,^44 ON MOUNTAINS AND MANKIND, 



telpieces, there was obviously something outside the ordinary proc- 

 esses of nature, and therefore miraculous, 



Swiss correspondents conmuinicated Avith the Royal Society the 

 latest news as to the proceedings of these unnnatural ice monsters, 

 while the wise men of Ziirich and Bern Avrote lectures on them. 

 Glacier theories began. Early in the eighteenth century Hottitigcr, 

 Cappeller, Scheuchzer. that worthy man who got members of our 

 Royal Society to pay for his pictures of flying dragons, contril)ut('d 

 their quota of crude speculation. But it was not till 1711 that Mont 

 Blanc and its glaciers were brought into notoriety by our young- 

 countrymen, Pococke and Windham, and became an attraction to the 

 mind and an object to the ambition of the student whose name was 

 destined to be associated with them. Horace Benedict de Saussure, 

 born of a scientific family, the nephew of Bonnet, the Genevese botan- 

 ist and ])hik)sopher, Avho has become known to the world as a moun- 

 taineer and the climber of Mont Blanc, came twenty years later. In 

 truth, he was far more of a mountain tra\'eler and a scientific observer, 

 a geological student, than a climber. When looking at his }iurple 

 silk frock coat (carefully preserved in his country house on the shore 

 of the Lake of Geneva) one realizes tlie ditference between the nuin 

 who climbed Mont Blanc in that garment and the modern gymnast, 

 who thinks himself par excellence the mountaineer. 



De Saussure did not confine himself to Savoy or to one group; he 

 wandered far and wide over the Alpine region, and the four volumes 

 of his voyages contain, besides the narratives of his sojourn on the 

 Col du Geant and the ascent of Momit Blanc, a portion of the fruit of 

 these wanderings. 



The reader who would ap]:)reciate De Saussure's claim as the 

 founder of the scientific exploration of mountains unist, however, be 

 referred to the List of Ageiula on (juestions calling for investigation 

 placed at the end of his last volume. They explain the comparative 

 indifference shown by De Saussure to the jjroblems connected with 

 glacial movement and action. His attention was absorbed in the 

 larger question of eai-th structure, of geology, to which the sections 

 exposed by mountains offered, he thought, a key; he was bitten by 

 the contemporary desire for '' a thcoi-y of ihc earth," by the taste of 

 the time for generalizations for wliich the facts were not always 

 ready. At the same time, his own intellect was perhai)s somewhat 

 deficient in the intuitive faculty — the grasp of the possible or prob- 

 able bearing of known facts by wliich the greatest discoverei's sug- 

 gest theories first and i)i'ove them afterwards. 



The school of De Saussure at Geneva died out after having pro- 

 duced Boun-it, the tourist who gloried in being called the historian 

 of the Ali)s, a man of pleasant self-conceit and warm enthusiasm, and 

 De Luc, a mechanical inventor, who endetl his life as reader to Queen 



