APPEARANCES OF GLACIERS AND SNOW-FIELDS. 171 
explanation of phenomena, which abound in these northern 
lands as elsewhere. 
Other travellers bave supplied additional sketches 
which help to fill up the outline. 
William’s writing of his voyage to Hammerfest, in the 
far north, says:—‘At about four o’clock on the second 
morning of our return journey we passed some remarkable 
glaciers near to the Havnes station; one of them very 
nearly reached the sea. We were near enough to examine 
them pretty fully, and with the aid of telescopes or opera 
glasses to look down the blue crevasses which rib the lower 
parts. They exhibit the whole phenomena of glaciers at 
one glance; there is the snow-field or névé above, the 
source from which the true glacier is derived; the deep 
lateral valley narrowing downward, one of the essential 
conditions of glacier formation ; then the ice torrent, with 
its sharp billows and blue chasms, filling this valley, and 
carrying with it in its slow descent blocks of rock forming 
the moraine, which, when deposited at its boundaries, 
will remain to mark its place, though the climate of the 
whole region should change, and the ice and snow all melt 
away. 
That was in the far north. Writing of his visit to 
the Romsdal in the south, he says :—‘ Veblungsnaesset is 
the port of the Romsdal, which valley is the “lion” of all 
Norway; the Norwegians themselves travel long distances 
to see it. In the Christiania Illustrated News there are 
numerous wood-cuts of its finest scenic features, and every 
Englishman who comes to Norway is told that he must see 
it, and his expectations are raised to the highest. The 
descriptions given by him of the waterfalls are numerous, 
varied, grand, and picturesque, and seem to show that ‘ the 
Romsdal caa safely bear this terrible ordeal of much re- 
peated praise.’ But what concerns us at present is the 
following statement :—‘In nearly all the tracks and hol- 
lows of the dark precipitous rocks are patches of snow, 
some of them so low as almost to touch the corn fields; for 
