280 Professor Agassiz on (he Glacier Theory, 



instruments was frozen to the walls of the hole, it became ne- 

 cessary to employ hot water to detach it ; an operation which 

 took up a considerable time. Except on rainy days, the bor- 

 ing could not be commenced before eight o'clock, for it was 

 necessary to wait till the rills of water again began to flow ; 

 the work was then carried on till midday. Those who were 

 not occupied with the borers made an excursion to some neigh- 

 bouring summit, or visited one of the numerous moraines which 

 descend from the flanks of the valley ; and as I had taken with 

 me a landscape painter, M. Bourkhart of Neuchatel, to deli- 

 neate the most remarkable phenomena of this mer de glace^ 

 in a scientific and picturesque point of view;, I often accom- 

 panied him to point out the places most worthy of attention. 

 Most frequently, it was not so much the special object we fol- 

 lowed, as the unexpected observations we made, which gave 

 importance to these excursions ; and at last we did not fix on 

 any particular plan, but simply walked to some summit, or to 

 some lateral glacier, with the anticipation of reaping an ample 

 harvest of new observations. The numerous facts of detail 

 which were collected in the course of these various excursions, 

 cannot come within the compass of a mere article in a journal ; 

 but I intend soon to publish a summary of them in a supple- 

 mentary volume to my Etudes sur les Glaciers; and I hope that 

 they will contribute more and more to increase the interest 

 which attaches to glaciers, by initiating naturalists into the 

 minute history of a natural phenomenon, which, with all its 

 apparent uniformity, is yet so splendid and so varied. What 

 indeed can be more interesting than this series of metamor- 

 phoses, to which frozen ice is subjected, from its fall on the 

 high summits in the form of snow or of small hail {gresit), to 

 its transformation into those masses of compact ice which de- 

 scend like immense solid couUes into the midst of our forests, 

 and of our cultivated fields ! What can be more worthy of at- 

 tention than the study of the red snow, that microscopic crea- 

 tion which extends as a rose-coloured tint over immense spaces 

 of the neve, in places where traces of organic life could hardly 

 have been expected to exist ! What, moreover, can be more 

 curious than to be able to follow for great distances the junc- 



