CHAPTER I 

 FORERUNNERS 



IN 1740, the date of Horace Benedict de Saussure's birth, a new 

 period in European history was about to open. A few months 

 later the disputed succession arising on the death of the Emperor 

 Charles the Sixth was to involve the Continent in the confused 

 Wars of the Spanish Succession. England under her Hanoverian 

 kings could no longer hope to hold aloof from the quarrels of her 

 neighbours, and Walpole's thirty years of inaction were drawing 

 to their close. But the Swiss Cantons and the closely attached 

 Republic of Geneva enjoyed the privilege of small States and were 

 left outside the struggle, while for four years more England 

 remained at peace with France. In 1740 young Englishmen of 

 birth were still free to complete their education abroad, and to 

 combine with the Grand Tour a course of lectures in the Protestant 

 Academy on the shores of Lake Leman. There their studies were 

 not so engrossing but that they found time to play Shakespeare 

 to the Venerable Company of Pastors, and to reveal the existence 

 of Mont Blanc and its glaciers to a world which for the moment 

 found other things to think about. 



The publication of Windham's and Martel's modest accounts 

 of their visits to the glaciers of Savoy was the seed from which, 

 after an interval of nearly twenty years, was to spring the career 

 of de Saussure. The fact is emphasised by his contemporary, 

 Senebier. But there were other local influences, and above all 

 the general atmosphere of the time, which contributed towards 

 converting a young Genevese patrician into the first scientific 

 explorer of the Alps. The latter half of the eighteenth century was 

 a period of movement, not only in politics, but in thought, in 

 literature, and in science. It witnessed in every direction the 

 break up of old barriers. Students came out of their libraries 



A 



