I have not heard anything concerning Le Conte’s glacier lecture, but he seems to have drawn all he knows of Sierra glaciers and new theories concerning them so directly from here that I cannot think that he will claim discovery, etc. If he does, I will not be made poorer.
Professor Kneeland, Secretary Boston Institute of Technology, gathered some letters I sent to Runkle and that “Tribune” letter, and hashed them into a compost called a paper for the Boston Historical Society, and gave me credit for all of the smaller sayings and doings and stole the broadest truth to himself. I have the proof-sheets of “The Paper” and will show them to you some time. But all of such meanness can work no permanent evil to any one except the dealer.
As for the living “glaciers of the Sierras,” here is what I have learned concerning them. You will have the first chance to steal, for I have just concluded my experiments on them for the season and have not yet cast them at any of the great professors, or presidents.
One of the yellow days of last October, when I was among the mountains of the “Merced Group,” following the footprints of the ancient glaciers that once flowed grandly from their ample fountains, reading what I could of their history as written in moraines and cañons and lakes and carved rocks, I came upon a small stream that was carrying mud I had not before seen. In a calm place where the stream widened I collected some of this mud and observed that it was entirely mineral in composition and fine as flour, like the mud from a fine-grit grindstone. Before I had time to reason I said, Glacier mud, mountain meal.
Then I observed that this muddy stream issued from a bank of fresh quarried stones and dirt that was sixty or seventy feet in height. This I at once took to be a moraine. In climbing to the top of it I was struck with the steepness of its slope and with its raw, unsettled, plantless, newborn appearance. The slightest touch started blocks of red and black slate, followed by a rattling train of smaller stones and sand and a cloud of the dry dust of mud, the whole moraine being as free from lichens and weather stains as if dug from the mountain that very day.
When I had scrambled to the top of the moraine, I saw what seemed a huge snow-bank four or five hundred yards in length by half a mile in width. Imbedded in its stained and furrowed surface were stones and dirt like that of which the moraine was built. Dirt-stained lines curved across the snow-bank from side to side, and when I observed that these curved lines coincided with the curved moraine and that the stones and dirt were most abundant near the bottom of the bank, I shouted, “A living glacier.” These bent dirt lines show that the ice is flowing in its different parts with unequal velocity, and these embedded stones are journeying down to be built into the moraine, and they gradually become more abundant as they approach the moraine because there the motion is slower.
On traversing my new-found glacier, I came to a crevass, down a wide and jagged portion of which I succeeded in making my way, and discovered that my so-called snow-bank was clear green ice, and, comparing the form of the basin which it occupied with similar adjacent basins that were empty, I was led to the opinion that this glacier was several hundred feet in depth.
Then I went to the “snow-banks” of Mts. Lyell and McClure and believed that they also were true glaciers and that a dozen other snow-banks seen from the summit of Mt. Lyell crouching in shadow were glaciers, living as any in the world and busily engaged in completing that vast work of mountain-making, accomplished by their giant relatives now dead, which, united and continuous, covered all the range from summit to sea like a sky.
I’m going to take your painter boys with me into one of my best sanctums on your recommendation for holiness.
Emerson has sent me a profound little book styled “The Growth of the Mind,” by Reed. Do you know it? It is full of the fountain truth.