FORERUNNERS 15 



first efforts at barometrical determinations of Alpine heights, the 

 first serious attempt to theorise about such subjects as glacier 

 motion, ice-caves, periodical winds, and intermittent springs. 

 Sir Isaac Newton accepted the dedication of one edition of his 

 work to our Royal Society, and the Fellows of that illustrious 

 body vied with one another in supplying funds for illustrations, 

 to which their names were severally attached. In so doing they, 

 perhaps unwittingly, lent their sanction to a feature that makes 

 Scheuchzer's travels still sought after a series of weird images of 

 prodigious dragons sworn to have been seen, mostly after supper, 

 by worthy and veracious peasants near their homes. These, 

 however, were but an ornament to volumes which profess on their 

 title-page to describe and illustrate ' whatever of rare and note- 

 worthy in Nature, the Arts, or Antiquity is to be found in the 

 Helvetic and Rhaetian Alps.' The subjects Scheuchzer most 

 delights in after dragons are botany, Baths, pastoral industries, 

 and milking utensils. 



Scheuchzer was not the first to introduce the Alps and their 

 glaciers to English men of science. In 1669 the Royal Society had 

 received a brief communication from a Mr. Muraltus of Berne, 

 ' Concerning the Icy and Crystalline Mountains of Helvetia called 

 the Gletscher.' Four years later a ' worthy and obliging ' Monsieur 

 Justel of Paris sent a further and equally brief report, adding 

 that there was such another mountain near Geneva, and thus 

 indicating the existence of Mont Blanc. 1 



Writing in 1685, Gilbert Burnet, afterwards Bishop of Salis- 

 bury, in a letter to Robert Boyle, reported that ' one Hill not far 

 from Geneva calTd Cursed, of which one-third is always covered 

 with snow, is three miles in perpendicular height according to 

 the observation of that incomparable mathematician and philo- 

 sopher, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier.' 2 In 1709 the Bishop's son, 



1 See Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vols. xlix and c. The 

 reports are quoted in full in Coolidge's The Alps in Nature and History, and in 

 Alpine Journal, vol. xiv. p. 319-20. 



2 N. F. de Duillier (1664-1753). There was much doubt and confusion as to 

 the height of the Swiss peaks. The Schreckhorn and Finsteraarhorn were held 

 the highest in the Oberland, but the St. Gotthard was thought by some to be 

 still higher, and there was an old legend that Pizzo Stella in Graubiinden was 

 the highest of all. It figures conspicuously in the corner of Scheuchzer's four- 

 sheet map of Switzerland (1712), a copy of which is hung in the Royal Geogra- 

 phical Society's House at Lowther Lodge. 



