“Cela saute aux yeux,” we all said, as soon as we were told; and I well remember the intense mortification of first looking down on the dirt bands of the Mer-de-Glace, from the foot of the Little Charmoz, after I had read Principal Forbes’ book. That we never should have seen them before!—so palpable, so inevitable now, with every inch of the ice’s motion kept record of, in them, for centuries, and every curve pencilled in dark, so that no river eddies, no festooned fall of sweeping cascade, could be more conclusive in proof of the flowing current. And of course it flowed; how else could it have moved but by a series of catastrophes?[12] Everything explained, now, by one shrewd and clear-sighted man’s work for a couple of summer months; and what asses we had all been!
But fancy the feelings of poor Agassiz in his Hotel des Neuchâtelois! To have had the thing under his nose for ten years, and missed it! There is nothing in the annals of scientific mischance—(perhaps the truer word would be scientific dulness)—to match it; certainly it would be difficult for provocation to be more bitter,—at least, for a man who thinks, as most of our foolish modern scientific men do think, that there is no good in knowing anything for its own sake, but only in being the first to find it out.
Nor am I prepared altogether to justify Forbes in his method of proceeding, except on the terms of battle which men of science have laid down for themselves. Here is a man has been ten years at his diggings; has trenched here, and bored there, and been over all the ground again and again, except just where the nugget is. He asks one to dinner—and one has an eye for the run of a stream; one does a little bit of pickaxing in the afternoon on one’s own account,—and walks off with his nugget. It is hard.
Still, in strictness, it is perfectly fair. The new comer, spade on shoulder, does not understand, when he accepts the invitation to dinner, that he must not dig,—or must give all he gets to his host. The luck is his, and the old pitsman may very excusably growl and swear at him a little; but has no real right to quarrel with him,—still less to say that his nugget is copper, and try to make everybody else think so too.
Alas, it was too clear that this Forbes’ nugget was not copper. The importance of the discovery was shown in nothing so much as in the spite of Agassiz and his friends. The really valuable work of Agassiz on the glaciers was itself disgraced, and made a monument to the genius of Forbes, by the irrelevant spite with which every page was stained in which his name could be introduced. Mr. Desor found consolation in describing the cowardice of the Ecossais on the top of the Jungfrau; and all the ingenuity and plausibility of Professor Tyndall have been employed, since the death of Forbes, to diminish the lustre of his discovery, and divide the credit of it.
To diminish the lustre, observe, is the fatallest wrong; by diminishing its distinctness. At the end of this last book of his, in the four hundred and tenth of the sapient sentences which he numbers with paternal care, he still denies, as far as he dares, the essential point of Forbes’ discovery; denies it interrogatively, leaving the reader to consider the whole subject as yet open to discussion,—only to be conclusively determined by—Professor Tyndall and his friends. “Ice splits,” he says, “if you strike a pointed pricker into it; fissures, narrow and profound, may be traced for hundreds of yards through the ice. Did the ice possess even a very small modicum of that power of stretching which is characteristic of a viscous substance, ‘such crevasses could not be formed.’ ” Professor Tyndall presumably never having seen a crack in clay, nor in shoe-leather, nor in a dish of jelly set down with a jerk; nor, in the very wax he himself squeezed flat to show the nature of cleavage,—understood that the cleavage meant the multiplication of fissure!
And the book pretends to be so explanatory, too, to his young friends!—explanatory of the use of the theodolite, of the nature of presence of mind, of the dependence of enjoyment of scenery upon honest labour, of the necessity that in science, “thought, as far as possible, should be wedded to fact,” and of the propriety of their becoming older and better informed before they unqualifiedly accept his opinion of the labours of Rendu!
But the one thing which, after following him through the edification of his four hundred and ten sentences, they had a right to have explained to them—the one thing that will puzzle them if ever they see a glacier, “how the centre flows past the sides, and the top flows over the bottom,” the Professor does not explain; but only assures them of the attention which the experiments of Mr. Mathews, Mr. Froude, and above all Signor Bianconi, on that subject, “will doubtless receive at a future time.”
The readers of ‘Fors’ may imagine they have nothing to do with personal questions of this kind. But they have no conception of the degree in which general science is corrupted and retarded by these jealousies of the schools; nor how important it is to the cause of all true education, that the criminal indulgence of them should be chastised. Criminal is a strong word, but an entirely just one. I am not likely to overrate the abilities of Professor Tyndall; but he had at least intelligence enough to know that his dispute of the statements of Forbes by quibbling on the word “viscous” was as uncandid as it was unscholarly; and it retarded the advance of glacier science for at least ten years. It was unscholarly, because no other single word existed in the English language which Forbes could have used instead; and uncandid, because Professor Tyndall knew perfectly well that Forbes was aware of the difference between ice and glue, without any need for experiments on them at the Royal Institution. Forbes said that the mass of glacier ice was viscous, though an inch of ice was not, just as it may be said, with absolute truth, that a cartload of fresh-caught herring is liquid, though a single herring is not. And the absurdity as well as the iniquity of the Professor’s wilful avoidance of this gist of the whole debate is consummated in this last book, in which, though its title is “The Forms of Water,” he actually never traces the transformation of snow into glacier ice at all—(blundering by the way, in consequence, as to the use of one of the commonest words in Savoyard French, névé). For there are three great “forms of water” by which the Alps are sheeted,—one is snow; another is glacier ice; the third is névé, which is the transitional substance between one and the other. And there is not a syllable, from the beginning of the book to the end, on the subject of this change, the nature of which is quite the first point to be determined in the analysis of glacier motion.
I have carried my letter to an unusual length, and must end for the time; and next month have to deal with some other matters; but as the Third Fors has dragged me into this business, I will round it off as best I may; and in the next letter which I can devote to the subject, I hope to give some available notes on the present state of glacier knowledge, and of the points which men who really love the Alps may now usefully work upon.