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Account of one of the most important Results of the Investi- 

 gations ofM. VsNETZy regarding the Present and Earlier 

 Condition of the Glaciers of the Canton Vallais, By Jo- 

 HANN VON Charpentier. With later additions by the 

 Author. * 



Mr Venetz, engineer of bridges and roads in the Canton 

 Vallais, has been occupied for several years with the study of 

 glaciers and their accompanying phenomena. His investigations 

 have led him to results which are of great importance for the 

 history of the changes which have taken place on the surface of 

 the earth. My object in here indicating one of these results is 

 chiefly to direct the attention of geologists anew to an important 

 geological phenomenon which seems now to be nearly forgotten 

 by the philosophers wJio devote themselves to the history of the 

 earth, and this owing to an opinion entertained that the subject 

 has been exhausted and fully explained, — I mean the erratic 

 blocks or the fragments of the alpine rocky masses which occur 

 from the ridge of the Alps to that of the Jura, from the southern 

 slope of the first to the plains of Upper Italy, and generally in 

 the valleys and at the base of all high mountain chains, with the 

 exception of those which he in equatorial districts, and on which 

 the masses of perpetual snow cannot be converted into glaciers. 



The most distinguished geologists, even those who have raised 

 geology to the high rank it now holds among the sciences, have 

 ascribed to the agency of water the removal or the transport of 

 these blocks to the places where we now find them. At the 

 time such authorities so expressed themselves, this mode of re- 

 moval was considered so much the more certain and clearly 

 proved, because the opinion was announced for the first time at 

 a period when in fact most geologists attributed extravagant ef- 

 fects to the action of water, for the inequalities of the earth's 

 surface were then regarded as exclusively a consequence of that 

 action. 



The investigations of M. Venetz on the Vallais glaciers, have 

 suggested to him the examination of the transported blocks in 



• Read at Lucerne to the Meeting of the General Swiss Society of Natu- 

 ralists on the 29th July 1834. 



