528 THE LIFE OF JAMES D. FORBES. [APPEND. 



As a last resource, on the 12th December, 1842, I wrote a 

 letter to Monseigneur Rendu (then Bishop-elect of Anne* 97), of 

 which I have fortunately preserved a copy, which is now before 

 me. In it I stated the particulars which (on the evidence of 

 this letter, and not from memoiy) I have mentioned above ; 

 the cursory inspection for a few minutes of a copy in the hands 

 of a Swiss friend, my inquiries for the work itself, both in 

 Switzerland and at Turin, the application to M. Baruffi, and 

 my desire to give an account of M. Rendu' s views in my volume 

 then in preparation. Of course I ended by requesting the 

 Bishop to excuse the intrusion of a stranger, and to forward a 

 copy of his book to Edinburgh with the least possible delay, 1 and 

 by offering him mine in return. 



I received from the Bishop a polite and friendly answer, dated 

 the 20th December, 1842, which is also before me, promising the 

 despatch of the volume of Academical Memoirs containing his 

 Essay through a Paris bookseller. I am unable to state the 

 exact date at which it reached me probably in February 1843 ; 

 but this is not of importance. I shall now indicate with pre- 

 cision the notice which I took in my work (already in great 

 part written before the arrival of Rendu's Memoir 2 ) of the 

 Essay which I had taken so much pains to procure. 



4. References to Rendu in my 'Travels in the Alps' (1843), and 

 in my later publications. 



The following extracts from my Travels in the Alps will 

 speak for themselves. The pages referred to are those of the 

 first edition (published in July 1843). No alterations whatever 

 were made in these extracts in the second edition (1845), only 

 the pages where a few of the later ones occur are slightly 

 different. 



(a) Travels, pp. 28, 29.' ... In the writings of Agassiz, Godefroy, 

 De Charpentier, and Rendu, devoted exclusively to glaciers, and published in 

 1840 and 1841, there is an equal silence as to the real nature of glacier 

 structure, &c.' 3 



1 I then believed the book or pamphlet to be a separate publication. This 

 accounts for the difficulty which I everywhere experienced in obtaining it through 

 bookselling channels. 



2 See extract (e) below. I may here note that the chapters were not 

 composed in the order in which they are printed. 



3 [Professor Tvndall (p. 301) ascribes to Rendu an allusion to the veined 

 structure. A reference to p. 60 of the Thtorie, however, must satisfy any 

 impartial person that he is speaking of the true stratification of the nem, as 

 would have been apparent had Professor Tyndall not stopped short in bis 

 quotation. After the word 'snow' in his citation, this passage follows, identi- 

 fying the description with those of De Saussure and other older writers, 

 applied to the higher glaciers: 'II y a dans 1'ensemble de grandes et de 



