The _Glaciers_ of the Alps, frozen streams of ice, are remarkable phenomena of nature, and possess the greatest interest for geologists. The name _Glacier_ is French; the German word is _Gletscher_, and the Italian _Ghiacciaio_. Ruskin calls them “silent and solemn causeways, broad enough for the march of an army in a line of battle, and quiet as a street of tombs in a buried city;” Longfellow describes them as “resembling a vast gauntlet, of which the gorge represents the wrist, while the lower glacier, cleft by its fissures into fingers, like ridges, is typified by the hand.” With the exception of the Engadine, where the limits do not begin below ten thousand and seventy feet, in the other parts of Switzerland the limit of the glaciers and of the eternal snow is met with at eight thousand seven hundred and forty to nine thousand one hundred and eighty feet. The average height of the snow-line fluctuates according to north or south aspect, and greater or less exposure to the south wind, but in exceptionally warm summers, the snow completely melts away on summits having an altitude of over eleven thousand feet. The common expression, the “line of perpetual snow,” is misleading; it is only correctly used to indicate the altitude above which the mountains always appear white, because at that height it is merely the surface which at times thus gets partially melted. These masses of ice or glaciers are called streams, because, though imperceptibly, they really move along; they are continually descending towards the valley from the mountain-tops: “The glacier’s cold and restless mass Moves onward day by day.”