34 LEAVES FROM THE BOOK OF NATURE. 



ago, a horse fell into one of these glaciers ; it sank, mark- 

 ing its outline distinctly, until it was seen no more. A 

 year afterwards the clean, white skeleton projected from 

 the top through the clear ice. In the middle of the six- 

 teenth century a succession of long winters, during which 

 immense masses of snow fell, increased the glaciers so 

 much, that they travelled faster and lower than usually, 

 and in their course overwhelmed a little chapel at the 

 foot of the Grindelwald. All was covered, mountains high, 

 with snow and ice, and so remained for years, buried in 

 ghastly silence. But lo! all of a sudden there appeared 

 a black ungainly mass, high up on the glittering field 

 it was the chapel bell ! Pious hands saved it, carried 

 it to a neighboring town, and there the long-buried bell 

 now rings merrily Sabbath after Sabbath. 



If stones travel thus by the aid of majestic glaciers 

 slowly downwards, they have to perform their journeys 

 from below upward in much less time. That fierce ele- 

 ment which many believe to be still raging under the 

 thin crust which we inhabit, breaks out every now and 

 then through the great safety-valves that nature has pro- 

 vided. Already, Strabo and Pausanias tell us how, nearly 

 three hundred years before Christ, the mountain Methone 

 arose on the Troicenian plain. Ovid, also, describes, in 

 beautiful verses, how a high hill, rigid and treeless, was 

 suddenly seen where once a fair plain had been spread 

 out. He traces it to vapors shut up in dark caverns 

 below, and seeking, in vain, an outlet through some cleft. 

 The soil began, at last, to heave, he says, and to swell 

 under the pressure of the pent-up heat, until it finally 



