VAST SIZE OF ANCIENT GLACIERS 37 



The two great glaciers — that of the Rhone valley 

 and that of the Rhine valley — have been carefully traced, 

 and their length and breadth and depth ascertained. 

 The glaciers which now seem to us so enormous and 

 powerful, as they push their snouts into the end of 

 the Rhone valley and the side valleys of the canton 

 of the Valais — the great trough which runs for a hundred 

 and twenty miles from near the Furca Pass to the Lake 

 of Geneva — are but the surviving roots of the immense 

 Rhone glacier which filled the whole of the valley and the 

 Lake of Geneva itself, and flowed on as far as, and even 

 beyond, Lyons ! The Rhone glacier, the great Aletsch, 

 the Gorner, and very many others extended along their 

 present course, met, and formed one huge advancing 

 stream of ice ! The great glacier of the Rhine extended 

 from the Swiss Alps northwards as far as Coblenz, on 

 the Rhine ; others at the same time spread down the 

 southern slopes of the Alps into Lombardy. We find the 

 moraines of the vast Rhone glacier at various parts of its 

 course, these vast heaps of rock fragments having been 

 piled up and left by the glacier, some when it was at its 

 fullest extension, some as it shrank towards its present 

 pygmy dimensions. The high, long terrace of St. Paul, 

 which one sees more than a thousand feet above the Lake 

 of Geneva, at Evian, is a moraine, and all over Switzerland, 

 in the lower valleys, fifty or a hundred miles away from 

 existing glaciers, you come upon these strange, long, 

 straight hills, resembling enormous railway embankments, 

 just as the moraines at the sides of the existing glaciers 

 resemble ordinary railway embankments. We can ascer- 

 tain the height to which the old huge glaciers filled the 

 present valleys by the polishing and scratching of the 

 rocks as well as by the remains of moraines. At 

 Martigny, where the Rhone valley takes a sharp turn, the 

 glacier filled it to a height of 5000 ft. above the present 



