Glacieres or Freezing Caverns

Author: Edwin Swift Balch
Publisher: Johnson Reprint Corporation, New York, NY. 1970.
Library of Congress Catalogue Number: 73-116687
Number of Pages: 337

The edition reproduced here was originally published in 1900.

From the introduction:
Perhaps the rarest of major American twentieth-century speleological books, Glacieres or Freezing Caverns (henceforth abbreviated GFC), is unusual even among pioneering works on caves. Those in the forefront of speleology and meteorology quickly recognized it for what it is: a detailed set of lucid scientific deductions, based on analytical observations of underground ice, prefaced by a scholarly review of the earlier writings on the subject. Balch's conclusions clarified, correlated, and systematized earlier ideas rather than initating original concepts. Nevertheless, it was his original reasoning expressed in this book that caused American science to recognize the basic principles of spelean meteorology. So well did Blach delineate the cause of occurrence and persistence of ice in certain caves that, despite the overwhelming scientific progress of the subsequent decades and the notable discoveries of the intervening generations of cavers who had forgotten Balch's very name, his theory of glacieres remains essentially unmodified today.