OEPTEMBER I, I9O4] 



NATURE 



431 



I hey explain the comparative indifference shown by De 

 Saussure to the problems connected with glacial niovement 

 and action. His attention was absorbed in the larger ques- 

 tion of earth-structure, of geology, to which the sections 

 exposed by mountains offered, he thought, a key ; he was 

 bitten by the contemporary desire for " A Theory of the 

 liartb," by the taste of the time for generalisations for 

 which the facts were not always ready. At the same time, 

 his own intellect was perhaps somewhat deficient in the 

 intuitive faculty ; the grasp of the possible or probable bear- 

 ing of known facts by which the greatest discoverers suggest 

 theories first and prove them afterwards. 



The school of De Saussure at Geneva died out after having 

 produced Bourrit, the tourist who gloried in being called 

 the Historian of the Alps, a man of pleasant self-conceit 

 and warm enthusiasm, and De Luc, a mechanical inventor, 

 who ended his life as reader to Queen Charlotte at Windsor, 

 where he flits across Miss Barney's pages as the friend 

 of Herschel at Slough and the jest of tipsy Royal Dukes. 

 Oddly enough, the first sound guess as to glacier movement 

 was made bv one Bordier, who had no scientific pretensions. 

 I reprinted many years ago the singular passage in which 

 he compared glacier ice to " cire amollie," soft wax, 

 " flexible et ductile jusqu'i un certain point," and described 

 it as flowing in the manner of liquids (A\^. ]., i.x. 327). He 

 added . this remarkable suggestion foreshadowing the in- 

 vestigations of Prof. Richter and M. Forel : " It is very 

 desirable that there should be at Chamonix someone capable 

 of observing the glaciers for a series of years and comparing 

 their advance and oscillations with meteorological records." 

 To the school of Geneva succeeded the school of Neuchatel, 

 Dpsor and Agassiz ; the feat of De .Saussure was rivalled 

 on the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn by the Meyers of 

 Bern. They in turn were succeeded by the British school, 

 Forbes and Tyndall, Reilly and Wills, in 1840-60. 



In 1S57 the Alpine Club was founded in this country. In 

 the half-century since that date the nations of Western 

 Furope have emulated one another in forming similar bodies, 

 one of the objects of which has been to collect and set in 

 order information as to the mountains and to further their 

 scientific as well as their geographical exploration. 



What boulders, or rather pebbles, can we add to the 

 enormous moraine of modern Alpine literature — a moraine 

 the lighter portions of which it is to be hoped for the sake 

 of posterity that the torrent of Time may speedily make 

 away with? 



For fifty years I have loved and at frequent intervals 

 wandered and climbed in the Alps. I have had something 

 of a grand passion for the Caucasus. I am on terms of 

 visiting acquaintance with the Pyrenees and the Himalaya, 

 the Apennines and the Algerian Atlas, the mountains of 

 Greece, Syria, Corsica, and Norway. I will try to set in 

 order some observations and comparisons suggested by these 

 various experiences. 



.\s one travels east from the Atlantic through the four 

 great ranges of the Old W'orld the peaks grow out not only 

 in absolute height but also in abruptness of form, and in 

 elevation above the connecting ridges. The snow and ice 

 region increases in a corresponding manner. The Pyrenees 

 have few fine rockpeaks except the Pic du Midi d'Ossau ; 

 its chief glacier summits, the Vignemale, Mont Perdu, the 

 Maladetta, correspond to the Titlis or the Buet in the Alps. 

 The peaks of the Alps are infinite in their variety and 

 admirable in their clear-cut outlines and graceful curves. 

 But the central group of the Caucasus, that which culminates 

 in Dykhtau, Koshtantau, and Shkara, 17,000 feet summits 

 (Koshtantau falls only 120 feet below this figure) has even 

 more stately peaks than those that cluster round Zermatt. 



Seek the far eastern end of the Himalaya, visit Sikkim, 

 and you will find the scale increased ; Siniolchum, Jannu, 

 and kangchenjunga are all portentous giants. To put it 

 at a low average figure, the cliffs of their final peaks are 

 half as high again as those of Monte Rosa and the Matter- 

 horn. 



In all these chains you will find the same feature of water- 

 sheds or partings lying not in but behind the geological 

 axis, which is often the line of greatest peak elevation. 

 This is the case in the .\lps at the St. Gothard, in the 

 Caucasus for some forty miles west of the Dariel Pass, in 

 the Himalaya, in Sikkim and Nepal, where the waters 

 flowing from the Tibetan plateau slowly eat their way back 



NO. 18 1 8, VOL. 70] 



behind Kangchenjunga and the Nepalese snows. Ihe 

 passes at their sources are found consequently to be of the 

 mildest character, hills " like Wiltshire Downs " is the de- 

 scription given by a military explorer. It needs no great 

 stretch of geological imagination to believe in the cutting' 

 back of the southern streams of Sikkim or the .\lps, as for 

 instance at the Maloya, but I confess that I cannot see 

 how the gorges of Ossetia, clefts cut through the central 

 axis of the Caucasus, can be ascribed mainly to the action 

 of water. 



I turn to the snow and ice region. Far more snow is 

 deposited on the heights of the Central Caucasus and the 

 Eastern Himalaya than on the Alps. It remains plastered 

 on their precipices, forming hanging glaciers everywhere of 

 the kind found on the northern, the Wengern Alp, face of 

 the Jungfrau. Such a peak as the Weisshorn looks poor 

 and bare compared with Tetnuld in the Caucasus or Siniol- 

 chum in the Himalaya. The plastered sheets of snow 

 between their great bosses of ice are perpetually melting, 

 their surfaces are grooved, so as to suggest fiuted armour, 

 by tiny avalanches and runnels. 



In the Aletsch glacier the Alps have a champion with 

 which the Caucasus cannot compete ; but apart from this 

 single exception the Caucasian glaciers are superior to the 

 Alpine in extent and picturesqueness. Their surfaces pre- 

 sent the features familiar to us in the Alps — icefalls, moulins, 

 and earthcones. 



In Sikkim, on the contrary, the glaciers exhibit many 

 novel features due no doubt mainly to the great sun-heat. 

 In the lower portion their surface is apt to be covered with 

 the debris that has fallen from the impending cliffs, so that 

 little or no ice is visible from any distance. In the region 

 below the n6v^ there are very few crevasses, the ice heaves 

 itself along in huge and rude undulations, high gritty 

 mounds, separated by hollows often occupied by yellow pools 

 which are connected by streams running in little icy ravines ; 

 a region exceptionally tiresome, but in no way dangerous 

 to the explorer. In steep places the .Alpine icefall is re- 

 placed by a feature I may best compare with a series of 

 earth-pillars such as are found near Evolena and elsewhere, 

 and are figured in most text-books. The ice is shaped into 

 a multitude of thin ridges and spires, resembling somewhat 

 the Nieves Penitentes of the Andes — though formed in a 

 different material. 



Great sun-heat acting on surfaces unequally protected, 

 combined in the latter case with the strain of sudden descent, 

 is no doubt the cause of both phenomena. Generally the 

 peculiarities of the great glaciers of Kangchenjunga may 

 be attributed to a vertical sun, which renders the frozen 

 material less liable to crack, less rigid, and more plastic. 



A glacier, as a rule, involves a moraine. Now moraines 

 are largely formed from the material contributed by sub- 

 aerial denudation, in plain words by the action of heat 

 and cold and moisture on the cliffs that border them. It is 

 what falls on a glacier, not that which it falls over, that 

 mainly makes a moraine. The proof is that the moraines 

 of a glacier which flows under no impending cliffs are puny 

 compared with those of one that lies beneath great rock- 

 walls. 



Take, for example, the Norwegian glaciers of the Jostedals 

 Brae and compare them with the Swiss. The former, fall- 

 ing from a great niv6 plain or snowfield, from which hardly 

 a crag protrudes, are models of cleanliness. I may cite as 

 examples the three fascinating glaciers of the Olden Valley. 

 The Rosenlaui Glacier in Switzerland owed the cleanliness 

 which gave it a reputation fifty years ago, before its re- 

 tirement from tourists' tracks, to a similar cause— a vast 

 snow-plateau, the Wetterkessel. 



One peculiarity very noticeable both in the Himalaya and 

 the Caucasus I have never found satisfactorily accounted 

 for. I refer to the long grassy trenches lying between the 

 lateral moraine and the hillside, which often seem to the 

 mountain explorer to have been made by Providence to form 

 grass paths for his benefit. They may possibly be due to 

 the action of torrents falling from the hillside, which, meet- 

 ing the moraine and constantly sweeping along its base, 

 undermine it and keep a passage open for themselves. 

 There are remarkable specimens of this formation on both 

 sides of the Bezingi Glacier, in the Caucasus, and on the 

 north side of the Zemu Glacier, in Sikkim. 



Water is one of the greatest features in mountain scenery. 



