AGASSIZ AND THE ICE AGE. 
G. FREDERICK WRIGHT. 
AGassiz did not claim to be the first one to see that the 
glaciers of the Alps formerly filled the valley of the Rhone in 
Switzerland and extended to the summits of the Jura Moun- 
tains. The credit of this brilliant theory he freely gave to 
his hospitable friend Jean de Charpentier, Director of Mines 
in the Canton of Vaud and living at Bex, a few miles above 
the head of Lake Geneva. Nor was the theory original with 
Charpentier. A mountaineer named Perraudin, living at the 
foot of the St. Bernard in Vallais, told Charpentier as early as 
1815 that the large boulders along the sides of the Alpine 
valleys were left there by glaciers which once filled them. 
Fourteen years later, in 1829, an engineer named M. Venetz. 
recalled to Charpentier the theory of Perraudin and advocated 
its truth. This belief of the Swiss engineer was defended in 
an essay read to the Swiss naturalists in 1821, but the paper 
remained unnoticed until Charpentier became a convert to the 
theory through the arguments of Venetz in 1829. The paper 
was not published, however, until 1833, the same year in which 
Charpentier’s first paper on the subject was published. 
But, although this paper of Charpentier presented the facts 
from the hands of a master, it did not convince Agassiz or 
many others. In 1836 Agassiz and his wife, however, accepted 
an invitation to spend their summer vacation with Charpen- 
tier at Bex, with the result that he returned to his home 
_ at Neuchatel an enthusiastic advocate of the glacial theory. 
And well he might be, for he had himself been living among 
the most remarkable indications of glacial work that could 
anywhere be found in the world. The very soil beneath his 
feet was composed of the Alpine glacial grist. The whole 
valley was gridironed with moraines, while one of the largest 
known Alpine boulders, the pierre à bot, rested high up on the 
flank of the Jura Mountains, not far from Neuchatel. 
