Ice an Agent in transporting Boulders—How this comes about—Dr Kane’s Observations—Long Night in Winter and Long Day in Summer—Extreme Darkness—Influence on Dogs—Intense Cold—Effect on the Sea.  
There are many things in this world which, up to within a few years back, have been to men a source of surprise and mystery.
 
Some of these problems have been solved by recent travellers, and not a few of them are referable to polar oceans and ice.
 
In many parts of our coasts we find very striking and enormously large boulder-stones lying on the beach, perfectly isolated, and their edges rounded away like pebbles, as if they had been rolled on some antediluvian beach strewn with Titanic stones. These boulders are frequently found upon the loose sands of the sea-shore, far removed from any rocks or mountains from which they might be supposed to have been broken; and, more than that, totally different in their nature from the geological formations of the districts in which they are found. “Whence came these?” has been the question of the inquisitive of all ages, “and how came they there?”
 
There may, for aught we know to the contrary, be more than one answer to these questions; but there is at least one which is quite satisfactory as to how and whence at least some of them have come. Ice was the means of conveying these boulders to their present positions.
 
It has been said that once upon a time a large part of this country was under the dominion of ice, even as the polar regions and some of the mountains and valleys of Norway are at the present day; that the boulders we see in elevated places were conveyed thither by glacier action; and that when the glacial period passed away, they were left there on the hill-sides—sometimes almost on the mountain-tops. But this is not the question we are considering just now. We are now inquiring into the origin of those huge boulders that are found upon our coasts and on the coasts of other lands—boulders which could not have rolled down from the hills, for there are no hills at all near many of them; and those hills that are near some of them are of different geological formation.
 
This question will be answered at once, and one of the phenomena of arctic ice and oceanic agency will be exhibited, by reference to the recent discoveries of the celebrated arctic voyager, Dr Kane of the American Navy.
 
While wintering far beyond the head of Baffin’s 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.” This belt never melted completely, and was usually fast to the shore. In fact it was that portion of the sea-ice which was left behind each spring when the general body of ice was broken up and swept away. Referring to this, he writes:
 
“The spot at which we landed I have called Cape James Kent. It was a lofty headland, and the land-ice which hugged its base was covered with rocks from the cliffs above. As I looked over this ice-belt, losing itself in the far distance, and covered with its millions of tons of rubbish, greenstones, limestones, chlorite, slates, rounded and angular, massive and ground to powder, its importance as a geological agent, in the transportation of drift, struck me with great force.
 
“Its whole substance was studded with these varied contributions from the shore; and further to the south, upon the now frozen waters of Marshall Bay, I could recognise raft after raft from the last year’s ice-belt which had been caught by the winter, each one laden with its heavy freight of foreign material.
 
“The water torrents and thaws of summer unite with the tides in disengaging the ice-belt from the coast; but it is not uncommon for large bergs to drive against it and carry away the growths of many years. I have found masses that had been detached in this way, floating many miles out at sea—long, symmetrical tables, two hundred feet long by eighty broad, covered with large angular rocks and boulders, and seemingly impregnated throughout with detrited matter. These rafts in Marshall Bay were so numerous, that could they have melted as I saw them, the bottom of the sea would have presented a more curious study for the geologist than the boulder-covered lines of our middle latitudes. One boulder in particular had had its origin in a valley where rounded fragments of water-washed greenstone had been poured out by the torrents and frozen into the coast-ice of the belt. The attrition of subsequent matter had truncated the great egg-shaped rock, and worn its sides into a striated face, whose scratches still indicated the line of water-flow.”
 
So, then, when we next meet with a huge isolated boulder on any of our flat beaches, we may gaze at it with additional interest, when we reflect that, perchance, it was carried thither by the ocean, countless ages ago, from the arctic regions, on a gigantic raft of ice; after having been, at a still more remote period, torn from its cliffs by some mighty glacier and slowly rolled and rounded, for hundreds of years perhaps down the scarred slopes of its native valley.
 
The primary cause of the intense and prolonged cold of the arctic regions is the shortness of the time during which they are under the influence of the sun’s r............