I.
, or calva
A Norwegian name, also used in the Hebrides, for islets lying off islands, and bearing a similar relation to them in size that a calf does to a cow. As the Calf at Mull and the Calf of Man.
II.
A word generally applied to the young of marine mammalia, as the whale.
♦ Calf, in the Arctic regions, a mass of floe ice breaking from under a floe, which when disengaged rises with violence to the surface of the water; it differs from a tongue, which is the same body kept fixed beneath the main floe. The iceberg is formed by the repeated freezing of thawed snow running down over the slopes, until at length the wave from beneath and weight above causes it to break off and fall into the sea, or, as termed in Greenland, to calve. Thus, berg, is fresh-water ice, the work of years. The floe, is salt water frozen suddenly each winter, and dissolving in the summer.