520 THE LIFE OF JAMES D. FORBES. [CHAP. xv. 



the delight of all travellers. Let us leave the beauty 

 and ask after the utility, we shall find still more cause 

 for wonder.' 



[Added December 16th, 1872.] 



A popular work, The Forms of Water, &c., just pub- 

 lished by Dr. Tyndall, reiterates an estimate of the actual 

 and relative originality, extent, and value of Forbes' 

 contributions to the theory of glaciers, so utterly different 

 from that contained in the preceding chapter as to render 

 it imperatively necessary for me to make a few addi- 

 tional remarks. I believe the question to be one entirely 

 of facts, not of opinions ; and I feel assured that the 

 work referred to would have elicited a prompt reply 

 from Forbes had he lived to see it. 



In proof of the general correctness of the view I have 

 taken above, and as the only approximation now possible 

 to the answer Forbes would probably have given, I have 

 reprinted (in the form of Appendices A and B below), 

 two most masterly papers of his, which unfortunately 

 had not a very wide circulation : but which minutely 

 detail his relations to Kendu on the one hand, and to 

 Guyot and Agassiz on the other. Though the first of 

 these has been published for twelve years, and the second 

 for thirty, no attempt has ever been made to controvert 

 or to answer either. 



Till it is shown that these papers, along with others 

 from which extracts have been made above, are not the 

 work of Forbes, in whose character unswerving rectitude 

 was the grandest feature, I shall continue to receive their 

 contents as facts. From these facts no conclusions are 

 possible but those drawn in the preceding chapter. 



P. G. TAIT. 



