Not only does the glacier collect a variety of foreign materials on its upper surface, but its sides as well as its lower surface are studded with boulders, stones, pebbles, sand, coarse and fine gravel, so that it forms in reality a gigantic rasp, with sides hundreds of feet deep, and a surface thousands of feet wide and many miles in length, grinding over the bottom and along the walls between which it moves, polishing, grooving, and scratching them as it passes onward.  One who is familiar with the track of this mighty engine will recognize at once where the large boulders have hollowed out their deeper furrows, where small pebbles have drawn their finer marks, where the stones with angular edges have left their sharp scratches, where sand and gravel have rubbed and smoothed the rocky surface, and left it bright and polished as if it came from the hand of the marble-worker.  These marks are not to be mistaken by any one who has carefully observed them; the scratches, furrows, grooves, are always rectilinear, trending in the direction in which the glacier is moving, and most distinct on that side of the surface-inequalities facing the direction of the moving mass, while the lee-side remains mostly untouched.

It may be asked, how it is known that the glacier carries this powerful apparatus on its sides and bottom, when they are hidden from sight.  I answer, that we might determine the fact theoretically from certain known conditions respecting the conformation of the glacier; to which I shall allude presently; but we need not resort to this kind of evidence, since we have ocular demonstration of the truth.  Here and there on the sides of the glacier it is possible to penetrate between the walls and the ice to a great depth, and even to follow such a gap to the very bottom of the valley, and everywhere do we find the surface of the ice fretted as I have described it, with stones of every size, from the pebble to the boulder, and also with sand and gravel of all sorts, from the coarsest grain to the finest, and these materials, more or less firmly set in the ice, form the grating surface with which, in its onward movement down the Alpine valleys, it leaves everywhere unmistakable, traces of its passage.

We come now to the moraines, those walls of loose materials built by the glaciers themselves along their road.  They have been divided into three classes, namely, lateral, medial, and terminal moraines.  Let us look first at the lateral ones; and to understand them we must examine the conformation of the glacier below the neve, where it assumes the character of pure compact ice.  We have seen that the fields of snow, where the glaciers have their origin, are level, and that lower down, where these masses of snow begin to descend toward the narrower valley, they follow its trough-like shape, sinking toward the centre and sloping upward against the sides, so that the surface of the glacier, about the region of the neve, is slightly concave.  But lower down