In all of those channels penetrating the mainland and intervening between the numerous islands from the head of Glacier Bay and Lynn Canal down to the north end of Vancouver’s Island, marks, or glacial scratchings, indicative of the sliding of a great ice-sheet, are to be found, generally in strict conformity with the trend of the passages, wherever the rocks were well suited for their preservation; and it is probable that the ice of the coast range, at one time, reached out as far west as the outer islands which fringe the entire Alaskan and British Columbian coast. Many of the boulders on the beaches are plainly glaciated; and, as they are often bunched in piles upon the places where found, they seem to have not been disturbed since they were dropped there. The shores are everywhere abrupt and the water deep. The entire front of this lofty coast-range chain, that forms the eastern Alaskan boundary from the summit of Mt. St. Elias to the mouth of Portland Canal, is glacier-bearing to-day, and you can scarcely push your way to the head of any cañon, great or small, without finding an eternal ice-sheet anchored there: careful estimation places the astonishing aggregate of over 5,000 living glaciers, of greater or less degree, that are silently but forever travelling down to the sea, in this region. Those congealed rivers which take their origin in the flanks of Mt. Fairweather[8] and Mt. Crillon[9] are simply unrivalled in frigid grandeur by anything that is lauded in Switzerland or the Himalayas, though the vast bulk of the Greenland ice-sheets is, of course, not even feebly approximated by them; the waters of the channels which lead up from the ocean to the feet of these large glaciers of Cross Sound and Lynn Canal, are full of bobbing icebergs that have been detached from the main sheet, in every possible shape and size—a detachment which is taking place at intervals of every few moments, giving rise, in so doing, to a noise like parks of artillery; but, of course, these bergs are very, very small compared with those of Greenland, and only a few ever escape from the intricate labyrinth of fiörds which are so characteristic of this Sitkan district. An ice-sheet comes down the cañon, and as it slides into the water of the canal or bay, wherever it may be, the pressure exerted by the buoyancy of the partially submerged mass causes it to crack off in the wildest lines of cleavage, and rise to the surface in hundreds and thousands of glittering fragments; or again, it may slide out over the water on a rocky bed, and, as it advances, break off and fall down in thundering salvos, that ring and echo in the gloomy cañons with awe-inspiring repetition. At the head and around the sides of a large indentation of Cross Sound there are no less than five immense, complete glaciers, which take their origin between Fairweather and Crillon Mountains, each one reaching and discharging into tide-water: here is a vast, a colossal glacier in