"I looked over this wondrous scene toward Mont Blanc, the Grand Combin, the Dent Blanche, the Weisshorn, the Dom, and the thousand lesser peaks which seem to join in the celebration of the risen day. I asked myself, as on previous occasions, How was this colossal work performed? Who chiselled these mighty and picturesque masses out of a mere protuberance of the earth? And the answer was at hand. Ever young, ever mighty-with the vigor of a thousand worlds still within him-the real sculptor was even then climbing up the eastern sky. It was he who raised aloft the waters which cut out these ravines; it was he who planted the glaciers on the mountain slopes, thus giving gravity a plough to open out the valleys; and it is he who, acting through the ages, will finally lay low these mighty monuments, rolling them gradually seaward, sowing the seeds of continents to be; so that the people of an older earth may see mould spread, and corn wave over the hidden rocks which at this moment bear the weight of the Jungfrau." And the Alps lie within twenty-four hours of London! Tyndall's writings also contain many vivid descriptions of glaciers; those "silent and solemn causeways ... broad enough for the march of an army in line of battle and quiet as a street of tombs in a buried city." [2] I do not, however, borrow from him or from any one else any description of glaciers, for they are so unlike anything else, that no one who has not seen, can possibly visualize them. The history of European rivers yet remains to be written, and is most interesting. They did not always run in their present courses. The Rhone, for instance, appears to have been itself a great traveler. At least there seems reasons to believe that the upper waters of the Valais fell at first into the Danube, and so into the Black Sea; subsequently joined the Rhine and the Thames, and so ran far north over the plains which once connected the mountains of Scotland and of Norway--to the Arctic Ocean; and to have only comparatively of late years adopted their present course into the Mediterranean.