188 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



and yet such as Bourrit's vanity might lead him to overlook. 

 He writes : 



' The public owes you its thanks for the lively and really picturesque 

 descriptions of objects so interesting and so little known. I also pro- 

 pose myself to publish something on these same mountains it is with 

 this purpose that I have been studying them for so many years. I 

 shall owe it to your book to have called the attention of the public 

 to these great objects, and to have aroused in it a desire to know more 

 of them.' 



In 1780, thanking Bourrit for a later volume, he writes : 



' I have just finished reading your work with singular pleasure. 

 One recognises everywhere that picturesque imagination and that 

 lively appreciation of the beauties of nature which are the marked 

 characteristics of your descriptions. I also greatly enjoy the historical 

 details with which you enrich them. There are some points in physics 

 in which I do not share your opinion, but that does not necessarily 

 prove that you are wrong.' 



The rest of the note consists of a vigorous correction of 

 Bourrit's hypsometry. 



Nothing could be more judicious : the letters might serve as 

 models for that embarrassing branch of correspondence, the 

 acknowledgment of a presentation copy. But when we turn to 

 later letters to Bourrit, we find that he candidly calls him to 

 account for his excess of imagination, whilst in familiar corre- 

 spondence with friends he was wont to refer to the Precentor's 

 failings in plain language. 



Such was the knight who advanced in September 1775 to 

 the attack of the Buet from the side of Valorsine the first 

 inventor of that lately somewhat hardly pressed resource of 

 modern climbers, the ' new route.' Bourrit was by no means 

 the man to take an easy peak by surprise ; his approaches were 

 always made in due form. In the previous year (1775) he had 

 inspected with de Saussure the Delucs' route from Les Fonds, 

 and been impressed by its formidable aspect. So he now went 

 round to the other side and summoned a council of the inhabi- 

 tants of Valorsine, which, as they did not know the mountain 

 in question by the name of Buet, naturally led to no result. 

 Vexed at his failure, he rather hastily set off to make the tour 

 by Cluses to Sixt, but meeting at Les Houches the former Cure 



