Neiv Zealand in the Ice Age. — Hitchcock. 275 
adding his own observations. The area is about thirty miles 
by eighteen, and the glaciers are situated upon both sides of the 
main divide. The books of Fitzgerald, Harper, ^lannering and 
Green contain the records of explorations and ascents as thrill- 
ing and daring as any in alpin'e annals. Mt. Cook, the highest 
of the peaks, was first practicallv ascended by Rev. W. S. 
Green, in 1882, and later by Zurbriggen the celebrated Swiss 
guide, in 1895, who had gone to New Zealand in the employ 
of E. A. Fitzgerald. 
The Tasman is the most important of all these glaciers. It 
is eighteen miles in length, rising between Mts. Elie de Beau- 
mont and Darwin, 10,200 and 9,715 feet high, and receiving as 
tributaries on the left the Rudolph, Forrest-Ross, Kaufman, 
Haast, Freshfield, Hochstetter and Ball glaciers ; on the right 
Darwin, Bonney, Beetham, Barkley, Langdale. ^^^alpole, Reag, 
Dorothy and the Murchison, second only in size to the Tasman. 
The water from the Mueller and Hooker glaciers joins the 
drainage from the Tasman below the Hermitage, which gives a 
more extensive flood plain than that described for the Dart 
river. The Tasman has the altitude of 6,136 feet two and a 
half miles below its remotest beginning, falls to 4,178 feet op- 
posite the Hochstetter glacier, where it is entirelv covered by 
moraine material. This debris covers six and one-half miles 
extent of the lower part of the Tasman, being one and one- 
fourth miles wide at its lower end and two miles wide at the 
union with the Murchison. It is less than three-fourths of a 
mile wide for three miles of its course and broadest high up 
between Mts. Beaumont and Darwin. The altitude of the sur- 
face of the ice at the terminus is 2,490 feet, the wall being 140 
feet. The moraine is continuous for eleven miles from the 
terminus up to the head of the Rudolph glacier. Hochstetter 
glacier starts in a great oval mass, two by three miles in ex- 
tent, between Mts. Cook and Haast, making a great plateau on 
the north, and joined by the two tributaries Linda and Adam- 
son on the south, and the united mass falls over a precipice 
nearly 2,000 feet high before uniting with the Tasman. The 
pieces unite by regelation and move four miles down the slope. 
On the west edge of the Tasman, upon the moraine descending 
from the Ball glacier, a hut has been erected for the accommo- 
dation of travellers, 3,402 feet high, and twelve miles distant 
