SPITZBERGEN is the name given to a group of islands in the frozen sea, discovered by Sir Hugh

Willoughby in 1553, and afterwards by the Dutch navigator, Barentz, in 1596. They consist of three large and a number of small islands, and extend from lat. 76° 30′ to 80° 40' N. Little is known of their interior, but their coasts have been frequently explored, and present immense glaciers, and mountain chains, bristling with granite peaks, many of which exceed 4000 feet in height. The sun never sets for three months-June, July, and August; for the rest of the year it is hardly seen, light being chiefly produced by the aurora borealis.

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A modern traveller thus describes a visit to it :"It was at one o'clock on the morning of the 6th of August, 1856, that, after having been eleven days at sea, we came to an anchor in the silent haven of English Bay, Spitzbergen.

"And now, how shall I give you an idea of the wonderful panorama in the midst of which we found ourselves? I think perhaps its most striking feature was the stillness and deadness of this new world; ice and rock and water surrounded us; not a sound of any kind interrupted the silence; the sea did not break upon the shore; no birds or any living thing was visible; the midnight sun-by this time muffled in a transparent mist-shed an awful, mysterious lustre on glacier and mountain; no atom of vegetation gave token of the earth's vitality: a universal numbness and dumbness seemed to pervade the solitude. I suppose in scarcely any other part of the world is

this appearance of deadness so strikingly exhibited. On the stillest summer day in England there is always perceptible an undertone of life, and, in default of motion, there is always a sense of growth; but here not so much as a blade of grass was to be seen on the sides of the bald, excoriated hills.

"The anchorage where we had brought up is almost the only one where you are not liable to be beset by drift-ice during the course of a single night; and many a good ship has been inextricably imprisoned in the very harbour to which she had fled for refuge. This bay is completely landlocked by two ranges of schistose rocks, about 1500 feet high, their sides almost precipitous, and the topmost ridge as sharp as a knife and jagged as a saw. The intervening space is entirely filled up by an enormous glacier, which, descending with one continuous incline from the head of a valley on the right, rolls at last into the sea.

“These glaciers are the principal characteristic of the scenery in Spitzbergen: the bottom of every valley is completely filled by them, enabling one in some measure to realise the look of England during her glacial period, when Snowdon was still being lifted towards the clouds, and every valley in Wales was brimful of ice. But the glaciers in English Bay are by no means the largest in the island. We got a distant view of ice-rivers which must have been more extensive; and Dr. Scoresby

mentions several which actually measured forty or fifty miles in length, and nine or ten in breadth; while the precipice formed by their fall into the sea was sometimes upwards of 400 or 500 feet high. Nothing is more dangerous than to approach these cliffs of ice. Every now and then huge masses detach themselves from the face of the crystal steep, and topple over into the water; and woe be to the unfortunate ship which might happen to be passing below. Scoresby himself actually witnessed a mass of ice, the size of a cathedral, thunder down into the sea from a height of 400 feet. Frequently, during our stay in Spitzbergen, we ourselves observed specimens of these ice avalanches; and scarcely an hour passed without the solemn silence of the bay being disturbed by the thunderous boom resulting from similar catastrophes occurring in adjacent valleys.

"A little to the northward I observed, lying on the sea-shore, innumerable logs of drift-wood. This wood is floated all the way from America by the gulf-stream; and as I walked from one huge bole to another, I could not help wondering in what primeval forest each had grown, what chance had originally cast them upon the waters, and piloted them to this desert shore. Mingled with this fringe of unhewn timber that lined the beach, lay waifs and strays of a more sinister kind,— pieces of broken spars, an oar, a boat's flag-staff,

and a few scattered fragments of some long-lost vessel's planking. Here and there, too, we would come upon skulls of walrus, ribs and shoulderblades of bears, brought possibly by the ice in winter. A little further on, half-imbedded in black moss, there lay a gray deal coffin, falling almost to pieces with age; the lid was goneblown off, probably, by the wind--and within were stretched the bleaching bones of a human skeleton. A rude cross at the head of the grave still stood partially upright, and a half-obliterated Dutch inscription preserved a record of the dead man's name and age. It was evidently some poor whaler of the last century, to whom his companions had given the only burial-place on the frost-hardened earth, which even the summer sun has no force to penetrate beyond a couple of inches, and which will not afford to men the shallowest grave.

"Turning to the right, we scrambled up the spur of one of the mountains on the eastern side of the plain, and thence dived down among the lateral valleys that run up between them. Although by this means we opened up quite a new system of hills and basins and gullies, the general scenery did not change its characteristics. All vegetation-if the black moss deserves such a name-ceases when you ascend twenty feet above the level of the sea; and the sides of the mountains become nothing but steep slopes of schist, split and crumbled into an even surface by the frost.