THE " GREAT ICE AGE/' 163 



size with very little sand or clay or other fine deposit between 

 them, and a distant deposit of totally different character, con- 

 sisting of gravel, sand, clay, or mud, according to the length 

 and conditions of its journey. The " chips," as they have 

 been well called, are thus separated from what I may designate 

 the filings or sawdust of the glacier. 



The filings from the existing glaciers of the Bernese Alps are 

 gradually filling up the lake-basins of Geneva and Constance, 

 repairing the breaches made by the erosive action of their 

 gigantic predecessors ; ' those of the southern slope of the Alps 

 are doing a large share in filling up the Adriatic ; while the 

 chips of all merely rest upon the glacier beds forming the com- 

 paratively insignificant terminal moraine deposits. 



The same in Scandinavia. The Storelv of the Jostedal is 

 fed by the melting of the Krondal, Nygaard, Bjornestegs, and 

 Soldal glaciers. It has filled up a branch of the deep Sogne 

 fiord, forming an extensive fertile plain at the mouth of its 

 wild valley, and is depositing another subaqueous plain beyond, 

 while the moraines of the glaciers are but inconsiderable and 

 comparatively insignificant heaps of loose boulders, spread out 

 on the present and former shores of the above-named glaciers, 

 which are overflows from one side of the great neve, the Joste- 

 dal Sneefond. All of these glaciers flow down small lateral 

 valleys, spread out, and disappear in the main valley, which 

 has now no glacier of its own, though it was formerly glaciated 

 throughout. 



What must have been the condition of this and the other 

 great Scandinavian valleys when such was the case ? To 

 answer this question rationally we must consider the meteoro- 

 logical conditions of that period. Either the climate must 

 hav^e been much colder, or the amount of precipitation vastly 

 greater than at present, in order to produce the general glacia- 

 tion that rounded the mountains up to a height of some thou- 

 sands of feet above the present sea-level. Probably both 

 factors co-operated to effect this vast glaciation, the climate 

 colder, and the snowfall also greater. The whole of Scandi- 

 navia, or as much as then stood above the sea, must have been 

 a neve or sneefond on which the annual snowfall exceeded the 

 annual thaw. 



This is the case at present on the largest neve of Europe, the 

 500 square miles of the great plateau of the Jostedals and 

 Nordfjords Sneefond ; on all the overflowing neve or snow- 

 fields of the Alps above the snow-line ; over the greater part of 



