Protestant it may be, but this was no Protestant Sabbath. Yet, externally, Zurich is one of the pleasantest towns in Switzerland. The views around it are beautiful, while the rural aspect of the whole gives it a charm few Swiss villages possess. I love the land of the bold Swiss; I love its lakes and snow-peaks and smiling vallies; but alas for its inhabitants. Their glory is in the past, and their stern integrity too. It seems impossible that any people should long retain simplicity and purity of character in the heart of Europe. The influence of the corrupt nations is too great, especially when the contact is so frequent as now.

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XV.

AVALANCHES AND GLACIERS, THEIR FORMATION AND MOVEMENT.

BEFORE taking leave of Switzerland, it may be interesting to give some statistics of the Alps, though they are always afterthoughts with the traveller. I have hitherto endeavoured to give the effect of the scenery one meets in the Alps rather than detailed descriptions of it.

Avalanches are regarded by many as immense masses of snow of a somewhat globular form, which gather as they roll till they acquire the size of a miniature mountain, and are more terrible to see even, than to hear. This is true of many of those which fall in winter, but not of those which descend in spring and early summer. The Swiss have different names for different kinds of avalanches. There is the Staublawinen, or dust avalanche, and GRUNDLAWINEN, or ground avalanche. The former is the falling of loose fresh-fallen snow. Gathering into huge drifts upon some peak till it is detached by its own weight; it slides away until it reaches a precipice, when it commences rolling and thundering down the mountain. Increasing in bulk with every bound, and extending farther and wider, it acquires at length an impetus and strength that sweep down whole forests, in its passage, as if the trees were slender reeds; and moves across the entire valley, into which it lands. This, however, is not the most dangerous kind of avalanche, as it only buries people and cattle, and does not crush them; so that they can frequently be dug out again without serious injury. The Grundlawinen, on the other hand, is a more serious It falls in the springtime, and is dislodged by the action of sun, south winds, and rain. These thawing the upper surface,

matter.

the water trickles down through the crevices, increasing their width and depth, till huge blocks, indeed immense precipices, are sawn loose by this slow process; and tipping over or sliding away, come with the might of fate itself down the precipitous sides of the mountain. A village disappears in their path in a breath-trees three feet in diameter are snapped off like pipe stems, and nothing but a wild ruinous waste is left where they sweep in their wrath. As I mentioned before, these avalanches have paths they travel regularly as deer. This is indicated by the shape of the mountains, and if the path comes straight on the site of a village, the inhabitants build strong parapets of mason work, against which the avalanches may thunder and accumulate. These prove sometimes, however, too weak for the falling mass, and are borne away in their headlong sweep, adding still greater ruin and terror to their march. The village I saw crushed in the pass of the Tête Noire had such a wall built behind its church to protect it. For a long time it withstood the shock of the avalanches that fell against it, but one night there came one too strong to be resisted, and bore away parapet, church, hamlet and all. The wind caused by an avalanche in its passage is sometimes terrific. A blast is generated by the rapid motion of the headlong mass, like that created by a cannon ball in its descent, which extends to some distance both sides of it, and bears down trees and whirls them like feathers through the atmosphere. A church spire was once blown down by one that fell a quarter of a mile off. These masses of ice and snow sometimes fill up immense gorges, and are bored through by the torrent, forming a natural bridge, over which the peasants drive their cattle the entire summer. The Swiss have their "sacred groves," which are the forests that are left standing on a mountain side above a hamlet to protect it from avalanches.

Those which fall in early summer are attended with very little danger, as they usually descend in abysses where no traveller ever goes. They are seen at a distance, and hence have none of the appearance commonly supposed to belong to an avalanche. You hear first a rumbling sound, which soon swells to a full, though distant thunder tone; and in turning your eye towards the spot whence the sound proceeds, you see something which appears like a small white rivulet pouring down the mountain side, now

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disappearing in some ravine, and now reappearing on the edge of some cliff over which it runs, and falls with headlong speed and increased roar, till it finally lands in a deep abyss. You wonder at first how so small a movement can create so deep and startling a sound ; but in that apparently small rivulet are rolling whole precipices of ice, with a rapidity and power that nothing could resist. Yet these terrible visitants become as familiar to

the Swiss as our own rain-storms to us. The peasantry wait their regular descent in the spring as indications that winter is over. Those which are loosened by the human voice or the jingling of bells are so nicely balanced at the time, that it requires but the slightest change or shock in the atmosphere to destroy their equilibrium.

GLACIERS are the everlasting drapery of the Alps, clothing them in summer and winter with their robes of ice. They are formed by the successive thawing and freezing of the loose snow in spring and summer. Melting in the daytime and freezing at night, the whole mass at length becomes crystalized ;—and as the lower extremities melt in summer, they gradually move down the mountain, carrying with them debris of rocks and stone, making a perfect geological cabinet of the hill it throws up.

Glaciers begin at an elevation of about 8000 feet or a little less-above this are eternal snow fields. These gletschers or glaciers constitute one of the most striking features of Alpine scenery. Whether looked upon with the eye of a geologist, and the slow and mighty process of renovation and destruction, contemplated, working on from the birth to the death of Time; or whether regarded with the eye of a landscape painter, as they now clasp the breast of a bold peak in their shining embrace, and now stretch their icy arms far away into the mountains, and now plunge their glittering foreheads into the green valleythey are the same objects of intense interest, and ever fresh wonder.

As they push down the declivities, the obstructions they meet with, and the broken surface over which they pass, throw them into every variety of shape. Towers are suddenly squeezed up forty or fifty feet high, and precipices thrown out which topple over with the roar of thunder. Rocks or boulders that have been car

ried away from their resting-places on the bosom of a glacier, protect the ice under them by their shadow, while the surrounding mass gradually melts away, leaving them standing on stately pedestals, huge block obelisks slowly travelling towards the valley. Whenever these descending masses enter a gorge in the mountains, they spread out into it, partially filling it up, and are called ice seas. The Mer de Glace of Chamouny is one of these. These large collections of ice are traversed by immense crevices, reaching hundreds of feet down, and revealing that beautiful ultra-marine colour which the Rhone has as it leaves Lake Gene. va. Through these fissures, streams flow in every direction, and collecting at the lower extremity of the glacier, under the roof of a huge cavern of their own making, flow off, a turbid torrent, into the valley. Into these crevices the snow frequently drifts, choking up the portion near the surface, thus making concealed pitfalls for the traveller, and sometimes even for the wary, bold chamois hunter. Above the glaciers, near the summit, one frequently meets with red snow. I have seen it myself, and noticed it when I was not looking for it. The colour is said to be produced by a species of fungus called "Palmella Nivalis or Protococus," which makes the snow itself its soil, and germinates and grows in imperceptible branches over the surface. The invisible threads reaching out in every direction give to the snow a deep crimson blush, which, as the plant dies, changes into a dirty black. The number of glaciers in the Alps has been put by Ebel at four hundred, covering a surface of about three hundred and fifty square miles. But he might as well attempt to estimate the number and weight of all the avalanches that fall; for these glaciers are of all sizes, from a few rods to miles, and in every variety of shape and position. The one around the FinsterAar-horn contains a hundred and twenty square miles. The traveller sees, as at Grindelwald and Chamouni, only the branches, the mere arms of these mighty forms. Scientific men differ very much as to the relative thickness of glaciers, though they average probably not more than seventy or eighty feet. The Mer de Glace, where it pitches into the vale of Chamouni, is a hundred and eighty feet thick. Some of these glaciers are of a pure white, and shine in the noonday sun with dazzling splendour,