In the Glacière of Grâce-Dieu, or La Baume, near Besançon, Mr. Browne was particularly struck with three large stalagmites of ice rising in a line across the middle of the cave. The central mass was remarkable only for its size, the girth being sixty-six and a half feet at some distance from the ice-floor, with which it blended; but nothing could be more strikingly lovely than the stalagmite to its right, owing to the good taste of some one, who had found that much ice was wont to accumulate on that spot, and had accordingly fixed the trunk of a small fir-tree, with the upper branches complete, to receive the water from the corresponding fissure in the roof. The consequence was that, while the actual tree had vanished from sight under its crystal covering, the ice with which it was incrusted showed every elegance of form which a mould so graceful could suggest, each twig of the different boughs becoming, to all appearance, a solid bar of frosted ice, from which complicated groups of icicles streamed down. But the mass to the left was the grandest and most beautiful of all. It consisted of two lofty heads, like weeping willows in Carrara marble, with three or four others less lofty, resembling a family group of lions’ heads in a subdued attitude of grief, richly decked with icy manes. Similar heads seemed to grow out here and there from the solid sides of the huge mass, which measured seventy-six and a half feet in girth about two feet from the floor. When this column was looked at from the side removed from the entrance to the cave, so that it stood in the centre of the light which poured down the long slope from the outer world, the transparency of the ice made the whole look as if it were set in a narrow frame of impalpable liquid blue—the effect of light penetrating through the mass at its extreme edges. Other and no less striking beauties rewarded our subterranean explorer on his visit to the Schafloch or Trou-aux-Moutons, a vast ice-cave on the Rothhorn, in the canton of Berne, which takes its name from the fact that, when a sudden storm comes on, the sheep and goats make their way to it for shelter, though never going so far as the spot where the ice begins. On entering the cave the way lies over a wild confusion of loose masses of stone, which soon, however, begin to be intermingled with ice, until the latter entirely hides the naked rock under a crystal mantle.