204 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 



AN ASCENT OF THE MATTERHORN. 



\ N old miner of '49 whom I once met in 

 •*- ^ California said to me, as we came in sight 

 of the snowy crests of Tuolumne and Calaveras : 

 "These mountains are not appreciated in Cali- 

 fornia. We used to dig and dig in them, and that 

 was the end of it. The fact is, stranger, a man 

 ought to have two lives, — one to get a living in, 

 the other to look at the mountains." 



But there are some on whom the mountains 

 have the first claim ; and so there has arisen the 

 Alpenclub, — the guild of mountain-lovers whose 

 " feet are beautiful upon the mountains," and to 

 which such men as De Saussure and Agassiz and 

 Tyndall and Balfour have been proud to belong. 



And thus it happened that on the tenth day of 

 August, 1 88 1, a party of young people from In- 

 diana, mountain-lovers of varying degrees, walked 

 over the snowy pass called the Matterjoch, which 

 leads from Italy across the Pennine Alps into 

 Switzerland. And ever before us and above us as 

 we came up the green valley of Tournanche, ever 

 before us as we toiled up the pass, — above us every- 

 where, dark, majestic, inaccessible, rose the huge 

 pyramid of the grandest of the Alps. No one 

 who has ever seen it can ever forget its form. It 

 burns itself into the memory as nothing else in all 



