were examining.  The maire afterwards promised to rail off all that end of the glaciere, and forbid his workmen to venture upon it.  Considering that the hole itself was only opened two years before by the fall of a column, and has already undergone such changes, I shall be surprised if the ice-bridge, and all that part on which we lay to fathom the pit, does not fall in before very long; and then, by means of steps and ropes and ladders, it may be possible to reach the entrance to the lower cave, 190 feet below the surface of the earth.  May I be there to see![72]

The left side of the glaciere, near the entrance, was occupied by a columnar cascade, behind which I forced a passage by chopping away some lovely ornaments of ice.  Here also the solid ground-ice falls away a little under the surface, leaving a cavern 8 or 9 feet deep, on the rock side of which every possible glacial fantasy was to be found.  The stalactites here presented the peculiar prismatic structure so often noticed; but on the more exposed side of the column they were tipped with limpid ice, free from all apparent external or internal lines.  This reminded me of what we had observed in the Glaciere of La Genolliere, namely, that the surface-lines tended to disappear under thaw; so I cut a piece of prismatic ice and put it in my mouth.  In a short time it became perfectly limpid, and on breaking it up I could discover no signs of prism.  On some parts of the floor of the glaciere, the ice was apparently unprismatic, generally in connection with running water or other marks of thaw; but, to my surprise, I found that it split into prisms very readily.

The maire could not understand how it was that, after a winter especially severe, as that of 1863-4 had been, there should be even less ice than in the preceding summer, and we could see the marks of last year’s cutting, down to the edge of the moulin.  He said that they had never before cut down in that direction; but in the summer of 1863 they had been so much struck by the clearness of the ice which formed the floor, that they had cut it freely, and removed a large quantity.  This, I believe, was the cause of the absence of any great amount of fresh ice.  The slope of the whole ice-floor is considerable, and the workmen increased the slope by cutting away the ice in the neighbourhood of the edge of the moulin:  they had also, as we could see quite plainly, excavated the clearer parts of the ice between the entrance to the cave and the moulin, so that a sort of trough ran down from near the foot of the snow to the pit at the lower end of the glaciere.  When we were there, the water rushed down this trough, and was lost in the pit; and very probably the same may have been the case in the earlier parts of the year, when, according to the view I have already expressed, the ice would under ordinary circumstances have been formed.  If this be so, the caverns below must have received immense additions to their stores of