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Show 90 significance of Muir's entry into this underworld. He had made his most dramatic discovery, not below the glacier where he found glacial mud, not overlooking it from the terminal moraine, but actually in it, and for good reason. For most laymen, a shrund is the surest sign of a live, active glacier, because it is the crevasse which lies close to the head of the amphitheater against the mountain, and it indicates that the ice has been moving down and away from the mountain wall. It is the glacier's point of origin; the winter snows which fill it keep the glacier moving. Even hidden under the snows of winter, the glacier continues its slow sure work of carving out the landscape. Because this is true, Muir had concrete support for his belief in a dynamic Nature, a wilderness that was still being made. Now he had lived what he had only read in Agassiz before. This kind of close observation became the inevitable starting point when he turned to his differences with LeConte, who was one of those he ridiculed as making a hash out of glacial theory. LeConte had actually observed the Lyell Glacier with Muir, but from a distance. Muir recounted the ambiguous report that LeConte published, which said that such a glacier was neither true nor typical, but was "in some sense a glacier." Then Muir insisted that imperfect data, acquired from such a distance, was "a sample of rashness sometimes evidenced by scientific observers" who had no prior experience and had made no effort to acquire some when the opportunity presented itself. LeConte had seen no glacial ice because he hadn't gone into |