Geologists think that the glaciers of the present day are “mere pigmies as compared to the giants of the glacial epoch;” and that their action has had much to do with the architecture of the Alps; that the ice exerts a crushing force on every point of its bed which bears its weight, and the glaciers would naturally scoop out and carve the mountains and valleys into the slopes which we now see; and that the plains of Italy and Switzerland are covered with _débris_ of the Alps. These geologists are pretty well agreed that the Lake of Geneva was excavated by a glacier. Whatever may be thought of the erosive theory, there is no doubt that these dreary wastes of ice are of great use in the economy of nature. They are the locked-up reservoirs, the sealed fountains which immediately fertilize the plains of Lombardy, the valley of the Rhone, and of Southern Germany, and from which the vast rivers traversing the great continents of our globe are sustained. The summer heat, which dries up sources of water, first opens out their bountiful supplies. When the rivers of the plain begin to shrink and dwindle within their parched beds, the torrents of the Alps, fed by the melting snow and glaciers, rush down from the mountains and supply the deficiency. Professor Hugi’s hypothesis, that the glacier is alive, is often suggested by the singular noises produced by the forcing of air and water through passages in the body of the glacier. In the eyes of the credulous mountaineers who live in the silence which broods over the sombre cliffs, the glacier is a place of grief and exile, of penance and punishment, of expiation and tears, such a place as described by Dante in his “Inferno,” where “... various tongues, Horrible languages, outcries of woe, Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse, With hands together smote, that swelled the sounds, Made a tumult that forever whirls Round through that air, with solid darkness stained, Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies.”