fast in the harbour of St. John's, Newfoundland.
Here it remained for two years, before the heats
of the short summers were powerful enough to
dissolve it. This berg stood upwards of eight
hundred feet in height; and as floating ice
sinks two-thirds of its depth, this respectable
refrigerator must have been about two thousand
four hundred feet in total height, or about six
times as high as St. Paul's. Some suppose that
the unfortunate Atlantic steamer, the President—
the mysterious disappearance of which, a
quarter of a century ago, created so much painful
anxiety in England and America—must have
run against such a floating island as this, and
been sent to the bottom with all on board.
The iceberg and the floe—the latter being
flat or surface, as distinguished from the peak
and mountain ice—when detached from the
solid earth of the Polar regions, sometimes
carry along with them on their sudden
disruption large masses of granite; and sometimes
Polar bears, which, unsuspicious of danger from
the influence of the warm sun that penetrates
even these inhospitable regions, have gone to
sleep upon the ice, and awakened to find
themselves unwilling mariners, drifting away to certain
death in the warm waters of the southern seas.

Whatever is beautiful is useful in its degree,
and the uses of ice are as manifold as its
loveliness. Medical science—always beneficently
active to discover the means of alleviation as
well as of cure for the numberless physical evils
that assail humanity—very early became aware
of the value of ice as an anodyne, or soother of
pain, in cases of local inflammation. More
recently it has discovered that ice can be used
as an anæsthetic as advantageously as chloroform,
and in some respects more advantageously,
inasmuch as it can be employed locally, in
surgical operations of a severe character. There
is no danger in its application to people of
abnormally nervous temperament, or who suffer
from heart disease. In the extraction of teeth
—a very painful surgical operation, as most
people know who remember that man (and
woman also)

     Is born to trouble,
     Both from single teeth and double—

ice is an anaesthetic that completely deadens the
sensibility of pain, and renders tooth-drawing
almost as easy as the paring of the nails. As
an article of luxury for the table, ice is only
just beginning to be known to the English
people—to the " upper ten thousand," as it
were. It remains for the present, " caviare to
the million," except perhaps in the form of ices,
as retailed by the pastrycooks and confectioners.
To the fishmongers, as a conservator of their
wares in freshness to the latest possible moment,
ice has long been known, in the shape of the
thin slabs of dirty frozen water, in rare wintry
seasons collected from the stagnant pools in
the neighbourhood of our great towns and
cities. Such ice is good for nothing but
refrigeration; but the real Wenham, or Norway,
or St. Lawrence ice, is not only good for
refrigeration but for consumption, and every
purpose of utility and health to which ice can be
applied. In the cities of the New World ice
is almost as essential an article of diet as bread,
and the iceman comes round every morning as
regularly as the milkman does in London, and
leaves at the doorsteps of every house which he
supplies, a glittering block, sufficient for the
day's consumption, which the servant or " help"
takes in at her convenience, serving up a
portion with the breakfast butter, not because
it is ordered, but simply as a matter of course.
Iced water, iced milk, iced ale or beer, are as
common among all classes as iced champagne is
among the select few in England. To forgo
the customary cooler would in the summer, and
often in the winter—for ice is good in all seasons—
be as great a hardship as to go without dinner.

We are a meat-consuming people; but our
labourers and unskilled workmen taste little
meat except bacon. Every year butchers' meat
is becoming more costly, and further out of the
reach of the poor. Trade must bring from
South America the superabundant beef, and
from the Antipodes the superabundant mutton,
that in both of these wealthy and teeming
regions find no purchasers. Ice supplies the
means for effecting this much-desired result,
and there is reason for the hope as well as for the
belief that, ere many years have passed,
enterprising merchants will be encouraged to convey
to our shores fleet loads of the beef and mutton,
packed in ice, or chemically frozen, that our
population would so gladly purchase at half or
a third of the pvice of British cattle, but that
for want of such a trade is boiled down into
tallow in Australia, or suffered to rot in Brazil,
until it is fit for nothing but manure. If, as has
been said, the man who makes a blade of grass
to grow where grass never grew before, is a
public benefactor, who shall measure the
benefaction of him who shall first successfully
organise a plan for bringing the beef and mutton of the
world to the mouths of the English multitude?

There is one other aspect of ice which we in
these islands may be excused, if we look upon
with pride: the love of adventure which the
mysteries of the Northern Pole have maintained
in the minds of our hardy and daring mariners.
"The storm, the fog, the sleet, the pitiless
cold," have no terrors for them, as dozens of
expeditions to discover the North-west Passage,
and as the names of Ross, Parry, Franklin,
M'Clintock abundantly testify.

THE SELE-DECORATIVE ARTS.

THERE is no baseness to which some men
will not descend, in order to become " noble."
Humanity has no more crawling specimen than
the creature who has centred his ambition on
an ornament for his button-hole. A cross and
an end of riband is the object of a lifetime of
ante-chamber waiting, of toadying to influential
friends, of abject meanness. Governing men,
and governing classes, seeing the avidity
with which poor humanity will swallow the