1848 GEOLOGICAL DELEGATES FROM ABROAD 139 



former glaciers in this country. He had never been 

 abroad. The revelation which the first sight of a 

 living glacier flashes upon the mind of a geologist was 

 still to come to him. And thus we find him passing 

 day after day up and down the Pass of Llanberis, 

 heedless of the ice-worn knolls and perched boulders 

 which he was soon so enthusiastically to visit and 

 revisit, and so lovingly to sketch and map and describe. 

 It has been the custom for foreign governments 

 from time to time to send delegates over to this 

 country for the purpose of personally seeing how the 

 work of the Geological Survey is carried on, with a 

 view to the initiation or improvement of geological 

 surveys in their own countries, or for other purposes 

 where a knowledge of detailed geological mapping 

 may be desirable. During Ramsay's long stay this 

 year at Llanberis he had two such foreign visits. In 

 June A. Sismonda, the well-known Tuscan geologist, 

 accompanied by a young French friend, was awaiting 

 him in his room one evening on his return, drenched 

 and weary, from a long tramp on the hills, and they 

 subsequently accompanied him to his work in the field. 

 * Sismonda not being much of a climber,' Ramsay 

 writes, ' preferred the road to the rocky sides of the 

 hills. He is still of the Iilie de Beaumont school, 

 believes in prodigious terrestrial actions down to the 

 end of late Tertiary time, working with a force of 

 which we have now no experience earthquakes 

 shaking, traps heaving, and currents sweeping. At 

 night I got the Frenchman and him into a hot political 

 argument, the Frenchman being republican, the other 

 monarchical. Their animated countenances and rapid 

 gestures were most unlike anything one sees in an 

 English debate.' 



