14 



The land on either side displayed to us mountains rising abruptly 

 from the sea, and bearing a glacier in their every ravine. Earlier in 

 the season, these glaciers would have been concealed by the snow, but 

 now they showed a surface of green ice." 



The district referred to by Simpson, I frequently visited during the 

 past season, and along Simpson's route there is now not a single glacier 

 reaching tide water. Many of the glaciers of which he speaks have 

 entirely disappeared, and others show their terminals 2,000 feet and 

 upwards from the sea. These are vast changes to occur in a lifetime. 

 There are, however, still four living or tide-water glaciers outside of the 

 great Muir glacier, which discharge ice and small bergs into the sea. 

 Glacier ice differs vastly from Arctic or sea ice. The colour of the 

 former on a face of fresh cleavage is transparent blue of transcendent 

 beauty, impossible to describe. It is very hard and not brittle, and in 

 the sea slowly wastes away. It is dangerous fur a vessel to run into 

 glacier ice. Sea water ice is, on the other hand, brittle, and readily 

 crumbles under compact, and is subject to very rapid decomposition. 

 To illustrate the latter, Prof. Elliott mentions that on the 27th of May, 

 1873, the ice fields still surrounded the island of St. Paul in an unbroken 

 mass, as they had done for the preceding five months. The following 

 morning nearly the whole mass had disappeared. As he says, " the 

 decomposition of the ice had taken place so secretly that its final 

 relegation to its original form was fairly accomplished almost instantly 

 and simultaneously, and without warning to human eye ; the alternate 

 layering of salt, in ocean water ice, accounts for this peculiar vanishing 

 of sea floes." 



That the discharge of glaciers must to some extent affect the 

 temperature of the neighbouring sea, is obvious. During the past season 

 I took a series of temperature readings of the sea as well as of the 

 atmosphere. The mean temperature of the sea along the coast was 

 found to be about 49 F., while the coldest part was found in Endicott 

 Arm, into which the Dawe's glacier discharges, there the water 

 registered $6 Q l\, a temperature of water in which a misfortune with a 

 boat or canoe would be equivalent to certain death. A marked 

 difference is found even at the same place. The difference is produced 



