THE VOYAGE OF THE HASSLER 137 



land upon, Mrs. Johnson and I did not have our walk 

 on shore. The two parties started with dayhght and 

 at about four o'clock in the afternoon Agassiz and his 

 companions returned. He was on the top w^ave of life, 

 so happy w^th the results of his day. You know geo- 

 logically he is seeking for glacial phenomena, and on 

 their way to a hill between the shore and Mt. Aymond 

 to which Pourtales and his party had gone, Agassiz 

 had come upon a terminal moraine having all the char- 

 acteristic features, built of glacier-worn boulders, 

 pebbles and stones of all sorts and sizes packed into 

 a paste of earth. It had been pushed up evidently 

 by a mass of ice advancing from the southward, the 

 southern slope being steep as is always the case with 

 the side of the moraine turned towards the glacier, 

 while the northern slope was more gradual. He also 

 found a salt pond some tw^o hundred feet above the 

 level of the sea with moraine shells living in it. This 

 will please Darwin if he does not already know it, be- 

 cause it illustrates a statement he made many years 

 ago that the geology of this coast was connected with 

 upheaval. The whole party came back in a state of 

 great elation, looking like a company of Nimrods, 

 loaded with game, ducks, snipe, cormorants, a fox 

 and a skunk, the smell of which made me quite home- 

 sick, it recalled so vividly certain summer evenings 

 at Nahant. It may be interesting to you as a scientific 

 fact to know that skunks smell in Patagonia exactly 

 as they do in New England. In order that the birds 

 might be prepared we deferred dinner till six o'clock 

 and had it made ready in great style with a centre 



