412 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



interesting plants. The richness of this district may be 

 judged by the fact that within a walk more than twenty 

 species of orchises have been found. This similarity of taste 

 led to a close intimacy, and in the spring of the following 

 year I was married to Mr. Mitten's eldest daughter, then 

 about eighteen years old. 



After a week at Windsor we came to live in London, and 

 in early autumn went for a month to North Wales, staying 

 at Llanberris and Dolgelly. I took with me Sir Andrew 

 Ramsay's little book on The Old Glaciers of Switzerland 

 and North Wales," and thoroughly enjoyed the fine examples 

 of ice-groovings and striations, smoothed rock-surfaces, roches 

 moutonniesy moraines, perched blocks, and rock-basins, with 

 which the valleys around Snowdon abound. Every day 

 revealed some fresh object of interest as we climbed among 

 the higher cwms of Snowdon ; and from what I saw during 

 that first visit the Ice Age became almost as much a reality 

 to me as any fact of direct observation. Every future tour 

 to Scotland, to the lake district, or to Switzerland became 

 doubled in interest. I read a good deal of the literature of 

 the subject, and have, I believe, in my later writings been 

 able to set forth the evidence in favour of the glacial origin 

 of lake-basins more forcibly than it has ever been done 

 before. As a result of my observations I wrote my first 

 article on the subject, "Ice-marks in North Wales," which 

 appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Science of January, 

 1867. In this paper I gave a sketch of the more important 

 phenomena, which were then by no means so well known as 

 they are now ; and I also gave reasons for doubting the 

 conclusions of Mr. Macintosh in the Journal of the Geological 

 Society, that most of the valleys and rocky cwms of North 

 Wales had been formed by the action of the sea. I also 

 gave, I think for the first time, a detailed explanation of 

 how glaciers can have formed lake-basins, by grinding due 

 to unequal pressure, not by "scooping out," as usually 

 supposed. 



In 1867 I spent the month of June in Switzerland with 

 my wife, staying at Champery, opposite the beautiful Dent 



