No. 375.] AGASSIZ AND THE ICE AGE. 169 
tion of Forbes’s letter. But Agassiz’s report was dated twenty- 
seven days later than that of Forbes. Naturally enough, this 
complicated condition of things led to a spirited discussion as 
to priority of discovery. But there can be no question of 
Agassiz’s originality in the matter. Without any reference to 
Forbes, he had, by his slow process of observing his stakes 
during a succession of years, determined that the central por- 
tion of the glacier moved faster than the portion near the side; 
for in 1842 the stakes in the middle of the glacier, set the year 
before, were one hundred feet farther down than those near 
the sides. On the other hand, Forbes has never been able to 
free himself from the suspicion of having unfairly availed him- 
self of Agassiz’s generous hospitality to copy his method and 
put it into execution at the earliest opportunity. 
Having thus convinced the Swiss geologists that their own 
country had once been completely enveloped in glacial ice, the 
still more difficult task remained of extending the theory to 
other countries. The first opportunity for such extended 
observation offered itself during the autumn of 1840, when 
Agassiz attended the meeting of the British Association at 
Glasgow, when, during numerous excursions taken over the 
north of England, Scotland, and Ireland in company with 
Buckland and Lyell, he established the fact that all those 
regions had been deeply enveloped in glacial ice. Murchison, 
however, with many other eminent British geologists, continued 
to doubt the theory and to endeavor to explain the scratches 
on the rocks, the transportation of boulders, and the accumu- 
lation of moraines on the iceberg theory. During this visit 
Agassiz’s quick eye saw the resemblance between the parallel 
roads of Glen Roy and such terraces as would naturally form 
around a glacial lake such as he had studied in the Merjelen 
Sea, on the border of the Aletsch Glacier. 
Agassiz’s last visit to the Glacier of the Aar was at the 
beginning of 1845, when he transferred his observations to 
Daniel Dollfus-Ausset, who faithfully continued them until 
1861, 
Agassiz, meanwhile, was approaching the great crisis of his 
life. Business failures broke up his work at Neuchatel, and 
