PREFACE 



THE following pages represent an endeavour to nil an obvious 

 gap in Alpine literature. After more than a century, Horace 

 Benedict de Saussure still awaits his biographer. The fact has 

 been proclaimed by two of his most distinguished successors in the 

 University (formerly the Academy) of Geneva, the late Professor 

 Ernest Naville and Professor Borgeaud. But their invitation has 

 failed hitherto to call forth any local response. I had hoped that 

 the pious task would be taken in hand by some Genevese man of 

 letters, who, with all the advantage of local and technical know- 

 ledge, would do full justice to the part played in life by his illus- 

 trious fellow-citizen as a man of science and a mountain explorer, 

 and would at the same time be able to appreciate the political 

 services he endeavoured to render to the Republic in a tragical 

 crisis in its history. It was this hope that first made me refrain 

 when, as long ago as 1878, Ruskin from boyhood an eager reader 

 of the Voyages dans les Alpes instigated by some articles on the 

 lesser pioneers of the period I had contributed to the Alpine 

 Journal (vol. ix.), proposed to me that I should write a life of 

 de Saussure. In later years I found a more practical and con- 

 clusive obstacle to the acceptance of the tempting suggestion in 

 the difficulty of collecting the material needful without researches 

 among the family papers and public archives preserved at Geneva 

 and Berne, which would have involved a prolonged stay in 

 Switzerland. 



This difficulty has recently been overcome by the kindness 

 of Mr. H. F. Montagnier, an American gentleman known to his 

 colleagues of the Alpine Club both as an assiduous climber and an 

 accomplished student of the literature of mountain travel. Mr. 

 Montagnier, finding himself resident in Switzerland and debarred 

 from active service during the Great War, has at his own sugges- 

 tion employed his leisure in ransacking public libraries and obtain- 

 ing access to private collections in quest of material bearing on 



