306 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



Strange Illustration of the Movements of Glaciers. Some of our 

 readers have doubtless heard of the tragic end of Auguste Tairaz, 

 Pierre Balmat, and Pierre Carrier, the three Chamounix guides who 

 were swept from the Grand Plateau by an avalanche on Aug. 20, 

 1820, while making, or attempting, the ascent of Mont Blanc with 

 Dr. Hammel and some Genevese gentlemen. No traces whatever 

 of these poor fellows had been discovered from the moment of their 

 destruction until within the past summer, when one of the bodies, im- 

 bedded in the ice, has been found on the lower part of the Glacier 

 des Bossons" entering the valley. Professor Forbes has repeatedly 

 told the Chamounix guides that they might look out for traces of 

 their deceased comrades in the Lower Bossons in about forty to forty- 

 five years after the catastrophe. He told Auguste Balmat in 1858 

 to keep a lookout, as traces of the bodies might then be expected 

 to present themselves from the glacier movement. 



Glaciers of Spitzbergen. Mr. Larnont, an English tourist, who 

 has recently made a yacht voyage to Spitzbergen, thus describes a 

 glacier seen by him upon the coast of that island : "It is," he says, 

 " the largest perhaps in the world. It has a seaward face of thirty to 

 thirty-two English miles, and protrudes in three great sweeping arcs 

 for at least five miles beyond the coast line. It has a precipitous and 

 inaccessible cliff of ice all along its face, varying from twenty to one 

 hundred feet in height ; pieces from the size of a church downward 

 are constantly becoming detached from this icy precipice, and tumble 

 into the sea with a terrific.' roar and splash, and of course render it 

 highly dangerous to go near the base in a boat. The surrounding 

 sea is always filled with these fragments of all sizes and shapes, and 

 many of them I have observed carrying large quantities of clay and 

 stones imbedded in them. 



" This great glacier is in three divisions. The northern and south- 

 ern divisions are each quite smooth and glassy, but the piece in the 

 centre is broken up and rough, and jagged to a degree that is per- 

 fectly indescribable ; at a little distance it exactly resembles a great 

 forest of pine trees thickly covered with snow. 



" This part of the glacier must have undergone some great disturb- 

 ance, arising either from its sliding over a rocky bed, or from its 

 being forced through a narrow ravine in the underlying hills. What- 

 ever the disturbing cause may be, it is actively at work still, because 

 we frequently saw enormous slices of the smooth division split up and 

 cave in toward the disrupted part ; and there is a constant succession 

 of tremendous booming reports, exactly resembling loud and pro- 

 longed thunder, proceeding from these cracks, and from the whole of 

 the rough part of the glacier in general." 



Elevations and Depressions of the Earth in North America. Dr. 

 Gessner, in a recent paper before the London Geological Society, after 

 some observations on the differences between volcanic uplifts of the 

 land and the slow upward and downward shiftings produced by 

 changes in the position of great parallel areas during long periods 

 of time, proceeded to enumerate evidences of local elevation and 

 subsidence that he has observed along the coast from the northern 

 part of Labrador to New Jersey. 



In the south-eastern part of New Jersey, at Nantucket, Martha's 



