The Government of India has lately established a definite survey and record of the movement of several Himalayan glaciers and of the variation in the distance to which their “snouts” descend into the valleys. Twelve glaciers were examined last year, and will be properly watched in future. The Yengutsa glacier has gained about two miles in length since Sir Martin Conway visited it in 1892; the great Hispar glacier has slightly retreated. The Hassanabad glacier three years ago increased its length by a rapid progress of the free “snout” of as much as six miles in three months, and is now no longer increasing or advancing! Many years ago it had reached its present position, and then retreated. The rock masses carried on the ice and left in great heaps at the point where the glacier melted away are known as terminal “moraines,” and often serve to show the position to which the snout of a glacier once extended--far below its present limit. A curious fact as to the increase and shrinkage of glaciers is that of two neighbouring glaciers, as in the case of the glacier Blanc and the glacier Noir in Dauphiné (France), one may be advancing whilst the other is in retreat. Further study and knowledge of the causes of these variations will throw important light on questions of general meteorology. Although there is no evidence to lead us to suppose that existing glaciers are now actually in a condition of general retreat, leading to their ultimate disappearance, yet it is one of the most certain and interesting results of geological study that some hundred and fifty thousand years ago the northern hemisphere was far colder than it is now, owing partly to the same change in the inclination of the earth’s axis to which I alluded on a former page (p. 81) as affecting the orientation of ancient astronomical temples--a change which diminished, when at its extreme, the effective amount of heat received from the sun in these regions of the earth. The peculiar scratching, polishing, and erosion of rocks, the existence of moraines, and other evidence, prove that enormous glaciers covered the north of Europe, that England and Scotland were in large part covered by a great ice-sheet or glacier, and that the great valleys of Switzerland such as the Rhone Valley and the basin of the Lake of Geneva, were filled by enormous glaciers, which helped to mould and deepen the valleys. The present glaciers are truly the remnants or rootlets of those enormous masses of the glacial epoch. On such of the land surface as was not then covered by ice, existed the hairy elephant or Siberian mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, wild cattle, lions, bears, hyenas, and other animals now extinct in this part of the world. Man had made his appearance, hunted these animals, and lived in caves. His weapons and carvings and their bones tell us the story in no uncertain terms.