8o 



Louis Agassiz. 



Once grant to Agassiz that his deepest valleys of 

 Switzerland, such as the enormous Lake of Geneva, 

 were formerly filled with snow and ice, and I see no 

 stopping-place. From that hypothesis you may 

 proceed to fill the Baltic and the Northern seas, 

 cover southern England and half of Germany and 

 Russia with similar icy sheets, on the surfaces of 

 which all the northern bowlders might have been 

 shot off. So long as the greater number of the 

 practical geologists of Europe are opposed to the 

 wide extension of a terrestrial glacial theory, there 

 can be little risk that such a doctrine should take 

 too deep a hold of the mind. . . . The existence 

 of glaciers in Scotland and England (I mean in the 

 Alpine sense) is not, at all events, established to the 

 satisfaction of what I believe to be by far the greater 

 number of British geologists.'' 



Yet in later years Murchison became an ardent 

 convert to the theories advanced by Agassiz, and 

 Darwin, who was the antipodes of Agassiz in many 

 things, agreed with him on the glacial question. 



If Agassiz neglected for a time his zoological 

 studies by his incursions into glacial lore, his fame in- 

 creased and grew in other ways. The King of Prussia 

 was his staunch supporter, and being especially inter- 

 ested in glaciers gave the naturalist one thousand 

 dollars to continue the work; so in 1842 he again 

 visited the glacier with a new party, when to their 

 regret they found that the Hotel des Neuchatelois, as 

 Agassiz had named their cabin, was sadly in need of 

 repairs. Its day of usefulness as a hotel was rapidly 

 passing, and as there was absolute danger in it, a 



