448 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



mite to knowledge when he has put for the first time the peaks and 

 passes and glacier basins of the district he is exploring in their 

 proper places on the map. The modern geologist can ill afford 

 to neglect the details of orography, but at the date of de 

 Saussure's labours, to a mind full of the deepest problems 

 of geology and absorbed in abstruse investigations into the 

 past story of the earth, the exact relations to one another 

 of a particular group of mountains may have seemed matters 

 of secondary interest. The fact remains that de Saussure 

 made little use of his opportunities to improve the maps of 

 either the Mont Blanc or the Monte Rosa groups. The 

 identifications in Bourrit's panorama from the top of the Buet, 

 which with two exceptions de Saussure specifically endorses, 

 are many of them fantastic. Bourrit's Furka is apparently the 

 Bietschhorn, and his 'St. Plomb ' (sic) the Monte Leone, un- 

 happy illustrations of de Saussure's remark that passes being 

 depressions in a chain, and inconspicuous in distant views, their 

 name is often applied to more or less adjacent summits. 



Finally, in all our criticism, literary or artistic, of the Voyages, 

 we must continually remind ourselves that de Saussure's fixed 

 purpose was to produce not an attractive volume of Travel, but 

 a solid contribution to Natural Science, and that he subordinated 

 all else to this intention. We must further endeavour to realise 

 to what an extent he had to find his own way and clear a path for 

 others in his scientific researches. In estimating the importance 

 of his lifework we must compare it, not with our knowledge to-day, 

 but with the work of those who went before him. There were 

 some brave men at Berne and Zurich, but de Saussure was the 

 Agamemnon of Alpine science. 



Besides being a traveller and an author, de Saussure was a 

 Professor of Metaphysics. In the eighteenth century Philosophy 

 covered a multitude of subjects. The double duties of its two 

 Professors in the Academy of Geneva * were set out in a scheme 

 very alien to our modern ideas. They were expected to lecture 

 alternately, one year on Physics, that is, Natural Science, in French, 

 the next on Metaphysics in Latin. De Saussure was therefore 



1 The Academy in the eighteenth century had no local habitation. The 

 1 Auditoire de Philosophic ' was in the Chapelle des Maccabees, adjacent to the 

 Cathedral. 



