is one of the most celebrated passes, the Gemmi;
witness (omitting obscure native accidents) the
French lady, a senator's daughter, whom, two
or three summers ago, her stumbling mule
pitched over the precipice. Her husband, walking
within a few feet of her, heard her one shriek
of despair, and she was gone. She was picked
up afterwards a mangled mass. The Gemmi,
therefore, although a sensational pass, is
certainly not a safe one, and it would hardly be
pleasant to be caught on that part of it by a thick
fog, a snow-storm, or a hurricane.

Our third and uppermost Switzerland supplies
the Alpine Club with spots where human foot
has never trod, or where the number of its
footprints may be counted. It furnishes peaks
ascended only by scientific men and human
donkeys. Nor is it the first time that fortune
has associated those names. When the invading
French infantry formed its squares to resist the
onslaught of the Egyptian horsemen, a standing
joke with the soldiers was the cry, " Savans and
asses into the middle!"

Now what, one asks, is the inducement which
leads to the essaying of these perilous feats?
One would gladly find a reasonable motive; but
none is either found or offered. A late secretary
to the Alpine Club leaves unanswered the
very natural question, " What is the use of
scaling precipitous rocks, and being for half an
hour at the top of the terrestrial globe?"
alleging that these are questions of sentiment, and
do not admit of conclusive arguments on either
side. But if it once be conceded that life is
risked for no earthly use whatever, most people
will think that the admission settles the matter
most conclusively.

What is the motive of foolhardiness? We
have said before, and again say, that the only
one discoverable is BRAG. The common-place
sport of steeple-chasing is eclipsed and
extinguished by pinnacle-chasing. But it is time to
be instant in urging that the first ascent of an
unclimbed peak, in which only a single life
(whether of guide or friend) is lost, confers, not
fame, but a painful notoriety, which is a punishment
instead of a reward of the exploit.

Is scientific observation the object? Hardly.
No problem is solved; no geographical difficulty
cleared away. It is not like ascertaining
whether at the North Pole there be an open sea, or
whether, in the midst of Antarctic ice, there lie
a region of mild and habitable temperature. If
it be merely wanted to behold the ghastly flame
of candles burning at great elevations, or to
learn by experiment wliat vegetables will and
will not cook in water boiling fifteen hundred feet
above the level of the sea, Mont Blanc is there
open, ready, secure, guaranteed to be ascended
and descended with the least possible chance of
broken bones. Glaciers may be studied, rare
minerals, plants, and insects collected, with
equal safety. So that a society for the scaling
or such heights as the Schreckhorn, the Eiger,
and the Matterhorn, contributes about as much
to the advancement of science as would a club
of young gentlemen who should undertake to
bestride all the weathercocks of all the cathedral
spires in the United Kingdom.

Is it for the love of the picturesque, and for
the sake of the view from the mountain-top,
that the gymnast climbs to his giddy eminence?
A panorama, however magnificent, will be but
carelessly and cursorily scanned during
progresses in which one false step, one feeble hand-
hold, is death. But it is notorious that the
most difficult peaks do not command the finest
views. The eye derives far greater gratification
from the scenes displayed by our second region.

Of the manifold surprises in store for the
climber, one or two instances will suffice.
Professor Tyndall, illustrating the phenomenon
now known under the name of Regelation, takes
a straight bar of ice, and by passing it successively
through a series of moulds, each more
curved than the last, finally turns it out as a
semi-ring. The straight bar on being squeezed
into the curved mould breaks, but by continuing
the pressure new surfaces come in contact, and
the continuity of the mass is restored. By
taking a handful of those small fragments and
squeezing them together, they freeze at their
points of contact, and the mass becomes one
aggregate. " The crossing of snow bridges in
the upper regions of the Swiss glaciers, is often
rendered possible solely by the regelation of the
snow granules. The climber treads the mass
carefully, and causes its granules to regelate;
he thus obtains an amount of rigidity which,
without the act of regelation, would be quite
unattainable. To those unaccustomed to such
work, the crossing of snow bridges, spanning, as
they often do, fissures a hundred feet and more
in depth, must appear quite appalling." By
way of encouragement, we are previously
informed that, in order that this freezing shall take
place, the snow ought to be at thirty-two degrees
and moist. When below thirty-two degrees and
dry, on being squeezed it behaves like salt.

The same great authority, to impress his
readers with what happens when heat waves
pursue their way unabsorbed, reminds them
that a joint of meat might be roasted before a
fire, the air around the joint being cold as ice.

"The air on high mountains," he adds, " may
be intensely cold, while a burning sun is
overhead. The solar rays which, striking on the
human skin, are almost intolerable, are
incompetent to heat the air sensibly, and we have
only to withdraw into perfect shade to feel the
chill of the atmosphere. I never, on any
occasion, suffered so much from solar heat as in
descending from the Corridor to the Grand
Plateau of Mont Blanc, on August 13, 1857.
Though we were at the time hip deep in
snow, the sun blazed against my companion and
myself with unendurable power. Immersion in
the shadow of the Dôme du Gôuté at once
changed my feelings, for here the air was at a
freezing temperature. It was not, however,
sensibly colder than the air through which the
sunbeams passed, and I suffered, not from the
contact of hot air, but from radiant heat, which
had reached me through an icy cold medium."