ice-berg long before it is seen.

Malte-Brun is one of those who by a dash of the pen can with the utmost ease convert an ice-mountain into a marine current, from the quantity which is daily (tous les jours) decomposed by the solar rays. If he had consulted Scoresby's Meteorological Journal for 1812, he would have found that in 77 and 78° lat. from the 21st June to the 21st July, Fahrenheit's thermometer stood only one day as high as 37°, very often at the freezing point, and once four degrees below it, in the shade. Wern. Mem. vol. ii. p. 170. As much ice therefore as the solar rays decomposed' on one side was probably recomposed on the other. Our celebrated old navigator Davis, in stating his reasons for the existence of a north west passage, has sounder notions of the destruction of ice than M. Malte-Brun. We know (he says) that the sea dissolveth this yse with great speede, for in twentie-four hours I have seen an ylande of yse turne up and downe, as the common phrase is, because it hath melted so fast under water that the heavier parte hath been upwarde, which hath been the cause of his so turning, for the heaviest part of all things swimming is by nature downwards, and therefore sith the sea is by his heate of power to dissolve yse, it is greatly against reason that the same should be frozen, so that the congelation of the seas can be no hinderance to the execution of this passage. The Worldes hydrographical Discription, 1595. We have no doubt that Davis is right, and that the action of the salt sea on the ice, and not its decomposition by the solar rays,' prevents an accumulation which otherwise in process of time would freeze up the globe. + We had scarcely written this sentence when we read in a Scotch newspaper (but we know not the authority) that

the westernmost of the Sip astonishment and dismay

, six miles in length, had grounded near Fula, bout half the size of the mountain of ice, to the

such

such question asked, as, Why should there be an open sea at the North pole, while a perpetual mass of impenetrable ice defies all approach within twenty degrees of the South pole? We might content ourselves with asking in our turn, Why is the northern temperate zone nearly filled with land, while the southern temperate zone is as nearly occupied by water?-Why is there a difference of temperature in the two hemispheres equal at least to ten or twelves degrees of latitude? All such anoma lies as these find their just balance, we doubt not, in that system of compensations and counteractions which are discoverable in every part of the creation, and which may not only be neces sary but essential and beneficial, though not fully comprehended by short-sighted mortals. The works of the Deity,' says Paley, ' are known by expedients; where we should look for absolute destitution-where we can reckon up nothing but wants-some contrivance always comes in to supply the privation.' With this temper of mind, instead of a predetermination to find difficulties, if we direct our inquiries to the present question, we shall perhaps find that, because it was expedient, for some wise and good purpose, that the south pole should be blocked up with mountains of ice or land, or both, it became necessary that the north pole should be free from both; for our doctrine is, that where there is no land and a deep sea, there can be no permanent ice : and this opinion is so far from being new, that Frobisher, in his second voyage, expressly says, that the deep sea doth not freeze; and Davis proves, from his own experience, and the experience of all that have ever travelled towards the north, that the sea never fryseth.*

For more than two centuries the speculative geographers of Europe had maintained the necessity of the existence of a great southern continent—a terra australis incognita-on the principle that all the land, which had till then been discovered in the southern hemisphere, was insufficient to form a counterpoise to the weight of land in the northern half of the globe. No man, after the learned and ingenious president De Brosses, took up this argument with more warmth than the late Mr. Dalrymple, hydrographer to the Admiralty. So strongly was this indefatigable inquirer impressed with the necessity of a great southern continent, that he actually created a terra australis cognita, whose probable limits he not only defined, but settled also its population, and calculated the great commercial advantages which Great Bri tain would derive from the mere 'scraps' which must fall from the rich table of a country, whose extent was' greater than the whole civilized part of Asia, from Turkey to the eastern extremity of The Worldes hydrographical Diseription. 1595.

China.'

China.'* This vast continent, however, with all its wealth, power and population, vanished before the severe scrutiny of the immortal Cook; and Mr. Dalrymple lived many years in the full conviction, that the world continued, as usual, to preserve its equilibrium without the aid of a southern continent.

Whether any such counterpoise be necessary is not our business to discuss; but, supposing it to be so, it might be employed as an argument for the probability, we may almost add necessity, of a great polar basin, free from land, in the northern hemisphere; for it can hardly be doubted, that the immense mountains and fields of ice in the southern seas, which, commencing between the 50th and 60th degrees of latitude, except in very few places, are supposed to extend to the very pole, have been formed round a great nucleus of land, at no great distance from its outer margin; this is an opinion which Cook himself seemed to entertain, and that the ice had been fixed round it from the earliest time. Here then we have at once a south polar continent, extending probably to little short of three thousand miles in diameter, and consequently of larger dimensions than the north polar sea; affording to the former an addition of weight, where weight would act with most effect, and taking off from the latter as much as may be supposed to maintain that equipoise of the two hemispheres, about which our early philosophical geographers were so anxious. It is rather surprizing that this counterpoise had not occurred to Mr. Dalrymple, as, in an early volume of the Philosophical Transactions, it had been recorded that, it was well known to all that sail northward, that most of the northern coasts are frozen up many leagues, though in the open sea it is not so, No, nor under the pole itself, unless by accident.'

But lest we should fall into the same error as this industrious geographer, we shall abandon all further speculations on this point, and proceed to state some circumstances which have a closer bearing on the subject, and from which some more conclusive inference may be drawn in favour of an open polar sea in the northern hemisphere.

The first observation that presents itself, is that of whales being rarely seen in deep water; but generally found in those parts of the arctic sea where the ice most abounds, and where it has taken

The passage runs thus :- The number of inhabitants in the southern continent is probably more than fifty millions, considering the extent; from the eastern part, discovered by Juan Fernandez, to the western coast seen by Tasman, is about 100° of lougitude, which, in the latitude of 40°, amounts to 4,596 geographic or 5,323 statute miles. This,' he continues, is a greater extent than the whole civilized part of Asia, from Turkey to the eastern extremity of China. There is at present no trade from Europe thither, though the scraps from this table would be sufficient to maintain the power dominion and sovereignty of Britain, by employing all its manufactures and ships.'

the

the ground either on the shore or on banks. It is on these banks, and in the tranquil pools of water within the large fields of ice, that the arctic sea literally swarms with those marine insects which constitute the food of these huge animals. In the deep and fathomless part of this sea, midway between old Greenland and Spitzbergen, deeper than did ever plummet sound,'-whales are rarely seen, and then not lying tranquilly on the surface, or playing about, because this deep sea affords them no food. As rarely therefore do the fishing vessels quit the ice and run in open water to the northward of Spitzbergen, being almost invariably disappointed in the expectation of finding whales. But vessels, which may thus have been tempted by an open sea to run to the northward for two or three degrees, have seldom met with any interruption from ice or land; and we know not what other explanation can be given of the absence of ice, than deep water and the absence of land.

Though we do not mean to assert with Davis, that 'the sea never fryseth,' yet we venture to maintain, from our own experience, that a deep and expansive ocean will not easily be frozen in an extreme diminution of temperature; such a sea can never be tranquil in all its parts a sufficient length of time to be uniformly and permanently bound in icy chains. Its surface may be partially covered, but the first breeze of wind and undulation of the water will break it up into patches, or pancake ice; these patches, carried away by the winds and currents, and uniting with others, float about till they finally fix themselves in narrow straits, or by the shores. Thus, though the inland Baltic, the White and Black seas, the gulf of St. Lawrence and the strait of Bellisle, are some of them occasionally, and others regularly every year, frozen up, the German Ocean, the Northern Atlantic, the Northern Pacific, and even the sea of Kamstchatka, have no ice but what is adventitious, or, in other words, such as may have been carried down by the rivers, or broken loose from the shores. This difference is not owing to the difference in position with respect to latitude, nor to any great difference of temperature, as those seas which are liable to be frozen, generally speaking, are situated more to the southward than those which never do freeze. Whenever the intensity of the

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Captain Scoresby might well anticipate' that his idle and thoughtless project, of travelling over the ice of the sea to the north pole, may be deemed 'the frenzied specu lation of a disordered fancy.' We regret that a young man of some talent should have been betrayed, by a desire to make the vulgar stare, into such an inconsistency; but it has served Malte Brun for an argument, such as it is, against the existence of a polar basin. One would have thought that a person of his reading and sagacity might have seen the absurdity of such an idea; and that, even supposing the polar sea to be frozen, it would present a surface so rugged and mountainous, as to make it an easier task to drive a broad-wheeled waggon over the summit of Mont-Blanc, than a rein-deer sledge to the north pole.

cold

cold is below the point at which common sea-water freezes, and which is somewhere about 27° of Fahrenheit, the formation of ice on the surface, or the want of it, has little or no relation to the degree of latitude, but depends on circumstances of locality, and chiefly, as we have already stated, on extension of surface and great depth, or the contrary-where the former are found, if at the pole itself, we believe the quantity of ice formed in any one year will be very trifling, and where they do not exist, the sea may be, and frequently is, frozen over in one night within what is called the temperate zone.

By the tables of Meyer, formed with great care from meteorological observations made at various and distant points on the earth's surface, it appears that the mean temperature of the equator is not very different from that of the tropics, and that the temperature of the north pole corresponds pretty nearly with that of the arctic circle, the whole difference in either case amounting only to about 8° of Fahrenheit's scale. James and his people, who wintered at Charlton island, in Hudson's Bay, in a latitude under 59°, suffered more from cold, though infinitely better provided against it, than Barentz and his party did in Nova Zembla, in lat. 76°. If, therefore, we have an open sea to the northward of the arctic circle, which we know to be the case in the northern Atlantic, (everywhere else there being land or straits within that parallel of north latitude,) the existence of an open sea at the pole is not improbable, provided it be free from land.

From the very few experiments, which have been made to ascertain the temperature of the sea at a certain depth and in different latitudes, there is no reason to doubt that, where the depth is sufficient, the sea as well as the land has its isothermal lines, or points of the same temperature, in every degree of latitude from the equator to the pole. Many more experiments however are yet wanting to ascertain what this standard temperature may be, but it is probable that it will be found somewhere between 40° and 50° of Fahrenheit;-perhaps to correspond with the mean temperature of the interior parts of the earth. From the experiment of Dr. Irving, on water drawn from any considerable depth, it appears that the temperature at 683 fathoms was 40° of Fahrenheit in lat. 75°; and in lat. 80, at 60 fathoms only, under the ice, it stood at 39°, when in the air it was at the freezing point; but the few experiments made in Phipps's voyage on the temperature of the sea at different depths are wholly unsatisfactory.*

In

Captain Douglas found the temperature at the depth of two hundred and sixty fathoms to be 52°, while that at the surface was only 47°, in latitude 68° 43′, while Captain Ellis observed the same temperature at the depth of six hundred and fifty fathoms, in latitude 25o 13'. The pretended experiments of Peron, and the inference of some

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