power that dwells beneath the dull, dead-looking surface of the earth.
But sections cut by the glaciers, displaying some of the internal
framework of Shasta, show that comparatively long periods of
quiescence intervened between many distinct eruptions, during which
the cooling lavas ceased to flow, and took their places as permanent
additions to the bulk of the growing mountain. Thus with alternate
haste and deliberation eruption succeeded eruption, until Mount Shasta
surpassed even its present sublime height.

Then followed a strange contrast. The glacial winter came on. The
sky that so often had been darkened with storms of cinders and ashes
and lighted by the glare of volcanic fires was filled with crystal
snow-flowers, which, loading the cooling mountain, gave birth to
glaciers that, uniting edge to edge, at length formed one grand
conical glacier--a down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of
smouldering fire, crushing and grinding its brown, flinty lavas, and
thus degrading and remodeling the entire mountain from summit to base.
How much denudation and degradation has been effected we have no means
of determining, the porous, crumbling rocks being ill adapted for the
reception and preservation of glacial inscriptions.

The summit is now a mass of ruins, and all the finer striations have
been effaced from the flanks by post-glacial weathering, while the
irregularity of its lavas as regards susceptibility to erosion, and
the disturbance caused by inter- and post-glacial eruptions, have
obscured or obliterated those heavier characters of the glacial record
found so clearly inscribed upon the granite pages of the high Sierra
between latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes and 39 degrees. This much,
however, is plain: that the summit of the mountain was considerably
lowered, and the sides were deeply grooved and fluted while it was a