104 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. IV 



inconceivable impositions and overcharges to foreigners, 

 quite consistently with good feeling, politeness, and readi- 

 ness to assist in many ways. 



By the 10th of July, nine days after setting out, I 

 felt satisfied (he continues) that your father was equal to 

 an excursion upon which he had set his heart, to the top 

 of the Pic de Sancy, 4000 feet above La Tour and 7 

 miles distant. 



It was on this occasion that the friends made what 

 they thought a new discovery, namely evidence of 

 glacial action in central France. Besides striated 

 stones in the fields or built into the walls, they 

 noticed the glaciated appearance of one of the valleys 

 descending from the peak, and especially some isolated 

 gigantic masses of rock on an open part of the valley, 

 several miles away, as to which they debated whether 

 they were low buildings or transported blocks. Sir 

 Joseph visited them next day, and found they were 

 the latter, brought down from the upper part of the 

 peak. 1 



Le Puy offered a special attraction apart from 

 scenery and geology. In the museum was the skeleton 

 of a pre-historic man that had been found in the 

 breccia of the neighbourhood, associated with the 

 remains of the rhinoceros, elephant, and other extinct 

 mammals. My father's sketch-book contains draw- 

 ings of these bones and of the ravine where they 

 were discovered, although in spite of directions from 



1 He published an account of these blocks in Nature, xiii. 31, 

 166, but subsequently found that glaciation had been observed by 

 von Lassaul in 1872 and by Sir William Guise in 1870. 



