A GLACIER GARDEN.
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.
To look at these polished cavities, nobody would dream that they were the mere evidences of the eddying action of an ice-stream upon a small fragment of rock, and yet this is exactly what geology teaches us they really are; indeed, there is no rock or mineral, even the flint and agate, but what is permeable in some degree by the action of water; and like granite and marble, most stones are softer and more easily wrought before they are dried and hardened by air-seasoning. Are not similar effects of the action of torrents in the erosion of rock seen in almost every gorge through which rushes a mountain torrent? It seems all but incredible that to a little rippling rivulet is due the tremendous erosion of many alpine ravines, with their great height and precipitous walls. But science tells us very strange tales, even that the mountain streams in the present day are depressing the ridges of the Alps and the Apennines, raising the plains of Lombardy and Provence, and extending the coasts far into the waters of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Thus it is easy to understand how, at that remote period when a vast ice-sheet covered not only our garden but all Switzerland from the Alps to the Jura, the loose stones which had become detached from the moraine, and were met by some barrier in the ice whirled about by rushing water, ground down first the ice, then the rock, and in the wear and tear of unnumbered centuries grew round and smooth like the basins in which they revolved.
It is very seldom that loose fragments of rock exercise a protective power upon the ice; but instances have been met with on the higher glaciers of large stones warding off the rain and the radiation of the sun from the ice immediately beneath them; so that as the glacier wastes and lowers in the course of time, these glacier-tables remain fixed upon elevated pillars of ice, which sometimes reach to a height of ten or twelve feet above the general level.
At Lucerne, it is impossible to forget, as we wander about the paths in this archaic garden, that countless years before the great glaciers planed away the old flora from off the face of the land, there was a period of tropical heat and tropical vegetation which succeeded the earliest epoch in the existence of our globe. Petrifactions of the first stages of life are distinctly visible upon, the rocks—relics of a primeval ocean.
But with the story of the rocks there is mingled no trace of human interest. For them Time has stood still and the seasons brought no change, until a few years ago, when the ground being excavated for the foundations of a new house, these unsuspected relics were brought to light from amongst the sand and pebbles and ice-worn boulders. These relics are unconnected even with the first traditions of the people of the Alps, and had remained in quiet slumber beneath the glacial débris for long ages before the earliest settlers raised their pile-dwellings above the blue waters of the lake. Evidence, indeed, has been afforded that the lacustrine dwelling-places were inhabited by generations of men two thousand, or, as some authorities affirm, six thousand years before the Christian era. Amongst the piles of oak, or beech, or fir wood, rising occasionally in three or four tiers, one above another, in the accumulated waste of animal and vegetable life found at the bottom of the lake, were stone celts and other implements of bone or flint, memorials of a people who perished at a period beyond the reach of the most distant annals; very old, in an historical point of view, although in a geological estimate they are but of yesterday. For what is the antiquity of the earliest of these relics compared with that of the latest records plainly written upon the smooth surface of the rocks?
In the glacier garden we find not only the indefinable charm of a vast antiquity, but a suggestiveness of the strange contrast between the present and the past. On the one hand there is busy life, noise, warmth upon the winding shores of the placid lake, magnificent mountains girdled by forest trees, and woven in and out with verdant pastures and far-off snow—all things lovely of the earth present before our eyes; on the other hand, we have a glimpse into the remote and mysterious past, when the sun shone down upon an illimitable white world of snow and ice.