Notice of Prof. Forbes's Travels in the Alps. 187 



belt has no great vertical height, but extends for miles — yes, for miles 

 along the mountain side, composed of blocs of granite thirty to forty, 

 fifty and sixty feet in the side — not a few, but by hundreds, fantastically 

 balanced on the angles of one another, their gray weather-beaten tops 

 standing out in prominent relief from the verdant slopes of the secon- 

 dary formation on which they rest." 



" For three or four miles there is a path preserving very nearly the 

 same level, leading amidst the gnarled stems of ancient chestnut trees, 

 which struggle round and among the piles of blocs, which leave them 

 barely time to grow. The trees, opening here and there, display the 

 rich cultivated valley of the Rhone beneath, whilst the snow-clad Alps, 

 whose fragments are beneath our feet, close the farther distance. The 

 blocs are piled one on another, the greater on the smaller, leaving 

 deep recesses between, in which the flocks or their shepherds seek 

 shelter from the snow-storm, and seem not hurled by a natural catas- 

 trophe, but as if balanced in sport by giant hands. For how came 

 they thus to alight on the steep and there remain ? What force trans- 

 ported them, and when transported, thus lodged them high and dry, 

 five hundred feet at least above the level of the plain ? We reply a 

 glacier might do this. What other inanimate agent could do it we 

 know not." 



Our author clambered to the top of the precipices, fifteen hundred 

 feet above the valley of the Rhone, which form the mural angle be- 

 tween the Sallenche River and the Rhone. Now, these vertical preci- 

 pices on which repose erratic blocs, are " scored by horizontal stripes, 

 or grooves, or fluting, evidently the result of superficial wear. But 

 what could have worn it in this position ? What could have been moved 

 with a steady pressure, as a carpenter presses his cornice plane to the 

 wood, or as a potter moulds with a stick his clay, pressed laterally too 

 with a perpendicular face of fifteen hundred feet beneath ? Nothing 

 that I am acquainted with save a glacier, which, at this day, presses, 

 and moulds, and scores the rocky flanks of its bed, extending to a 

 depth often certainly of hundreds of feet beneath, A torrent however 

 impetuous, a river however gigantic, a flood however terrific, could 

 never do this." Among modern ruins of the moraines we may cite 

 that of 1820* at the Humeau des Bois, where the erratic rocks " lie 

 scattered almost at the doors of the houses, and have raised a formida- 

 ble bulwark at less than a pistol shot distance, where cultivation'and all 

 verdure suddenly cease, and a wilderness of stones of all shapes and 

 sizes commences, reaching as far as the present ice." 



The period of the greatest extension of this glacier. 



