THE 

 LONDON, EDINBURGH, and DUBLIN 



PHILOSOPHICAL MAGAZINE 



AND 



JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



[FOURTH SERIES.] 



APRIL 1870. 



XXXII. On the "Veined Structure" of the Ice of Glaciers, 

 By Henry Moseley, F.R.S., Canon of Bristol*. 

 [With a Plate.] 



THE veined structure of ice appears first to have been de- 

 scribed by M. Guyot, in the year 1838. The following 

 is his account of it, as he saw it on the glacier of Gries, which I 

 translate from the work of M. Hubert : — 



" I saw under my feet the entire surface of the glacier covered 

 with furrows an inch or two wide cut in snowy ice, and separated 

 from one another by ridges of harder and more transparent ice. 

 It was evident that the mass of the glacier was here formed of these 

 two different kinds of ice : the former (that of the furrows) was 

 white and melted more rapidly; the other (that of the ridges) 

 was more perfect, crystallized, transparent, and hard. The un- 

 equal resistance to melting of these two kinds of ice was the 

 obvious cause of these depressions and elevations. After having 

 followed them for several hundreds of metres I reached a crevasse 

 20 or 30 feet wide, which, cutting the furrows at right angles, 

 exhibited down to the depth of 30 or 40 feet an admirable 

 transverse section of this structure. As far as my eye could 

 reach I saw the mass of the glacier composed of layers of the 

 [opaque] white ice separated from one another by layers of the 

 transparent ice, the whole forming a mass as regularly stratified 

 as certain calcareous rocks." This is the veined structure of 

 glaciers. 



* Communicated by the Author. 

 f Les Glaciers, p. 170. Paris, 1867. 



Phil. Mag. S. 4, Vol. 39. No. 261. April 1870. R 



