1883.] NATURAL SCIENCES OF PHILADELPHIA. 189 



In connection with tlie subject of tlie comparative recentness 

 of great geological changes as indicated by botanical evidence, 

 Mr. Meehan referred to an exposure of the remains of a large 

 forest near the Muir glacier, one of five huge ones which form the 

 head of Glacier Bay, between lat, 59"^ and 60°. This glacier is 

 at least two miles wide at the mouth, and has an average depth of 

 ice at this spot of perhaps five hundred feet. At the present time 

 there is not a vestige of arboreal vegetation to be seen an3'where, 

 except some willows on the hillsides, some miles from huge hills 

 of drift piled up everywhere around. The river which flows under 

 the glacier, and which has a volume equal to the Schujdkill at 

 Philadelphia, does not flow into the bay from under the ice at the 

 face, but rushes out in a mighty torrent on the northwest side, a 

 few miles above the mouth, and has cut its way through mountains 

 of drift, the gorge being many hundred feet in width, and the 

 sides from two hundred to five hundred feet high. The torrent 

 through the bed is now comparatively level, canying with it an 

 immense quantit}' of heavy stones, some of which must have 

 comprised masses of six or eight cubic feet. Along the sides of 

 this gorge were the exposed trunks, all standing perfectly erect, 

 and cut oflT at about the same level. Some were but a few feet 

 high, and others as much as fifteen — the difference arising from 

 the slope of the ground on which the trees grew. These trunks 

 were of mature trees in the main, and were evidently of Abies 

 Sitfcensis, with a few of either Thuja gigantea or Jiiniperus, 

 perhaps Occidentalism the uncertaint}^ arising from the imperfec- 

 tion of the bark — what there was of this indicating the former, 

 while an eccentricity of outline of the wood, not uncommon in 

 Juniperus, favoring the latter view. These trees must have been 

 filled in tightly by drift to the height of fifteen feet before being 

 cut off, or the trunks now standing would have been split down 

 on the side opposite to that which received the blow, and the 

 grinding off could not have been many years after, or the dead 

 trees would have lost their bark, as the}^ always do when under 

 varying conditions of heat and moisture. The facts seemed to 

 him to injdicate that the many feet of drift which had buried part 

 of the trees in the first instance was the work of a single season, 

 and that the subsequent total destruction of every vestige of these 

 great forests was the work of another one soon following. As 

 in the, case of the facts noted in Hood's Bay, Mr. Meehan believed 

 that the conclusion was justified that the total destruction of the 

 forests here, the covering of their site by hundreds of feet of 

 drift, and the subsequent exposal to view of their remains, were 

 all the work of but a very few hundred years. 



Mr. Charles Peabody was elected a member. 



