340 HEROES OF SCIENCE. 



movement." Full of this important subject he wrote 

 fully on it. 



" In order to appreciate the distinctive character 

 of this colossal moraine, you must reflect on the 

 uniformity and evenness of the vast plain of the 

 Po all round it, for, although really inclined from 

 the Alps, it looks as level as the sea ; then fancy 

 the great mounds sloping up at angles of 20° and 

 30° to heights of 500, 1000, 1500 and 2000 feet ; 

 then consider that at the very extremity, as near 

 Caluso, there are blocks of protogine which have 

 come one hundred miles from Mont Blanc ; also 

 that the whole assemblage of stones is not like that 

 which has issued from the Susa, or from any other 

 valley, but confined to rocks such as now strictly 

 belong to the basin of the Dora Baltea ; also that 

 the pebbles and fragments of stone, if of ser- 

 pentine or any easily striable rock, are all striated, 

 at least nineteen-twentieths of the whole, whereas 

 in a recent glacier which has only travelled ten 

 miles, you might only find one in twenty of the 

 same stone striated ; and lastly, think of the nar- 

 row vomitory which has disgorged this enormous 

 quantity of material, the ravine above Ivrea being 

 as obviously the source of the whole, as is the crater 

 of Vesuvius the point from which its lavas have 

 issued. When Gastaldi read his paper to the Geo- 

 logical Society at Paris, written jointly by him and 

 Martens, Elie de Beaumont, who had many years 

 before visited the ground, objected entirely to their 

 conclusion that it was a moraine, but I never saw 



