Kneeland.] 40 [February 21, 
and the streams of centuries, except in a few protected, small, and 
hardly accessible places. 
The fourth great ice stream which flowed to the Yosemite valley, 
was the glacier which filled the basin of the Yosemite creek on the 
north side of the valley, from which now descends on the edge: the 
beautiful Yosemite Fall,'2,600 feet high. ‘This basin has been thor- 
oughly examined. by Mr. Muir, who estimates its glacier as having 
been fifteen miles long, five wide in the middle, and in many places 
1000 feet deep— uniting with the central glacier in the valley by a 
mouth extending from the east side of El Capitan to Yosemite point, 
east of the Falls, a distance about four miles; on the north flowed 
by the great Tuolumne glacier from Mt. Dana and its range, the 
mightiest of these ice-rivers. It came from the western and south- 
western slopes of Mt. Hoffman, and the main stream flowed nearly 
south; it had several branch basins among the higher spurs of this 
range, flowing to the east, now abounding in small clear lakes, set in 
the solid granite, without the usual terminal moraine dam. The 
north sides of these, and most of the spurs and ranges in this portion 
of the Sierra, as long since noticed by Prof. Whitney, are very steep 
compared with the southern, and as the spurs here mainly run east 
and west, their glaciers were deeper, more sheltered from the sun, 
and therefore longer lived than the main stream; the result is small 
glacier action, little detritus, and a quiet melting into clear lakes, 
with comparatively small borders of the meadows so characteristic of 
the disappearance of the lower glaciers. Though the declivity and 
rate of progress of some of the tributaries were great, the main 
stream, according to Mr. Muir, was rather level and in one part of 
its course compelled to make a considerable ascent; to this fact of 
levelness, width at mouth, and overwhelming power of the concen- 
trated central glaciers, he attributes in great measure the present 
height of the Yosemite Falls. The main stream of the Merced river, 
flowing through a narrow and deep cafion, has in its course the thun- 
dering Nevada and Vernal falls; while the wide and gently sloping 
Yosemite basin conducts its stream almost noiselessly and with com- 
parative smoothness till it makes its final and only feathery plunge of 
half a mile vertical descent into the valley. 
Looking into the Yosemite glacier basin from any of its surround- 
ing domes, you see many small patches of dark forests, apparently in 
close contact with bare rock, which mark the places of the fragment- 
ary moraines of the basin, as later eroding agents have not had time 
