“Poor Hansli!—but after all, it is faith which saves, people say.”
My readers may at first be little interested by this uneventful narrative; but they will find it eventually delightful, if they accustom themselves to classic and sincere literature; and as an account of Swiss life now fast passing away, it is invaluable. More than the life of Switzerland,—its very snows,—eternal, as one foolishly called them,—are passing away, as if in omen of evil. One-third, at least, in the depth of all the ice of the Alps, has been lost in the last twenty years; and the change of climate thus indicated is without any parallel in authentic history. In its bearings on the water supply and atmospheric conditions of central Europe, it is the most important phenomenon, by far, of all that offer themselves to the study of living men of science: yet in Professor Tyndall’s recent work on the glaciers,[10] though he notices the change as one which, “if continued, will reduce the Swiss glaciers to the mere spectres of their former selves,” he offers no evidence, nor even suggestion, as to the causes of the change itself.
I have no space in this number of ‘Fors’ to say what reason there is for my taking notice of this book, or the glacier theory, in connection with the life of Scott. In the interests of general literature, it is otherwise fitting that the nature of the book itself should be pointed out.
Its nature, that is to say, so far as it has any. It seems to be written for a singular order of young people, whom, if they were older, Professor Tyndall assures them, it would give him pleasure to take up Mont Blanc; but whom he can at present invite to walk with him along the moraine from the Jardin, where “perfect steadiness of foot is necessary,—a slip would be death;” and to whom, with Mr. Hirsch, he can “confide confidently” the use of his surveying chain. It is, at all events, written for entirely ignorant people—and entirely idle ones, who cannot be got to read without being coaxed and flattered into the unusual exertion. “Here, my friend,” says the Professor, at the end of his benevolently alluring pages, “our labours close! It has been a true pleasure to me to have you at my side so long. You have been steadfast and industrious throughout.… Steadfast, prudent, without terror, though not at all times without awe, I have found you, on rock and ice. Give me your hand—Goodbye.” Does the Professor count, then, upon no readers but those whom he can gratify with polite expressions of this kind? Upon none who perhaps unsteadfast, imprudent, and very much frightened upon rock and ice, have nevertheless done their own work there, and know good work of other people’s, from bad, anywhere; and true praise from false anywhere; and can detect the dishonouring of nameable and noble persons, couched under sycophancy of the nameless? He has at least had one reader whom I can answer for, of this inconvenient sort.
It is, I am sorry to say, just forty years (some day last month) since I first saw the Bernese Alps from above Schaffhausen. Since that evening I have never let slip a chance of knowing anything definite about glaciers and their ways; and have watched the progress of knowledge, and the oscillations of theory, on the subject, with an interest not less deep, and certainly more sincere, than it would have been if my own industry had been able to advance the one, or my own ingenuity to complicate the other. But only one great step in the knowledge of glaciers has been made in all that period; and it seems the principal object of Professor Tyndall’s book to conceal its having been taken, that he and his friends may get the credit, some day, of having taken it themselves.
I went to the University in 1836, and my best friend there, among the older masters, Dr. Buckland, kept me not ill-informed on my favourite subject, the geological, or crystallogical, question. Nearly everything of which Professor Tyndall informs his courageous readers was known then, just as well as it is now. We all,—that is to say, all geologists of any standing, and their pupils,—knew that glaciers moved; that they were supplied by snow at the top of the Alps, and consumed by heat at the bottom of them; that there were cracks all through them, and moraines all down them; that some of their ice was clear, and other ice opaque; that some of it was sound, and some rotten; and that streams fell into them at places called mills, and came out of them at places called grottoes. We were, I am sorry to say, somewhat languidly content with these articles of information; we never thought of wading “breast-deep through snow” in search of more, and still less of “striking our theodolites with the feelings of a general who had won a small battle.”[11] Things went on thus quietly enough. We were all puzzled to account for glacier motion, but never thought of ascertaining what the motion really was. We knew that the ice slipped over the rocks at some places, tumbled over them at others; gaped, or as people who wanted to write sublimely always said, yawned, when it was steep, and shut up again when it was level. And Mr. Charpentiêr wrote a thick volume to show that it moved by expansion and contraction, which I read all through, and thought extremely plausible. But none of us ever had the slightest idea of the ice’s being anything but an entirely solid substance, which was to be reasoned about as capable indeed of being broken, or crushed, or pushed, or pulled in any direction, and of sliding or falling as gravity and smooth surfaces might guide it, but was always entirely rigid and brittle in its substance like so much glass or stone.
This was the state of affairs in 1841. Professor Agassiz, of Neuchâtel, had then been some eight or ten years at work on the glaciers: had built a cabin on one of them; walked a great many times over a great many of them; described a number of their phenomena quite correctly; proposed, and in some cases performed, many ingenious experiments upon them; and indeed done almost everything that was to be done for them—except find out the one thing that we wanted to know.
As his malicious fortune would have it, he invited in that year (1841) a man of acute brains to see what he was about. The invitation was accepted. The visitor was a mathematician; and after examining the question, for discussion of which Agassiz was able to supply him with all the data except those which were essential, resolved to find out the essential ones himself.
Which in the next year (1842) he quietly did; and in 1843 solved the problem of glacier motion for ever,—announcing, to everybody’s astonishment, and to the extreme disgust and mortification of all glacier students,—including my poor self, (not the least envious, I fancy, though with as little right to be envious as anyone),—that glaciers were not solid bodies at all, but semi-liquid ones, and ran down in their beds like so much treacle.