Science from an easy chair Author:Edwin Ray Lankester Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV GLACIERS who have not seen a glacier, walked on a J- glacier, chipped into it with an ice-axe, and followed it up from its melting " snout" and de... more »cidedly dirty, rock- strewn lower end to the regions where it is pure and white, split into yawning chasms and raised into great teeth or pinnacles—those, indeed, who have not followed it yet further from these middle heights, far on up the rocky sides of a great mountain, until the region is reached where it ceases to be ice, and becomes a mass of soft, powdery snow—do not know one of the most curious, unimaginable, and powerful agencies in Nature. We inhabitants of the British Isles, were we confined to our limited territory, and un-informed by travellers as to the wonders of the snow-world, would never guess or infer from anything we ever see here that such things as glaciers exist. There is no parallel to the peculiarity, the unexpected and astonishing quality, of a glacier. Even a volcano is not so remote from what one could have expected. Rivers, lakes, and seas we know, and we can imagine them -bigger and deeper. Waterfalls and great white clouds, in fact all the forms of water, are familiar to us. Mountains, even winter snow-capped mountains, we sometimes see in our own island, and can imagine them bigger. We have handled ice and snow, too. Yet nothing which we know by experience here prepares usfor the complete change in the appearance, character, and behaviour of snow when it is piled in vast thickness on the slopes of mountains so high that it is ever renewed, and never melts away on their peaks and shoulders. We are accustomed to see snow slowly melt and run away as water, and the more observant will have noted that in prolonged frost, snow, even when piled in heaps by the roadside, disappears without thawin...« less