10 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. V., No. 100. 



simplest, and because it is that form which has been 

 used in the report of the proceedings of the Montreal 

 meeting in the organ of the Royal geographical soci- 

 ety. The present writer has, however, never seen it 

 so spelled on any geographical map. It is spelled in 

 three different ways in the publications of the Canada 

 survey, and in the same number of ways in Stieler's 

 1 Hand-atlas.' J. D. Whitney. 



THE TASMAN GLACIER. 



. A year ago, accounts were published of the 

 attempt in 1SS2, of Mr. W. S. Green, an Englishman, 



without a cloud, during which a good piece of triangu- 

 lation was executed, the Hochstetter dome ascended 

 (2,840 m.), and material collected for a fairly detailed 

 map on a scale of 1 : 80,000. The results of the sur- 

 vey now appear as supplement 75 to Petermanrts 

 mittheilungen (Der Tasman-gletscher und seine um- 

 gebung; Gotha, June, 1884, 80 p.), with ageneral and 

 local map, a well-executed reproduction of a photo- 

 graph taken from the medial moraine of the great 

 Tasman glacier, which we copy in reduced form, and 

 several cuts. The glacier was found to be twenty- 

 eight kilometres in length, — three kilometres longer 

 than the Aletsch, the greatest in Switzerland. Its 

 lower part is of moderate slope and slow motion, 



THE NEW-ZEALAND ALPS AS SEEN FROM THE MIDDLE MORAINE OF TIIR TASMAN GLACIER. 



to ascend Mount Cook, the highest (12,350) of the 

 New-Zealand Alps. He was accompanied by two prac- 

 tised Swiss guides from Grindelwald, and reached a 

 great altitude over snow and ice, but failed in his 

 main object, chiefly on account of bad weather. A 

 somewhat similar exploration was undertaken in 

 March, 1883, by Dr. R. v. Lendenfeld of Christchurch, 

 New Zealand, accompanied by his wife, three shep- 

 herds to serve as porters, and a driver for the wagon 

 in which the supplies were carried up to within a few 

 miles of the Tasman glacier. Bad weather on the 

 approach to the mountains was followed by nine days 



greatly covered by moraines. Green described the 

 New-Zealand Alps as equalling or exceeding those 

 of Europe in picturesqueness, but Lendenfeld thinks 

 them inferior. The mountain form is less pro- 

 nounced, the snow-fields are smaller, and the glaciers 

 are much obscured by morainic rubbish : bushes re- 

 place pines, and the flat-bottomed valleys are without 

 villages and fields. The summit of the Hochstetter 

 dome, a sharp edge of hard-packed snow, was reached 

 by Lendenfeld, his wife, and one porter, after a dar- 

 ing climb across a delicate ice-bridge, of which the 

 author's rough figure is here copied. Sitting astride 



