Passing west of Douglas Island and through Icy Strait to Glacier Bay, a magnificent view is presented. Snow-covered mountains rise six and seven thousand feet all around, and to the northwest is the imposing Mount Fairweather range, elevated over fifteen thousand feet. Glacier Bay extends forty-five miles up into the land, its width gradually contracting from twelve to three miles. Small icebergs and floes cover much of the surface, as they are constantly detached from the glaciers descending into it. At the head of the bay is the greatest curiosity of Alaska and the most stupendous glacier existing,--the Muir Glacier,--named in honor of Professor John Muir, the geologist of the Pacific coast, who first saw it in 1879 and thoroughly explored it in 1890. When Vancouver was here at the close of the eighteenth century he wrote that a wall of ice extended across the mouth of the bay. The belief is that the glacier once filled the entire bay and has gradually receded. Near the middle of the bay is Willoughby Island, a rock two miles long and fifteen hundred feet high, showing striated and polished surfaces and glacial grooves from bottom to top. This glacier far exceeds all the Swiss ice-fields put together, and it enters the sea with a front one mile and a half wide and two to three hundred feet high. Unlike the dirty terminal moraines of the Swiss glaciers, this is a splendid wall of clear blue and white ice, built up in columns, spires and huge crystal masses, displaying beautiful caves and grottoes. It goes many hundreds of feet below the surface of the water, and from its front, masses of ice constantly detach and fall into the bay with noises like thunder or the discharge of artillery. Huge bergs topple over, clouds of spray arise, and gigantic waves are sent across the water. Every few minutes this goes on as the glacier, moving forward with resistless motion, breaks to pieces at the end. The field of ice making this wonderful glacier is formed by nine main streams and seventeen smaller arms. It occupies a vast amphitheatre back among the mountains, thirty to forty miles across, and where it breaks out between the higher mountains to descend to the sea is about three miles wide. The superficial area of this mass of ice is three hundred and fifty square miles. It moves forward from seven to ten feet daily at the edges and more in the centre, and in August, when it loses the most ice, the estimate is that about two hundred millions of cubic feet fall into the bay every day. It loses more ice in the summer than it gains in the winter, and thus steadily retrogrades. The visitors go up to its face, although it cannot be ascended there, and then landing alongside approach it through a lateral moraine, and can there ascend to the top and walk upon the surface. The character and appearance of this famous glacier were much changed by an earthquake in 1899. Among the attractions are the mirages that are frequent here, which have been the origin of the