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.

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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

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have suggested the fanciful names given to some of the rocks are entirely due to the planing of the ice. The Cannon Rock,' the Giant's Coffin,' the 'Man-of-War,' and others, owe their forms to the mighty moulding-plane which in bygone ages passed over them.

I have spoken of the echoes in the Gap of Dunloe. They are very fine, and are usually awakened by a guide who plays a bugle, and to whom extra wages are paid on this account. The man times his operations so that the echo and the original sound. shall not overlap, and he usually places his guests behind a hill-brow, which partially cuts away the direct sound, but offers no impediment to the echoes. He flourishes his trumpet, and pauses; the rocks respond, the first return of the sound being almost as strong as the blast itself; the sonorous pulses leap from crag to crag, and from them to the listener's ear, diminishing in intensity and augmenting in softness the oftener they are reflected. Moore's melody of The Meeting of the Waters,' suitably played, is thus returned with exquisite sweetness by the reflecting rocks.

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The rain here is pitiless, but the march of the showering clouds over the mountains is sometimes very grand. One really good day is all that I have been able to number out of six spent on the banks of the Lower Lake, and even that day was ushered