ON MOUNTAINS AND MANKIND. 547 



nations prior to A. D. lfiOO. I must content myself with the following 

 specimens, which will probably be new to most of my hearers. 



Benoit Marti was a professor of Greek and Hebrew at Bern, and a 

 friend of the great Conrad Gesner (I call him great, for he combined 

 the qualities of a man of science and a man of letters, was one of the 

 fathers of botany as well as of mountaineering, and was, in his many- 

 sidedness, a typical figure of the renaissance). Marti, in the year 

 1558 or 1559, wrote as follows of the view from his native city: 



" These are the mountains which form our pleasure and delight " 

 (the Latin is better — ' delicias nostra?, nostrique amores ') "when we 

 gaze at them from the higher parts of our city and admire their mighty 

 peaks and broken crags that threaten to fall at any moment. Here we 

 watch the risings and settings of the sun and seek signs of the weather. 

 In them we find food not only for our eyes and our minds but also for 

 our bellies " ; and he goes on to enumerate the dairy products of the 

 Oberland and the happy life of its population. I quote again this good 

 man : " Who, then, would not admire, love, willingly visit, explore, and 

 climb places of this sort? I assuredly should call those who are not 

 attracted by them mushrooms, stupid, dull fishes, and slow tortoises " 

 ( e fungos, stupidos insulsos pisces, lentosque chelones'). "In truth, 

 I cannot describe the sort of affection and natural love with which I 

 am drawn to mountains, so that I am never happier than on the moun- 

 tain crests, and there are no wanderings dearer to me than those on 

 the mountains. They are the theater of the Lord, displaying monu- 

 ments of past ages, such as precipices, rocks, peaks and chasms, and 

 never-melting glaciers " ; and so on through many eloquent paragraphs. 



I will only add two sentences from the preface to Simler's ' Val- 

 lesiae et Alpium Descriptio/ first published in 1574, which seems to me 

 a strong piece of evidence in favor of my view : " In the entire district, 

 and particularly in the very lofty ranges by which the Vallais is on all 

 sides surrounded, wonders of nature offer themselves to our view and 

 admiration. With my countrymen many of them have through fa- 

 miliarity lost their attraction; but foreigners are overcome at the mere 

 sight of the Alps, and regard as marvels what we through habit pay 

 no attention to." 



Mr. Coolidge, in his singularly interesting footnotes, goes on to 

 show that the books that remain to us are not isolated instances of a 

 feeling for mountains in the age of the renaissance. The mountains 

 themselves bear, or once bore, records even more impressive. Most of 

 us have climbed to the picturesque old castle at Thun and seen beyond 

 the rushing Aar the green heights of the outposts of the Alps, the 

 Stockhorn and the Niesen. Our friend, Marti, who climbed the for- 

 mer peak about 1558, records that he found on the summit ( tituli, 

 rythmi, et proverbia saxis inscripta una cum imaginibus et nominibus 



