Charpentier's Essay on Glaciers. 15S 



time disposed only along the sides of glaciei-s, were now scat- 

 tered here and there on the same bed they had occupied. 

 These debris continued in their place wherever water had not 

 access to them ; and where torrents were formed, only the large 

 blocks remained. The small debris carried farther, formed 

 new beds of diluvium, which have often interred the large erra- 

 tic blocks found in them. When the melting of the ice had con- 

 fined the glaciers within the lakes, their influence on the 

 jpormation of Lower Switzerland would entirely cease; and the 

 materials which the torrents, to which they give rise, con- 

 tinued to carry along with them, as they do to the present 

 day, were arrested by the lakes, and accumulated at their up- 

 per ends. Once more restricted to the valleys of the Alps, 

 the glaciers experienced alternations of progression and re- 

 trocession analogous to those we witness in our own times, 

 and which explain the various stages of moraines to be seen 

 on the flanks of mountains on the two sides of the valley. 

 But when the vapours diminished greatly, and the atmo- 

 sphere cleared, the rains becoming less frequent and the sun 

 warmer, the glaciers melted more and more, and retired 

 within the high valleys, where we find them in the present 

 day. This influence of glaciers, formerly so considerable, on the 

 configuration of the surface of the valleys and basins of Switzer- 

 land, is still continued though on a very small scale. They still 

 transport debris, form moraines, leave scattered deposits ; in a 

 word, create an erratic formation around them. Torrents 

 carry away a part of these materials, heap them up in the 

 lakes, and form diluvium ; so that the present geological 

 epoch is nothing else than a feeble continuation of that which 

 preceded it. 



Such are M. de Charpentier's views on the formation of 

 the erratic deposit ; views founded on a long series of studies 

 and observations, and which he brings forward with a noble 

 and modest simplicity, and with that entire absence of all ir- 

 ritation against the objections that maybe made to them, which 

 characterise, in such a high degree, this distinguished philoso- 

 pher. His theory, it will be perceived, differs from that of 

 M. Agassiz, inasmuch as the latter, although admitting that 

 the glaciers of the Rhone may have extended as far as the east- 



