Last summer we were watching the gradual change of the brilliant sunlight on the snows of Mont Blanc as the shadows crept up the pine-covered sides of the valley of Chamonix. We noted how the highest peak--the true summit of Mont Blanc--remained almost white and brilliant when the somewhat lower and nearer Dome de Gouter (so often, when clouds are about, mistaken for the true summit by tourists) had assumed a marvellous shade of saffron-rose colour. The crevasses of the glaciers were marked by an unearthly pale-green tint and delicate purple hues of weird beauty were spreading over the evanescent forms of the great snow-field, when one of the hotel guests--a citizen of Geneva--said, “Ah, yes! Look at them whilst you may, and wonder at them, those glaciers of the Alps. They are but the remnants, the roots, as it were, of the vast glacier which once filled the whole of this vale of Chamonix and spread down into the valley of the Rhone, and ploughed out with the slow movement of its huge mass the deep rock basin of the Lake Leman. Every year they dwindle, as they have dwindled for ages past, and soon--perhaps not more than another 100 years hence--they will have disappeared utterly from human sight and knowledge.” I continued to gaze at the scene, and as the night fell and the distant details were lost to view I felt as though a venerable, but decrepit, friend had passed from my sight, never to return. I was rejoiced to see the glaciers still there when the morning sun showed forth their strange opaque white and faintly green masses on the mountain sides--stupendous outpourings, as it were, of whipped cream tinted with pistachio-nut. But was it true, that lament of the Genevese savant? Undoubtedly the glaciers in many parts of the Alps have been shrinking for the last thirty years. It is longer than that since I first saw the glaciers of the Chamonix valley, and there is no doubt that they have shrunk up since then, leaving acres of boulders and bare polished rock where was the ice I formerly climbed. The glacier of Argentière, near the upper end of the valley, is a mile or more shorter than it was; the ice caves which we used to visit at the foot of the Mer de Glace have melted away, and the end of the glacier is now high up above a precipitous surface of polished rock far from the site of the little pavilion, with its gay flag and amiable guardian, who used to exhibit the marvellous ice cavern.