Studies Scientific and Social - v. 1 Author:Alfred Russel Wallace 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 VI THE GORGE OF THE AAR AND ITS TEACHINGS There is perhaps no valley in Switzerland that offers to the tourist so much variety and grandeur, and to... more » the glacialist so much instruction, as the Haslithal or valley of the Aar. I visited it for the first time last summer, walking over the Grimsel Pass to the Hospice and the Aar glacier, and thence along the old mule-track and fine new carriage-road to Meiringen ; staying there three days to visit the Reichenbach Falls, the Kirchet Hill, the gorge of the Aar, and other interesting localities. It seemed to me at the time that the phenomena presented by this valley afforded a striking example of the vast amount of glacial erosion, and that some of the conclusions to which they point had been overlooked by English writers. They give us, in fact, a fresh and very powerful argument in support of the power of the ancient glaciers both to deepen valleys and to grind out lake-basins; and I now propose to lay before my readers the facts which seem to me to prove the correctness of this view. The Grimsel Pass is a low one, only a little over 7,000 feet, but for this reason, and because it lies directly between extensive areas of perpetual snow, which give rise to some of the finest glaciers in Switzerland, it has been very largely ice-ground and presents a scene of savage grandeur which is often absent from higher passes. Everywhere the rocks are ground into huge domes or smooth slopes or rounded hollows, and these ice-ground VOL. I. K contours extend to at least a thousand feet higher, above which level the mountains rise in sharp peaks or serrated ridges. The descent towards the Grimsel Hospice is very grand, owing to the enormous surfaces of smooth ice- ground rocks of the hardest gneiss, which plunge down at a very high...« less