317 
ON THE RETREAT OF THE EUROPEAN GLACIERS. 
By Professor C. DUFOUR.* 
I N 1870, when M. F. A. Forel and myself were on the Rhone 
glacier, we mapped the front of the glacier. I have since 
repeatedly communicated to the Society the results of fresh 
measurements which have been made there, and which, year by 
year, have shown that this glacier was undergoing a consider- 
able diminution, so that, in 1879, it had gone beyond all 
previous limits, so far as the memory of the inhabitants of 
the country could go back. This retreat, which commenced 
about 1855 or 1856, is not peculiar to the Rhone glacier ; it is 
a general phenomenon throughout the chain of the Alps, 
although it did not commence everywhere at the same time, 
some glaciers were advancing when others were decreasing. 
But at present it may be said that the retrograde movement 
has become the rule in all the Alpine regions. 
In 1878, at the Scientific Congress in Paris, I had the 
opportunity of conversing on this subject with several French 
savants, and learned from them that the glaciers of the 
Pyrenees were in the same case ; all of them had diminished, 
and some had actually disappeared. It then became an inter- 
esting point to ascertain whether the other European glaciers, 
those of the Caucasus and of Scandinavia, presented the same 
phenomenon. With this purpose in view, I applied, with 
regard to the former, to M. Wild, the director of the Central 
Physical Observatory of Russia, and with regard to the latter, 
to a Swede, M. Ny strom. These two gentlemen were kind 
enough to obtain the information that I asked for, and from 
their investigations it appeared that these groups of glaciers 
had diminished in the same way as those of the Alps and 
Pyrenees. In the Caucasus the retreat commenced, as in the 
* From the Bulletin de la Societe Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles, Series 
2, toI. xvii. pp. 422-425. 
