146 Mr. H. H. Howorth on 



entitled " Poissons, Echinodermes, et Mollusques fossiles," 

 and had merely gone to see Charpentier's collections. 

 Schimper stayed at Bex with Charpentier from September 

 to December, 1836. Agassiz, who was there also, was busy 

 with his shells, and although he listened to the discussions 

 of the two friends, he only once accompanied them on a 

 glacier exploration to the Col de Balme and the Trient 

 Glaciers, which was conducted by Schimper. During this 

 time Schimper pressed upon Charpentier the fact that the 

 ice action to which he had appealed was in no sense a res 

 domestica, and limited in its operations to Switzerland, but 

 was, in fact, a widespread effect of a mantle of ice covering 

 a much wider area. On the 19th of December, 1836, 

 Schimper discovered the famous glacier marks in the chalk 

 of the Jura, near Landeron. This fact he communicated to 

 Agassiz, whose imagination was at length fired by the im- 

 pulsive and picturesque conversations of his friend, and he 

 determined for the first time to appear in tlie character of a 

 geologist, and advertised a course of lectures to be delivered 

 to' his fellow-citizens of Neuchatel which were duly an- 

 nounced in the Courrier N euchdtelois of January 24th, 

 1837. In order to carry out his purpose more effectually 

 he asked Schimper to lend him the notes of the lectures 

 the latter had given at Munich the winter before. As 

 these were locked up, Schimper wrote to his friend and 

 pupil Bezold to forward him his own notes. 



These were duly sent. Schimper acknowledged their 

 receipt in a letter dated the 5th of February, 1837, in 

 which were enclosed some verses on the lake of Neuchatel. 

 In this letter he again urged that the granite blocks had 

 not been transported by rivers, but by glaciers before the 

 upheaval of the Alps and the Bavarian mountains, and 

 that, in the penultimate geological period, masses of ice 

 several thousand feet thick covered, not only Switzerland, 

 but all Europe ; and that the then existing lakes were also 



