from its origin to its end. The day had been one of cloudless splendour, and there was something awful in the darkness of the firmament. This deepening of the blue is believed by those who know the mountains to be an indication of a humid atmosphere. The transparency, however, was wonderful. The summits of Mont Cervin and the Weisshorn stood out in clear definition, while the mighty mass of the Finsteraarhorn rose with perfect sharpness of outline close at hand. As long as the sun was high there was no trace of fog in the valleys, but as he sloped to the west the shadow of the Finsteraarhorn crept over the snow-fields at its base. A dim sea of fog began to form, which after a time rose to a considerable height, and then rolled down like a river along the flanks of the mountain. On entering the valley of the Rhone, it crossed a precipitous barrier, down which it poured like a cataract; but long before it reached the bottom it escaped from the shadow in which it had been engendered, and was hit once more by the direct beams of the sun. Its utter dissipation was the consequence, and though the billows of fog rolled on incessantly from behind, the cloud-river made no progress, but disappeared, as if by magic, where the sunbeams played upon it. The conditions were analogous to those which hold in the case of a glacier. Here the ice-river is incessantly nourished by the mountain snow: it

moves down its valley, but does not advance in front. At a certain point the consumption by melting is equal to the supply, and here the glacier ceases. In the case before us the cloud-river, nourished by the incessant condensation of the atmospheric vapour, moved down its valley, but ceased at the point where the dissipating action of the sunbeams equalled the supply from the cloudgenerator behind.

VI.

KILLARNEY.

THE total amount of heat which the sun sends annually to the earth is invariable, and hence if any portion of the earth's surface during any given year be colder than ordinary, we may infer with certainty that some other portion of the surface is then warmer than ordinary. The port of Odessa owes its importance to a case of atmospheric compensation of this kind. Forty or fifty years ago, Western Europe received less than its normal amount of heat; the missing sunbeams fell upon the East, and Odessa became, to some extent, the granary from which the hungry West was fed. The position it then assumed it has since maintained. The atmosphere is the grand distributor of heat. It has its cold and warm currents-vast aërial rivers, which chill or cheer according to the proximate sources from which they are derived. In this present year 1860 the British Isles appear to lie near the common boundary of two such currents -the limit, however, shifting so as to cause both

to pass over us in swift succession. Near this boundary line the atmospheric currents mingle, and the copious aqueous precipitation which we now observe is the result.

Superadded to this source of general rain, we have at Killarney local condensers in the neighbouring mountains. Round the cool crests of Carrantual and his peaked and craggy brothers the moist and tilted south-west wind curdles ceaselessly into clouds, which nourish the moss and heather whose decomposition produces the peat which clothes the disintegrated rocks. Grandly the vast cumuli build themselves in the atmosphere, hanging at times lazily over the mountains and mottling with their shadows the brown sides of the hills. Reddened by the evening sun, these clouds cast their hues upon the lakes, the crisped surface of which breaks up their images into broad spaces of diffused crimson light. On other days the cumuli seem whipped into dust, and scattered through the general air, mixing therewith as the smoke of London mingles with the supernatant atmosphere. Day by day the guides prophesy fine weather-the blackest cloud is all for hate.' You are assured that if you start to-day you will not get a single dhrop' of rain; you go, and are drenched; but the guide's purpose is accomplished, the moderate sum of three and sixpence being added to his private store.

6

In ages past these mountain condensers acted differently. The wet winds of the ocean, which now descend in liquid showers upon the hills, once discharged their contents as snow. And a famous deposit they must have made. In addition to the charms which this region presents to every eye, the mind of him who can read the rocks aright is carried back to a time when deep snowbeds cumbered the mountain-slopes, and vast glaciers filled the vales. In neither England nor Wales do the traces of glacial action reach the magnitude which they exhibit here.

The Gap of Dunloe is the channel of an ancient glacier; and all through it the scratching and polishing may be traced. The flanks of the Purple Mountain have been planed down by the moving ice, and the rocky amphitheatre which the guides choose for the production of echoes has been scooped and polished by the same agency. Near the point where the road from the Gap joins that up the Black Valley is a slab of rock, which rivals the famous Höllen Platte in Haslithal. The Black Valley, indeed, was the mould through which a great glacier from the adjacent mountains moved, 'unhasting, unresting,' grinding the rocks right and left, and filling the entire basin now occupied by the waters of the Upper Lake. All the islands of this lake are glacier domes. The shapes, moreover, which