TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 619 
Swiss correspondents communicated with our own Royal Society the latest news 
as to the proceedings of these unnatural ice-monsters, while the wise men of 
Ziirich and Bern wrote lectures on them. Glacier theories began. arly in the 
eighteenth century Hottinger, Cappeller, Scheuchzer, that worthy man who got 
members of our Royal Society to pay for his pictures of flying dragons, contri- 
buted their quota of crude speculation. But it was not till 1741 that Mont Blane 
and its glaciers were brought into notoriety by our young countrymen, Pococke and 
Windham, and became an attraction to the mind and an object to the ambition of 
the student whose namie was destined to be associated with them. Horace Benedict 
de Saussure, born of a scientific family, the nephew of Bonnet, the Genevese botanist 
and philosopher, who has become known to the world as a mountaineer and the 
climber of Mont Blanc, came twenty years later. In truth he was far more of a 
mountain traveller and a scientific observer, a geological student, than a climber. 
When looking at his purple silk frock-coat (carefully preserved in his country 
house on the shore of the Lake of Geneva), one realises the difference between the 
man who climbed Mont Blanc in that garment and the modern gymnast, who 
thinks himself par exeel/ence the mountaineer. 
De Saussure did not confine himself to Savoy or to one group, he wandered far 
and wide over the Alpine region, and the four volumes of his ‘ Voyages’ contain, 
besides the narratives of his sojourn on the Col du Géant and ascent of Mont Blanc, 
a portion of the fruit of these wanderings. 
The reader who would appreciate De Saussure’s claim as the founder of the 
Scientific Exploration of Mountains must, however, be referred to the List of 
Agenda on questions calling for investigation placed at the end of his last volume. 
They explain the comparative indifference shown by De Saussure to the problems 
connected with glacial movement and action. His attention was absorbed in the 
larger question of earth-structure, of geology, to which the sections exposed by 
mountains offered, he thought, a key; he was bitten by the contemporary desire 
for ‘A Theory of the Earth,’ by the taste of the time for generalisations for 
which the facts were not always ready. At the same time, his own intellect was 
perhaps somewhat deficient in the intuitive faculty; the grasp of the possible or 
probable bearing of known facts by which the greatest discoverers suggest theories 
first and prove them afterwards, 
The school of De Saussure at Geneva died out after having produced Bourrit, 
the tourist who gloried in being called the Historian of the Alps, a man of 
pleasant self-conceit and warm enthusiasm, and De Luc, a mechanical inventor, 
who ended his life as reader to Queen Charlotte at Windsor, where he flits 
across Miss Burney’s pages as the friend of Herschel at Slough and the 
jest of tipsy Royal Dukes. Oddly enough, the first sound guess as to glacier 
movement was made by one Bordier, who had no scientific pretensions. I re- 
printed many years ago the singular passage in which he compared glacier ice to 
‘cire amollie,’ soft wax, ‘flexible et ductile jusqu’’ un certain point,’ and 
described it as flowing in the manner of liquids (dip. J., ix. 327). He added 
this remarkable suggestion foreshadowing the investigations of Professor Richter 
and M. Forel: ‘It is very desirable that there should be at Chamonix someone 
capable of observing the glaciers for a series of years and comparing their 
advance and oscillations with meteorological records.’ To the school of Geneva 
succeeded the school of Neuchatel, Desor and Agassiz; the feat of De Saussure 
was rivalled on the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn by the Meyers of Bern. 
They in turn were succeeded by the British school, Forbes and Tyndall, Reilly 
and Wills, in 1840-60. 
In 1857 the Alpine Club was founded in this country. In the half-century 
since that date the nations of Western Europe have emulated one another in 
forming similar bodies, one of the objects of which has been to collect and set 
in order information as to the mountains and to further their scientific as well 
as their geographical exploration. 
What boulders, or rather pebbles, can we add to the enormous moraine of 
modern Alpine literature—a moraine the lighter portions of which it is to be hoped 
for the sake of posterity that the torrent of Time may speedily make away with ? 
