14 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



frost. 1 Marc Lescarbot, a sceptical Frenchman who in 1618 

 visited Switzerland and borrowed largely from Simler in his 

 poetical description of the Alps, attacked the vulgar belief in some 

 very dull lines : 



' Ecrivains qui couchez dans vos doctes esprits 

 Le crystal etre glace, ou 1'avez vous appris ? 

 Si le crystal est tel, pourquoi dans les val!6es 

 Les Montagnes de glace en ce temps ecroulees 

 Fondent-elles au feu ? ' 2 



and so on for several pages . But the superstition was too strong 

 to be slain by so blunt a weapon as Lescarbot 's verse. 



In a volume known from its illustrator as Merian's Topographia 

 Helvetiae, Rhaetiae, et Vallesiae (1642) we, for the first time, find 

 the Grindelwald Glacier carefully described and depicted. About 

 this date a certain number of Swiss students started in pursuit 

 of a glacier theory and wrote more or less dull treatises. But it 

 was not until the first decade of the eighteenth century that 

 glacial problems were taken up seriously. The next landmark 

 in Alpine literature is afforded by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer's 

 voluminous works. The best known are Beschreibung der Natur- 

 geschichten des Schweitzerlands, 1706-8, and the oddly named 

 " > Ovpecn<f)oir'r}<t Helveticus sive Itinera Alpina tria(1708), republished 

 and enlarged to four volumes in 1723. Scheuchzer (1672-1733) was 

 by profession a doctor and by taste an energetic pedestrian. He 

 was also a Fellow of the Royal Society. His rambles extended 

 beyond the Bernese Oberland to Graubiinden, Glarus, Uri, and 

 the Valais. His thick volumes of Alpine travel present a strange 

 combination of topography, legend, and fiction with a sprinkling of 

 such scientific observation as was current in his day. He not only 

 called attention to the marvels of the Alps he added to them ! 

 Yet Scheuchzer was an esteemed writer and obtained full recog- 

 nition in the most learned circles. We owe to him some of the 



1 Strabo, bk. xi. ch. 6, describes how the natives of the Western Caucasus 

 cross with the aid of snowshoes and toboggans its snows and glaciers. The phrase 

 used is ' Tac x^vas nal TOVS KpvcrraXAovf.' This is the only reference to glaciers as 

 distinct from snows that I remember in the classics. That in Greek the same 

 word serves for both ice and crystal may have helped to create the subsequent 

 confusion. 



2 Tableau de la Suisse et autres allies de la France el hautes Allemagnes, par 

 Marc Lescarbot, advocat en Parleinent, 1618. 



