438 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



scientific pursuit. As early as 1762 he published his Observa- 

 tions sur I'Ecorce des Feuilles et des Petales, in which he was 

 the first to distinguish between the cortex and the epidermis of 

 plants. He dedicated the little work to his Bernese friend. 

 The treatise, writes Senebier, himself a botanist, shows great 

 patience and accuracy. He continued to the end of his travels 

 to take a keen interest in the Alpine flora, but botany was before 

 long relegated to a secondary place in favour of geology. 

 In his last days we find him urging the future great botanist, 

 de Candolle, not to spend energy on a branch of science he 

 held relatively unimportant ! If in his last publication he 

 reverted to the pursuit of his youth, it was probably as a 

 relaxation from the more exacting brainwork of his geological 

 speculations. 



This brief catalogue may give some idea of the activity of de 

 Saussure's mind, the multiplicity of his studies, the ingenuity of 

 his constructive talent, and his power of applying it to practical 

 ends. ' He had,' writes Dr. Mill, ' such a gift of planning observa- 

 tions and devising instruments, that it comes as a shock every 

 now and then to realise that a hundred and fifty years ago no one 

 knew many of the facts that are now the basis of all our ideas of 

 natural processes.' This reflection, I must remind the reader, 

 applies equally to de Saussure's geological work ; it is difficult 

 for the student of the present day to put himself back mentally 

 to the standpoint of the latter half of the eighteenth century, and 

 we are apt to forget that the discoveries of ono age or even its 

 undiscovered facts may well be the commonplaces of the next. 

 If de Saussure, for instance, failed to elucidate glacial phenomena, 

 we have to bear in mind that it took the concentration of many 

 scientific intellects to collect the facts and formulate the theories 

 which are now in every text-book. If the earliest mountain 

 explorers failed to realise the nature and extent of glacial action, 

 their successors in many cases notably in those of Tyndall and 

 Ramsay have greatly exaggerated it. Even now we are in 

 the presence of conflicting schools whose respective dogmas, 

 however confidently formulated, fail to produce any lasting 

 impression on their opponents. In Germany and beyond the 

 Atlantic professors and students of high reputation still advance 

 theories that to many of those who know mountains best seem 



