Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition

[731] all the Swiss glaciers, is greater than the lateral, the ice being pushed forward in the middle faster than on the sides. But there would seem to be more than one axis of progression in this broad mass of ice; for though the centre is pushed out beyond the rest, the terminal wall does not present one uniform curve, but forms a number of more or less projecting angles or folds. A few feet in front of this wall is a ridge of loose materials, stones, pebbles, and boulders, repeating exactly the outline of the ice where it now stands; a few feet in advance of this, again, is another ridge precisely like it; still a few feet beyond, another; and so on, for four or five concentric zigzag crescent-shaped moraines, followed by two others more or less marked, till they fade into the larger morainic mass, upon which stands the belt of wood dividing the present glacier from the bay. Agassiz counted eight distinct moraines between the glacier and the belt of wood, and four concentric moraines in the wood itself. It is plain that the glacier has ploughed into the forest within some not very remote period, for the trees along its margin are loosened and half uprooted, though not yet altogether decayed. In the presence of the glacier