Central Europe . of the carrying power towhich running water may attain, especially when, loadedwith fragments torn from its bed, it flings itself onward ina stream of slush. Nature, then, seems to be trying tocreate something half-way between a river and a glacier. The glaciers, those imperceptibly moving rivers of icethat travel down majestically from large ice-fields, passingbetween forests and coming into the neighbourhood of THE ALPS AND THE GERMAN DANUBE 21 human habitations, are doing their part in the geologicalwork still proceeding in the Alps. The spectacle of oneof these great glaci
Central Europe . of the carrying power towhich running water may attain, especially when, loadedwith fragments torn from its bed, it flings itself onward ina stream of slush. Nature, then, seems to be trying tocreate something half-way between a river and a glacier. The glaciers, those imperceptibly moving rivers of icethat travel down majestically from large ice-fields, passingbetween forests and coming into the neighbourhood of THE ALPS AND THE GERMAN DANUBE 21 human habitations, are doing their part in the geologicalwork still proceeding in the Alps. The spectacle of oneof these great glaciers seems to threaten that the ice willpush its way, conquering and destroying, into the domainof life and cultivation. When, however, we consider theAlps from a wider horizon of time, we become aware thatexactly the reverse has taken place. The extent of peren-nial snow- and ice-fields actually existing in the Alps is1400 square miles, and the area of the glaciers of the fthone ClcLcier?&.% Other Glaciers. Fig. 4.—The Rhone Glacier in the Ice Age. (After Falsan et Chantre.) Bernese Oberland—the largest connected expanse of thepresent day — is 180 square miles, but the diluvianAlpine glacier system occupied more than 65,000 squaremiles. How modest appears the Aletsch Glacier, with itsfifteen miles of length and its superficies of forty-fivesquare miles, in comparison with the Rhone Glacier of theGlacial Period (9270 square miles) which passed—2600feet thick—through the narrow valley of St. Maurice, andspread its high front from Lyons to Vienne. This picturefrom the Glacial Period gives us a new standard by which 22 CENTRAL EUROPE to measure the present ; the woodlands clothing themountain sides, and the many-coloured blossoms of themeadows, pushing their way to the very edge of thesnow-fields, seem a triumphal procession of life. The snow-fields themselves, in their present restricteddimensions, are not, only a boundary of life, but also astorehouse whence life draws
Size: 1865px × 1340px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookidcentraleurop, bookyear1903
