Many of the fellow-countrymen of Agassiz, the peasants of the Swiss Alps, believe the glacier is a living thing and has a soul. In the spring the peasants take their sheep and cattle into the high meadows called "alps," from which the mountains get their name, and remain there until fall with the glaciers all around them. There are nearly 2,000 glaciers in the Alps, varying from less than a mile to over ten miles in length, and from a few hundred feet to a mile in breadth. So the peasants have every opportunity to get acquainted with their big white neighbors. "The glacier has a soul," they say, "and a voice, many voices. Sometimes he groans. This is when he is in pain. Listen!" SOUNDS THAT GIVE ONE THE "CREEPS" We do hear a sound very like a groan. Even experienced mountain climbers can hardly keep down a "creepy" feeling when they hear it. This sound is made when the ice is cracking into a crevasse and while it is enlarging. These crevasses are formed by various strains in the ice as it moves along. So long as the strain which caused them continues the crevasses keep widening. The "groans" may be said to be "growing pains." In some places you hear a constant roaring sound. The peasants are not superstitious about this sound however. They know it is made by what they call the "moulins" or mills of the glacier. Water, melting on the surface, makes streams. These, running together, make a larger stream. This stream, coming to a crack in the ice where a crevasse is just beginning, pours down, hollows out a little shaft and joins streams in the interior of the glacier, like that in which Agassiz took a bath when he didn't want to. The noise of the water, striking far below, comes up through the shaft, as a voice comes up through a speaking tube. But the crack into which the water falls must be very narrow, so that the water can melt both walls and thus form a shaft; otherwise it merely glides down the nearer wall and makes no sound. NOISES WE PEBBLES HELP MAKE Where two ice rivers emptying into a main stream come together you hear a constant dull rattle and rumble. This is made by the blocks of stone and trains of pebbles that have ridden in on the backs of the two glaciers thus going into partnership, falling between the glaciers at the point where they come together. The stones that do not fall over are brought together in the centre of the glacier and so make that spiny backbone of his, the "medial moraine." The rows of stones on the two sides of the glacier, called the "lateral moraines," have fallen piece by piece from the mountain walls as the glacier moved along between them.