I will not detain my imaginary companion longer with local details, but turn at once to the objects which will ever be the center of attraction to visitors who may chance to reach this remote island in the ice. Looking far up the Marvine glacier, beyond the tapering pinnacles and rugged peaks about its head, you will see spires and cathedral-like forms of the purest white projected against the northern sky. They recall at once the ecclesiastic architecture of the Old World; but instead of being dim and faded by time they seem built of immaculate marble. They have a grandeur and repose seen only in mountains of the first magnitude. The cathedral to the right, with the long roof-like crest and a tapering spire at its eastern terminus, is Mount Augusta; its elevation is over 13,000 feet. A little to the west, and equally beautiful but slightly less in elevation, is Mount Malaspina--a worthy monument to the unfortunate navigator whose name it bears. These peaks are on the main St. Elias range, but from our present point of view they form only the {118} background of a magnificent picture. Later in the season our tents were pitched at their very bases, and they then revealed their full grandeur and fulfilled every promise given by distant views. The rugged Hitchcock range bordering the distant margin of the Marvine glacier, like the mountains near at hand and the rocky island on which we stand, is composed of sandstone and shale, but presents one interesting feature, to which I shall direct your attention. The trend of the range is northeast and southwest, but the strata of which it is composed run east and west and are inclined northward. As the range is some eight miles long, these conditions would seem to indicate a thickness of many thousands of feet for the rocks of which it is composed; yet the beds were deposited in horizontal sheets of sand and mud of very late date, as will be shown farther on. But the great apparent thickness of the strata is deceptive: a nearer examination would reveal the fact that the rocks have been so greatly crushed that even a hand specimen can scarcely be broken off with fresh surfaces. More than this, the black shale, exhibiting the greatest amount of crushing, is usually in wedge-shaped masses, which, in some cases at least, are bordered by what are known as thrust planes, nearly coinciding with the bedding planes of the strata. The rocks have been fractured and crushed together in such a way as to pile fragments of the same layer on top of each other, and thus to increase greatly their apparent thickness. In the elevations before us the thrust planes are tipped northeastwardly, and it would seem that the force that produced them acted from that direction. The apparent thickness of the beds has thus been increased many times. What their original thickness was, it is not now possible to say. Similar indications of a lateral crushing in the rocks may be found in several of the mountain