74 LOUIS AGASSIZ. [CHAP. v. 



when read at Lucerne soon changed into a desire to 

 know more about it. 



A mountaineer, Perraudin, of the Bagnes valley, at 

 the foot of the St. Bernard, in Valais, told de Charpentier, 

 as far back as 1815, that the large boulders perched on 

 the sides of the Alpine valleys were carried and left 

 there by glaciers. De Charpentier thought the hypoth- 

 esis so extraordinary and extravagant that it was not 

 worth examining or even considering. Fourteen years 

 later, in 1829, at the meeting of the Swiss naturalists 

 at the Grand St. Bernard's Hospital, his good and 

 most esteemed friend, the engineer of the "Fonts et 

 Chaussees " of the Valais Canton, M. Venetz, not only 

 supported the view advanced by Perraudin, but told 

 the Society that his observations led him to believe that 

 the whole Valais has been formerly covered by an 

 immense glacier, and that it even extended outside of 

 the canton, covering all the "Canton de Vaud" as far 

 as the Jura Mountains, carrying all the boulders and 

 erratic materials, which are now scattered all over the 

 large Swiss valley. In 1821 the extremely modest 

 Venetz had read before the Swiss naturalists a paper 

 entitled, " Memoire sur les variations de la temperature 

 des Alpes de la Suisse." In some way the memoir was 

 left entirely unnoticed, and the manuscript put aside. 

 De Charpentier, as soon as he was convinced of the 

 correctness of the Venetz theory, hunted up the man- 

 uscript, which was buried under the dust of the archives 

 of the Helvetic Society of Naturalists, and had it finally 

 printed and published, in 1833,- twelve years after it 

 was written,- -in " Erstern Bandes zweyte abtheilung," 



