yjiy IVIV^UIN L.'lllNO AL\U iVlAlN JVIXN U. 



telpieces, there was obviously somethino; outside tlie oi-dlnary proc- 

 esses of nature, and therefore miraculous. 



Swiss correspondents connnunicated with the Ro^^al Society the 

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

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

 Glacier theories began. Early in the eighteenth century Hotti)igei-, 

 Ca])])eller, Scheuchzer. that worthy man who got members of our 

 Koyal Society to p&y for his pictures of flying dragons, contriliuted 

 their (juota of crude speculation. But it Avas not till 1741 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 nephcAV of Bonnet, the Genevese botan- 

 ist and philosopher, who 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 traveler and a scientific observer, 

 a geological student, than a climber. When looking at his purjjle 

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

 of the Lake of Geneva) one realizes the difference between the man 

 who climbed Mont Blanc in that garment and the modern gynniast. 

 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 

 (Jol du Geant and the ascent of Mount Blanc, a portion of the fruit of 

 these wanderings. 



The reader who would ap]ireciate De Saussure's claim as the 

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

 referred to the List of Agenda on questions calling for investigation 

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

 indifference shown by De Saussure to the problems connected with 

 glacial movement and action. His attention was absorbed in the 

 larger question of earth structure, of geology, to which the sections 

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

 the contemporary desire for '' a theory of the earth," by the taste of 

 the time for generalizations for which the facts were not always 

 ready. At the same tim(\ his own intellect was j^erhaps somewhat 

 deficient iu tlie intuitive faculty — the grasp of the possible or prob- 

 able bearing of known facts by which the greatest discoverers sug- 

 gest theories first and prove them afterwards. 



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

 duced Bourrit, the tourist who gloried in being called the historian 

 of the Alps, a man of pleasant self-conceit and warm enthusiasm, and 

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



