Occasional Papers on the Theory of Glaciers: Now First Collected and Chronologically Arranged; With a Prefatory Note on the Recent Progress and Present Aspect of the Theory

Excerpt from Occasional Papers on the Theory of Glaciers: Now First Collected and Chronologically Arranged; With a Prefatory Note on the Recent Progress and Present Aspect of the Theory

In 1850 Mr. Faraday delivered a lecture at the Royal Institution on certain properties of water, and more especially of water in the act of freezing. This lecture was never (I believe) published by authority. But an abstract of it appeared in the Athenæum Journal for June 15, 1850, and also in the Literary Gazette. In this brief and imperfect summary of what must evidently have been an interesting and suggestive discourse, it is stated, that if a film of water be enclosed between two plates of ice. even at a thawing temperature, the film of water is frozen, and the plates of ice cohere; and also that damp snow becomes, by the same process, compacted into a snow-ball, which will not occur if the snow is dry and hard frozen.

These facts appear to have excited little notice, until attention was called to them by Dr. Tyndall in a lecture, also delivered at the Royal Institution, on the 23d January 1857. He gave to the phenomenon the name of regelation.

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