Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 50, Vol. I, December 13, 1884

No. 50.—Vol. I.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1884.
The glacier garden lies far away on a steep hillside by the Lake of the Forest Cantons. Close to the picturesque town of Lucerne, a little path leads past the sandstone crag on which is hewn Thorwaldsen’s famous monument, to the small inclosed space, overshadowed by trees, where have recently been discovered vestiges of the most remote days in the youth of our old mother-earth. Hidden away amongst tangled fern and bright green grass, we see huge surfaces of native rock, some furrowed with parallel lines, others, with curious petrifactions of the sea; and giant boulders smoothed and polished that do not in the least resemble the surrounding rocks, but which are travellers from the Alps, left stranded here by the glaciers in the last great Ice Age. It is indeed a wonderful garden, with a wonderful history, and although, as unscientific observers, we cannot trace the different phases of its development in the dim geological past, still, standing by these gray old stones on which have been laid the softening and romantic influences of countless ages, it is as if we had pages of the world’s history unrolled before our eyes.
The proofs of past glaciers are all around us in the grindings and scratchings on the rocks—in the ice-worn stones—and still more in the deep smooth circular hollows, which are perhaps the most perfect known specimens of the singular phenomena called glacier-mills. These erosions have been found also in Scandinavia and in the Jura Mountains, and are caused by the rapid whirling of a stone by a stream from the melting ice, which in the course of ages scoops out ever deeper and wider these cavities in the rock. But in this little garden we can trace the origin of the glacier-mills, from the tiny erosion just commenced, to the grand basin, twenty feet in diameter, and more than thirty feet deep, on whose smooth walls are clearly marked the spiral windings caused by the whirling of the stone perpetually from east to west. If you take up the glacier-stone that lies at the bottom of this mill, you will see not only how strangely round and polished it has become, but also that it is composed of totally different rock, and must have been transported hither by the great Reuss glacier from the granite slopes of the St Gothard.