The peasants tell old stories of ice-gods ruling and thundering with strange sounds, and the “lamentations and loud moans” of prisoners in these frozen caves. The legends people the glaciers only with gloomy, unhappy beings, trembling with fear, weighed down by some malediction. Professor Helm has made a careful survey of the Alpine glaciers, and reckons them at eleven hundred and fifty-five, of which Swiss territory includes four hundred and seventy-one. He estimates the total superficial area of these glaciers between three thousand and four thousand square kilometres; the area of the Swiss glaciers is put down as eighteen hundred and thirty-nine square kilometres. They begin in the Canton of Glarus, extend to the Grisons, thence to the Canton of Uri, and finally down to Bern. Of these Swiss glaciers, one hundred and thirty-eight are of the first rank,--that is, over four and three-quarters of a mile long. Eight glaciers unite at the foot of Monte Rosa, seven at the foot of the Matterhorn, and five at the foot of the Finsteraarhorn. The _Mer de Glace_, which surrounds the Bernina, is more than sixteen leagues in circumference. Its tempestuous waves, with azure reflections like lava, pile themselves in the defiles, precipitate themselves into the gorges, or run by a rapid descent into the depths of the valleys; sometimes they leap up between two points of rocks, dart into space, and remain suspended above the abyss till the day when their frozen sheet is broken up and hurled into its depths. There are few grander sights than the Bernina, with its boldly contoured granitic rocks and its glaciers creeping low down into the valleys. The Canton of Grisons, of which the Engadine forms a part, counts more than one hundred and fifty glaciers. The great ice-fields of the Bernese Oberland consist of one hundred and eight to one hundred and twenty square miles in extent, and are the most extensive in Europe. The boundaries are the Valais, the Grimsel, the valley of the Aar, and the Gemmi, and spread over more than two hundred and thirty thousand acres. The longest glacier is the _Gross Aletsch_ of the Bernese Oberland; it is fifteen miles long, and has a basin forty-nine and eight-tenths square miles, and a maximum breadth of nineteen hundred and sixty-eight yards. The Rhone glacier is admired for its natural beauties, more especially on account of its terminal face, furrowed by huge crevasses. The lowest point to which a Swiss glacier is known to have descended is three thousand two hundred and twenty-five feet, attained by the Lower Grindelwald glacier in 1818. As to the thickness of the glaciers there exist no reliable data. In the series of investigations and measurements made by Professor Agassiz on the Aar glacier, fifty years ago, he excavated to a depth of two hundred and sixty metres (over eight hundred and thirty feet), and did not get to the bottom. He estimated the depth of the Aar glacier,