Beport of the Besearches of M. Agassiz. 305 



M. Agassiz, it is true, had announced the fact, that all glaciers 

 are stratified, and had given a figure representing this arrange- 

 ment in his Atlas ; but he had not sufficiently insisted upon the 

 manner of its existence, and of the different circumstances 

 which usually accompany the stratification ; and it was not till 

 last year (1842) that it was studied with all the attention it 

 deserved. It is truly astonishing that so important a pheno- 

 menon had not been previously investigated. It was only in 

 the higher regions of the neve in which, with unanimous con- 

 sent, stratification was admitted. There, indeed, it is so dis- 

 tinct, that, when standing upon the margin of one of those 

 great hollows which are met with in all neves, you may dis- 

 tinctly count the number of the layers. On this point, I refer 

 the reader to what I have said elsewhere, when describing the 

 immense hollows we observed in the upper parts of the glacier 

 of Viesch, when ascending by the Col de I'Oberaar to the Jung- 

 frau.* As to the strata of glaciers properly so called, many 

 authors, and among others M. Charpentier, formally denied 

 their existence, maintaining that they could exist only in the 

 neve. The following question, however, as it appears to me, 

 might very readily occur to the minds of the observers who 

 were cognisant of the phenomena of stratification in the more 

 elevated regions, namely, what became of those annual strata, 

 so regular, and so well defined in their superposition ? It is 

 true, that when we compare this very distinct superposition 

 with the uniform appearance of the walls of the crevasses in 

 the less elevated regions, where the whole mass is of a pro- 

 verbial uniformity, we are very naturally led to suppose that 

 these strata must have been necessarily effaced by the suc- 

 cessive transformations which the ice has undergone ; and it 

 is probably owing to Professor Forbes having confined his at- 

 tention to these regions, that he fell into the strange error of 

 confounding the strata of the glaciers with the blue bands. 

 In his latter publications, he positively affirms, so far follow 

 ing M. de Charpentier, that the glaciers are destitute of stra- 

 tification, whilst he has actually witnessed the strata as we 

 have done, and has even given a sketch of them in one of his 



♦ See Bihl. Univ. November 1841 (vol. xxxvi.), p. 120, et suiv. 



