102 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



grander reign than that they now engross. Immense bowlders of basalt, 

 sixty-seven miles distant from the nearest mountain, pebbles of porphyry, 

 fragments of granite and slate, border the Santa Cruz River, impede its 

 course, and lie broadcast upon the plain which rises 1,100 feet above its 

 bed. From the encircling shores of Beagle Channel, glaciers born upon 

 the lofty slopes and granitic peaks 4,000 and 5,000 feet above the sea, 

 push their frozen lengths into the sea, which is shaken into waves as 

 successive ruptures into the ice launch mimic icebergs upon its surface. 

 "Almost every arm of the sea," writes Darwin, "which penetrates to 

 the interior higher chain, not only in Terra del Fuego but on the coast 

 for 650 miles northward, is terminated by tremendous and astonishing- 

 glaciers." Old channels, now dry by the elevation of the land, are 

 diversified with groujDS of traveled blocks, and the bowlders, so well 

 known, from the distant Andes, lying upon the island of Chiloe, are fur- 

 ther indications of an action in the past identical with that exerted at 

 present. 



In conclusion, without rehearsing the evidence drawn from the Pyr- 

 enees or the Caucasus, where glaciers still exist, we see in the northern 

 and southern hemispheres the imposing remains of primitive areas of 

 ice which in a more congenial era projected their confluent and inter- 

 mingling- branches over vast regions of the earth, where, as they have 

 retreated, they have left irrefragable evidence of their power. We 

 have observed the same processes at work, the same results produced, 

 the same methods utilized, in the world about us, and the clearest anal- 

 ogy compels us to accept a theory which ascribes the morainic debris 

 piled up in hills and islands, the engraved rocks, the excavated basins, 

 and the rounded slopes, to an identical though vastly-magnified cause 

 in times only within the ken of Geology in its retrospective glance of 

 ages. 



»»» 



SINGING MICE. 



By IIENEY lee. 



A FEW days ago I was in\'ited by a medical friend to visit him at 

 his house, and hear two musical mice sing a duet, the perform- 

 ance to begin punctually at 8 P. m. I had never heard a singing 

 mouse, though I had read and been told a good deal of the vocal 

 accomplishments the little animal occasionally displays ; so I gladly 

 availed myself of the opportunity, and duly arrived half an hour before 

 the commencement of the concert. My friend explained to me that 

 every evening two little mice came out from behind the skirting-board 

 in his dining-room, and sang for their supper of cheese, biscuit, and 

 other muscine delicacies, which he took care to place on the carpet for 

 them always at the same hour. One of them had received the name of 

 " Nicodemus " — an allusion, I suppose, to a certain furtive visit by 



