432 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



turned from observation to theory, and attempted to account for 

 the formation and movement of glaciers, his intelligence failed 

 him. He had visited the Alps only at midsummer, when much 

 melting goes on in the day and some freezing at night. He 

 came to the conclusion that the upper snowfields were converted 

 into ice by these daily alternations of temperature during the 

 warm months. De Saussure, on the contrary, asserted that it 

 was the cold of winter acting on the mass saturated by the summer 

 heats that affected the transformation. Neither of the savants 

 made due allowance for the results of pressure ; Desmarets alto- 

 gether ignored it. As for motion, Desmarets' idea was crude in 

 the extreme. He argued that the diurnal melting and freezing, 

 having produced blocks of ice, soon proceeds to undermine them, 

 until the fall of one block leads to that of the next to it, and then 

 of others, so that the whole glacier, like a bank of loose stones, 

 cascades valleywards. De Saussure had little difficulty in dealing 

 with so simple a solution of glacial advance, the main causes of 

 which mass, pressure, and gravity he had firmly grasped. 



De Saussure, if in glacier problems he made a less advance 

 than might have been looked for, at least provided the technical 

 terms in which we discuss them to-day. He was the first to 

 substitute definitely * glacier ' for * glaciere,' * to give the Savoyard 

 words ' moraine ' and * serac ' literary sanction. He invented 

 for the ice-rubbed rocks the phrase moittonnees, which had previ- 

 ously been applied, he tells us, to a smooth, curly variety of the 

 wigs then in common use. He divided glaciers into two orders 

 primary glaciers, that fill trenches in the mountains, and secondary, 

 that rest on their slopes. It is to de Saussure also that we owe 

 the first authoritative contradiction of the myth promulgated by 

 Bourrit, of several continuous longitudinal troughs, or ' valleys 

 of ice/ extending between the highest ridges of the Alps, and 

 forming a common reservoir for their glaciers. He refers to the 

 Chermontane Glacier as the only instance he knows of such a 

 trough. In the still undecided controversy that throughout the 



1 Bordier suggests that ' glaciere ' is properly used for the upper basins, the 

 ' neve' (?), and 'glacier' for the snout protruding below the summer snow-level. 

 But this use, if it ever prevailed, was soon dropped. The form ' Glassier ' is 

 found in a document of 1605 preserved in the Chamonix Archives and cited in 

 La Oiographie. Bull, de la Section de Oiographie, Ministere de V Instruction 

 publique, vol. xxviii. nos. 1 and 2, 1913. 



