simplest, and because it is that form which has been used in the report of the proceedings of the Montreal meeting in the organ of the Royal geographical society. The present writer has, however, never seen it so spelled on any geographical map. It is spelled in three different ways in the pubilcations of the Canada survey, and in the same number of ways in Stieler's 'Hand-atlas.' J. D. Whitney.
THE TASMAN GLACIER.
A year ago, accounts were published of the attempt in 1822, of Mr. W. S. Green, an Englishman,
to ascend Mount Cook, the highest (12,350) of the New-Zealand Alps. He was accompanied by two practised Swiss guides from Grindelwald, and reached a great altitude over snow and ice, but failed in his main object, chiefly on account of bad weather. A somewhat similar exploration was undertaken in March, 1383, b; Dr. R. v. Lendenfeld of Christchurch, New Zealand, accompanied by his wife, three shepherds to serve as porters, and a driver for the wagon in which the supplies were carried up to within a few miles of the Tasman glacier. Bad weather on the approach to the mountains was followed by nine days
without a cloud, during which a good piece of triangulation was executed, the Hochstetter dome ascended (2,840 m.), and material collected for a fairly detailed map on a scale of 1:80,000. The results of the survey now appear as supplement 73 to Petermann's mittheilungen (Der Tasman-gletscher und seine umgebung; Gotha, June, 1884, 80p.), with a general and local map, a well-executed reproduction of a photograph taken from the medial moraine of the great Tasman glacier, which we copy in reduced form, and several cuts. The glacier was found to be twenty-eight kilometres in length,—three kilometres longer than the Aletsch, the greatest in Switzerland. Its lower part is of moderate slope and slow motion,
greatly covered by moraines. Green described the New-Zealand Alps as equalling or exceeding those of Europe in picturesqueness, but Lendenfeld thinks them inferior. The mountain form is less pronounced, the snow-fielda are smaller, and the glaciers are much obscured by morainic rubblsh: bushes replace pines, and the flat-bottomed valleys are without villages and fields. The summit of the Hochstetter dome, a sharp edge of hard-packed snow, was reached by Lendenfeld, his wife, and one porter, after a daring climb across a delicate ice-bridge, of which the author's rough figure is here copied. Sitting astride
