A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



tains slow rolling on," carrying with them blocks of 

 granite and other d6bris to form moraine deposits. 

 If these glaciers had once been much more extensive 

 than they now are, they might have carried the bowl- 

 ders and left them where we find them. On the other 

 hand, no other natural agency within the sphere of 

 the chamois-hunter's knowledge could have accom- 

 plished this, ergo the glaciers must once have been 

 more extensive. Perraudin would probably have said 

 that common-sense drove him to this conclusion; but 

 be that as it may, he had conceived one of the few truly 

 original and novel ideas of which the nineteenth cen- 

 tury can boast. 



Perraudin announced his idea to the greatest scien- 

 tist 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 respect. Then he found a listener 

 in M. Venetz, 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 investigation. 



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 

 supporter of the idea that the Alps had once been im- 

 bedded in a mass of ice, and in 1836 he brought the 



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