A wonderfully eccentric history of 19th-century science, focusing on three personalities and their ideas about the role of ice in Earth's history: oddball Louis Aggasiz; the great geologist Charles Lyell; and romantic Arctic adventurer Dr. Elisha Kent Kane. Each contributed to the Victorian debate among scientists, explorers and the man on the street about the nature of the polar regions. Perhaps most interesting is Bolles' detailed account of the underappreciated American explorer Kane, whose small ship was caught in the ice on the Greenland coast for two winters. It was the poetic Kane who first sighted the awesome Humboldt Glacier, sixty miles long " rising in a solid glassy wall three hundred feet above the water level -- swallowing rocks and islands, and ploughing its way with irresistible march --" The glacier is still quite a sight.  (ARC78, $14.50)