THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



Perraudin announced his idea to the greatest scientist 

 in his little world Jean de Charpentier, director of the 

 mines at Bex, a skilled geologist who had been a fellow- 

 pupil of von Buch and von Humboldt under Werner at 

 the Freiberg School of Mines. Charpentier laughed at 

 the mountaineer's grotesque idea, and thought no more 

 about it. And ten years elapsed before Perraudin could 

 find any one who treated his notion with greater re- 

 spect. Then he found a listener in M. Yenetz, a civil 

 engineer, who read a paper on the novel glacial theory 

 before a local society in 1823. This brought the matter 

 once more to the attention of de Charpentier, who now 

 felt that there might be something in it worth investi- 

 gation. 



A survey of the field in the light of the new theory 

 soon convinced Charpentier that the chamois-hunter had 

 all along been right. He became an enthusiastic sup- 

 porter of the idea that the Alps had once been embed- 

 ded in a mass of ice, and in 1836 he brought the notion 

 to the attention of Louis Agassiz, who was spending the 

 summer in the Alps. Agassiz was sceptical at first, but 

 soon became a convert. Then he saw that the implica- 

 tions of the theory extended far beyond the Alps. If 

 the Alps had been covered with an ice sheet, so had 

 many other regions of the northern hemisphere. Cast- 

 ing abroad for evidences of glacial action, Agassiz found 

 them everywhere, in the form of transported erratics, 

 scratched and polished outcropping rocks, and moraine- 

 like deposits. Presently he became convinced that the 

 ice sheet which covered the Alps had spread over the 

 whole of the higher latitudes of the northern hemi- 

 sphere, forming an ice cap over the globe. Thus the 

 common -sense induction of the chamois -hunter blos- 



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