138 Reports and Proceedings. 



Switzerland, there to renew his researches among the snowfields and 

 glaciers. He had early in life projDOsed to himself to examine that 

 country, not as a mere amusement, but as a serious occupation, and 

 with the great De Saussure as his model. Writing in 1843, he says 

 of himself — " I had the advantage of receiving my first impressions 

 of Switzerland in early youth, and I have carefully refreshed and 

 strengthened them by successive visits to almost every district of 

 the Alps between Provence and Austria. I have crossed the 

 principal chain of the Alps twenty-seven times, generally on foot, by 

 twenty-three different passes, and have, of course, intersected the 

 lateral chains in very many directions. I have likewise undertaken 

 similar journeys in other mountainous countries with a view to com- 

 pare the results. I have spent part of ten summers on the Con- 

 tinent, and six of these in the Alps and adjacent country." From 

 these varied wanderings, but more especially from the careful, 

 detailed measurements made during a prolonged sojourn among the 

 Swiss mountains in the summer of 1842, he was enabled to write 

 his great work on the Alps — a treatise which at once established his 

 name as an observant and eloquent traveller, and as the most suc- 

 cessful of all the philosophers who had, up to that time, grappled 

 with the problem of glacier -motion. The publication of his volume, 

 however, by no means completed his labours. Year after year he 

 continued to revisit the Alps, and to send at intervals a narrative of 

 his arduous journeys to the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal. There 

 is reason, indeed, to believe that the excessive fatigue of many of 

 these mountain expeditions began to tell upon his constitution. In 

 1843, after the publication of his "Travels," he had an attack of 

 inflammation of the lungs, and from that time forward he never 

 possessed the same vigour as before. 



In the year 1845 he visited the Isle of Skye, and his eye, already 

 trained to recognise the traces of vanished glaciers in Switzerland, 

 was at once struck by the identity of the forms assumed by the rocks 

 at Loch Scavaig with the roches montonnees of the Alps. Further 

 investigation led him to obtain complete demonstration of the former 

 presence of a group of glaciers descending from the rugged scarps of 

 the Cuchullin Hills. He walked over mountain and glen, filling in 

 a rough sketch-map of the glacier valleys as he went along, and in 

 December of the same year he read a narrative of his observations to 

 the Eoyal Society of Edinburgh. This was the most detailed and 

 satisfactory account which had yet been given of the proofs that the 

 highlands of Britain once nourished groups of glaciers. 



In the year 1851, as already remarked. Professor Forbes under- 

 took a journey to Norway, partly to make observations of the great 

 solar eclipse, and partly drawn by his love of physical geography, and 

 notably of glaciers. It was his design to compare the phenomena 

 of glaciers in Northern Europe vnth those already so familiar to 

 him in Switzerland. This he has done in a masterly way. His 

 pages contain, in a clear and succinct form, the sum of all that 

 was known at the time regarding the snow line and the existing 

 glaciers of Norway. 



