336 
ICE-CASCADES. 
These ice-cascades, as we called them, kept up their 
din the whole night, sometimes startling us with a 
heavy booming sound, as the larger masses fell, but 
more generally rattling away like the random fires of a 
militia parade. On examining the ice of which they 
were made up, I found grains of -neve larger than a 
walnut; so large, indeed, that it was hard to realize that 
they could be formed by the ordinary granulating pro¬ 
cesses of the winter snows. My impression is, that the 
surface of the plateau-ice, the mer de glace of the island, 
is made up of these agglomerated nodules, and that 
they are forced out and discarded by the advance of 
the more compact ice from higher levels. (56) 
m 
f 
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