340 LOUIS AGASSIZ. 



honestly and according to my own faith with 

 your ice, but have never lost sight of your 

 great merit. My concluding paragraph will 

 convince you and all your friends that if I am 

 wrong it is not from any preconceived no- 

 tions, but only because I judge from what you 

 will call incomplete evidence. Your " Venez 

 voir ! " still sounds in my ears. . . . 



Murchison remained for many years an op- 

 ponent of the glacial theory in its larger appli- 

 cation. In the discourse to which the above 

 letter makes allusion (Address at the Anni- 

 versary Meeting of the Geological Society of 

 London, 1842 x ) is this passage : " Once grant 

 to Agassiz that his deepest valleys of Switzer- 

 land, such as the enormous Lake of Geneva, 

 were formerly filled with snow and ice, and I 

 see no stopping place. From that hypothesis 

 you may proceed to fill the Baltic and the 

 northern seas, cover southern England and half 

 of Germany and Russia with similar icy sheets, 

 on the surfaces of which all the northern boul- 

 ders might have been shot off. So long as the 

 greater number of the practical geologists of 

 Europe are opposed to the wide extension of 



1 Extract from Report in vol. 33 of the Edinburgh New 

 Philosophical Journal. 



