ICE-HOUSE, a repository for ice during the summer months. The aspect of ice-houses should be towards the east or south-east, for the advantage of the morning sun to expel the damp air, as that is more pernicious than warmth: for which reason trees in the vicinity of an ice-house tend to its disadvantage.

The best foil for an ice-house to be made in is chalk, as it conveys away the waste water without any artificial drain; next to that, loose stony earth or gravelly soil. Its situation should be on the side of a hill, for the advantage of entering the cell upon a level, as in the drawing, Plate CCLXXVIII.

To construct an ice-house, first choose a proper place at a convenient distance from the dwelling-house, or houses it is to serve: dig a cavity (if for one family, of the dimensions specified in the design) of the figure of an inverted cone, sinking the bottom concave, to form a reservoir for the waste water till it can drain off; if the foil requires it, cut a drain to a considerable distance, or so far as will come out at the side of the hill, or into a well, to make it communicate with the springs, and in that drain form a flink or air-trap, marked A, by sinking the drain so much lower in that place as it is high, and bring a partition from the top an inch or more into the water, which will consequently be in the trap; and will keep the well air-tight. Work up a sufficient number of brick piers to receive a cart-wheel, to be laid with its convex side upwards to receive the ice; lay hurdles and straw upon the wheel, which will let the melted ice drain through, and serve as a floor. The sides and dome of the cone are to be nine inches thick—the sides to be done in steened brickwork, i.e., without mortar, and wrought at right angles to the face of the work: the filling in behind should be with gravel, loose stones, or brick-bats, that the water which drains through the sides may the more easily escape into the well. The doors of the ice-house should be made as close as possible, and bundles of straw placed always before the inner door to keep out the air.

Description of the parts referred to by the letters.— a The line first dug out. b The brick circumference of the cell. c The diminution of the cell downwards. d The lesser diameter of the cell. e The cart wheel or joists and hurdles. f The piers to receive the wheel or floor. g The principal receptacle for straw. h The inner passage, i the first entrance, k the outer door, passages having a separate door each. l An air trap. m The well. n The profile of the piers. o The ice filled in. p The height of the cone. q The dome worked in two half brick arches. r The arched passage. s The door-ways inserted in the walls. t The floor of the passage. u An aperture through which the ice may be put into the cell; this must be covered next the crown of the dome, and then filled in with earth. x The sloping door, against which the straw should be laid.

The ice when to be put in should be collected during the frosts, broken into small pieces, and rammed down hard in strata of not more than a foot, in order to make it one complete body; the care in putting it in, and well ramming it, tends much to its preservation. In a season when ice is not to be had in sufficient quantities, snow may be substituted.

Ice may be preserved in a dry place under ground, by covering it well with chaff, straw, or reeds.

Great use is made of chaff in some places of Italy to preserve ice: the ice-house for this purpose need only be a deep hole dug in the ground on the side of a hill, from the bottom of which they can easily carry out a drain, to let out the water which is separated at any time from the ice, that it may not melt and spoil the raft. If the ground is tolerably dry, they do not line the sides with anything, but leave them naked, and only make a covering of thatch over the top of the hole: this pit they fill either with pure snow, or else with ice taken from the purest and clearest water; because they do not use it as we do in England, to set the bottles in, but really mix it with the wine. They first cover the bottom of the hole with chaff, and then lay in the ice, not letting it anywhere touch the sides, but ramming in a large bed of chaff all the way between: they thus carry on the filling to the top, and then cover the surface with chaff; and in this manner it will keep as long as they please. When they take any of it out for use, they wrap the lump up in chaff, and it may then be carried to any distant place without waste or melting.

It appears from the investigation of Professor Beckman, in his History of Inventions, that the ancients from the earliest ages were acquainted with the method of preserving snow for the purpose of cooling liquors in summer. "This practice," he observes, "is mentioned by Solomon *; and proofs of it are so numerous in *Proverbs* the works of the Greeks and the Romans, that it is unnecessary for me to quote them, especially as they have been collected by others. How the repositories for keeping it were constructed, we are not expressly told; but it is probable that the snow was preserved in pits or trenches.

"When Alexander the Great besieged the city of Petra, he caused 30 trenches to be dug, and filled with snow, which was covered with oak branches; and which kept in that manner for a long time. Plutarch says, that a covering of chaff and coarse cloth is sufficient; and at present a like method is pursued in Portugal. Where the snow has been collected in a deep gulf, some grass or green sods, covered with dung from the sheep. ICE

Thee pens, is thrown over it; and under these it is so well preserved, that the whole summer through it is sent the distance of 60 Spanish (nearly 180 English) miles to Lisbon.

"When the ancients, therefore, wished to have cooling liquors, they either drank the melted snow, or put some of it in their wine; or they placed jars filled with wine in the snow, and suffered it to cool there as long as they thought proper. That ice was also preserved for the like purpose, is probable from the testimony of various authors; but it appears not to have been used so much in warm countries as in the northern. Even at present snow is employed in Italy, Spain, and Portugal; but in Persia ice. I have never any where found an account of Grecian or Roman ice-houses. By the writers on agriculture they are not mentioned."

ICE-Island, a name given by sailors to a great quantity of ice collected into one huge solid mass, and floating about upon the seas near or within the Polar circles. — Many of these fluctuating islands are met with on the coasts of Spitzbergen, to the great danger of the shipping employed in the Greenland fishery. In the midst of these tremendous masses navigators have been arrested and frozen to death. In this manner the brave Sir Hugh Willoughby perished with all his crew in 1553; and in the year 1773, Lord Mulgrave, after every effort which the most finished seaman could make to accomplish the end of his voyage, was caught in the ice, and was near experiencing the same unhappy fate. See the account at large in Phipps's Voyage to the North Pole. As there described, the scene, divested of the horror from the eventful expectation of change, was the most beautiful and picturesque:—Two large ships becalmed in a vast basin, surrounded on all sides by islands of various forms: the weather clear: the sun gilding the circumambient ice, which was low, smooth, and even; covered with snow, excepting where the pools of water on part of the surface appeared crystalline with the young ice: the small space of sea they were confined in perfectly smooth. After fruitless attempts to force a way through the fields of ice, their limits were perpetually contracted by its closing; till at length it befell each vessel till they became immovably fixed. The smooth extent of surface was soon lost; the pressure of the pieces of ice, by the violence of the swell, caused them to pack: fragment rose upon fragment till they were in many places higher than the main-yard. The movements of the ships were tremendous and involuntary, in conjunction with the surrounding ice, actuated by the currents. The water shoaled to 14 fathoms. The grounding of the ice or of the ships would have been equally fatal: The force of the ice might have crushed them to atoms, or have lifted them out of the water and overflown them, or have left them suspended on the summits of the pieces of ice at a tremendous height, exposed to the fury of the winds, or to the risk of being dashed to pieces by the failure of their frozen deck. An attempt was made to cut a passage through the ice; after a perseverance worthy of Britons, it proved fruitless. The commander, at all times matter of himself, directed the boats to be made ready to be hauled over the ice, till they arrived at navigable water (a task alone of seven days), and in them to make their voyage to England. The boats were drawn progressively three whole days. At length a wind sprung up, the ice separated sufficiently to yield to the pressure of the full-sailed ships, which, after labouring against the resisting fields of ice, arrived on the 10th of August in the harbour of Smeerenburg, at the west end of Spitzbergen, between it and Hackluyt's Headland.

The forms assumed by the ice in this chilling climate are extremely pleasing to even the most incurious eye. The surface of that which is congealed from the sea water (for we must allow it two origins) is flat and even, hard, opaque, resembling white sugar, and incapable of being trodden on, like the British ice. The greater pieces, or fields, are many leagues in length: the lesser are the meadows of the seas, on which these animals at times frolic by hundreds. The motion of the lesser pieces is as rapid as the currents: the greater, which are sometimes 200 leagues long, and 60 or 80 broad, move slow and majestically; often fix for a time, immoveable by the power of the ocean, and then produce near the horizon that bright white appearance called the blink. The approximation of two great fields produces a most singular phenomenon: it forces the lesser (if the term can be applied to pieces of several acres square) out of the water, and adds them to their surface; a second and often a third succeeds; so that the whole forms an aggregate of a tremendous height. These float in the sea like so many rugged mountains, and are sometimes 500 or 600 yards thick; but the far greater part is concealed beneath the water. There are continually increased in height by the freezing of the spray of the sea, or of the melting of the snow, which falls on them. Those which remain in this frozen climate receive continual growth; others are gradually wafted by the northern winds into southern latitudes, and melt by degrees, by the heat of the sun, till they waste away, or disappear in the boundless element.

The collision of the great fields of ice, in high latitudes, is often attended with a noise that for a time takes away the sense of hearing any thing else; and the lesser with a grinding of unspeakable horror. The water which dashes against the mountainous ice freezes into an infinite variety of forms; and gives the voyager ideal towns, streets, churches, steeples, and every shape which imagination can frame.

ICE-Plant. See MESEMBRYANTHEMUM, BOTANY Index.