together by the advance of the glacier, and now form but one.  Indeed, we have ample traditional evidence of the oscillations of glacier-boundaries in recent times.  When I was engaged in the investigation of this subject, I sought out all the chronicles kept in old convents or libraries which might throw any light upon it.  Among other records, I chanced upon the following, which may have some interest for the historian as well as the geologist.

During the religious wars of the sixteenth century, when the Catholics gained the ascendancy in the Canton of Valais, the inhabitants of the upper valleys adhered to the Protestant faith.  Shut out from ordinary communication with the Protestant churches by the Bernese Oberland, the account states that these peasants braved every obstacle to the exercise of their religion, and used to carry their children over a certain road by the valley of Viesch, across the Alps, to be baptized at Grindelwald, on the farther side of the glaciers of Aletsch and Viesch.  I could not understand this statement, for no such road exists, or could be conceived possible at present; nor was there any knowledge of it among the guides, intimate as they are with every feature of the region.  Impressed, however, with the idea that there must be some foundation for the statement, I carefully examined the ground, and, penetrating under the glacier of Aletsch, I actually found, a number of feet below the present level of the ice, the paved road along which these hardy people travelled to church with their children, and some traces of which are still visible.  It has been almost completely buried, although here and there it reappears; but at this day it is completely impassable for ordinary travel.

Evidence of a like character is found in a number of facts cited by Venetz in his celebrated paper upon the variations of temperature in the Swiss Alps, drawn from the parish and commune registers of the Canton of Valais.  Among these are acts concerning the right to roads which are now either entirely hidden by ice, or rendered nearly useless by the advance of the glacier, a lawsuit respecting the use of a forest which no longer exists, but the site of which is covered by a glacier, and other records of a similar character.  The only document, so far as I know, previous to this century, which furnishes the means of delineating with any accuracy the former boundary of a glacier, is a topographical plan of the environs of the Grimsel, including the extremity of the Aar, making a part of Altmann’s work upon the Alps.

In 1740, Kapeler, a physician of Lucerne, undertook a journey to the mountains of the Aar, to visit certain crystal grottos, now well known, but then recently discovered.  He prepared a map of these grottos and their vicinity, in which they are represented as being situated at some distance from the extremity of the glacier, the lower end of which is now considerably beyond them.[50]