I would willingly have published this volume without illustrations, and should the reader like those here introduced—two of which were published ten years ago, and the remainder recently executed under the able superintendence of Mr. Whymper—he will have to ascribe his gratification to the initiative of Mr. William Longman, not to me.
I have sometimes tried to trace the genesis of the interest which I take in fine scenery. It cannot be wholly due to my own early associations; for as a boy I loved nature, and hence, to account for that love, I must fall back upon something earlier than my own birth. The forgotten associations of a far-gone ancestry are probably the most potent elements in the feeling. With characteristic penetration, Mr. Herbert Spencer has written of the growth of our appreciation of natural scenery with growing years. But to the associations of the individual himself he adds ‘certain deeper, but now vague, combinations of states, that were organised in the race during barbarous times, when its pleasurable activities were among the mountains, woods, and waters. Out of these excitations,’ he adds, ‘some of them actual, but most of them nascent, is composed the emotion which a fine landscape produces in us.’ I think this an exceedingly likely proximate hypothesis, and hence infer that those ‘vague and deep combinations organised in barbarous times,’ not to go further back, have come down with considerable force to me. Adding to these inherited feelings the pleasurable present exercise of Mr. Bain’s ‘muscular sense,’ I obtain a somewhat intelligible, though, doubtless, still secondary theory of my delight in the mountains.
The name of a friend whom I taught in his boyhood to handle a theodolite and lay a chain, and who afterwards turned his knowledge to account on the glaciers of the Alps, occurs frequently in the following pages. Of the firmness of a friendship, uninterrupted for an hour, and only strengthened by the weathering of six-and-twenty years, he needs no assurance. Still, for the pleasure it gives myself, I connect this volume with the name of Thomas Archer Hirst.
J. Tyndall.
May 1871.
CONTENTS.
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | The Lauwinen-Thor | [1] |
| II. | Disaster on the Col du Géant | [18] |
| III. | The Matterhorn—First Assault, with J. J. Bennen as Guide | [27] |
| IV. | Thermometric Stations on Mont Blanc | [53] |
| V. | A Letter from Bâle | [59] |
| Note on the Sound of Agitated Water | [65] | |
| VI. | The Urbachthal and Gauli Glacier | [66] |
| VII. | The Grimsel and the Æggischhorn | [75] |
| Note on Clouds | [82] | |
| VIII. | The Bel Alp | [86] |
| IX. | The Weisshorn | [91] |
| X. | Inspection of the Matterhorn with Bennen | [114] |
| XI. | Over the Moro | [125] |
| XII. | The Old Weissthor | [130] |
| XIII. | Rescue from a Crevasse | [141] |
| XIV. | The Matterhorn—Second Assault, in Company with Bennen | [153] |
| XV. | From Stein to the Grimsel | [166] |
| XVI. | The Oberaarjoch.—Adventure at the Æggischhorn | [174] |
| XVII. | Ascent of the Jungfrau | [180] |
| XVIII. | Death of Bennen on the Haut de Cry | [192] |
| XIX. | Accident on the Piz Morteratsch | [206] |
| XX. | Alpine Sculpture | [219] |
| XXI. | Search on the Matterhorn: a Project | [252] |
| XXII. | The Titlis, Finsteraarschlucht, Petersgrat, and Italian Lakes | [255] |
| XXIII. | Ascent of the Eiger and Passage of the Trift | [265] |
| XXIV. | The Matterhorn--Third and Last Assault | [271] |
| XXV. | Ascent of the Aletschhorn | [295] |
| XXVI. | A Day among the Séracs of the Glacier du Géant Fourteen Years Ago | [318] |
| NOTES ON ICE AND GLACIERS, ETC. | ||
| I. | Observations on the Mer de Glace | [339] |
| II. | Structure and Properties of Ice | [360] |
| III. | Structure of Glaciers | [367] |
| IV. | Helmholtz on Ice and Glaciers | [377] |
| V. | Clouds | [405] |
| VI. | Killarney | [413] |
| VII. | Snowdon in Winter | [421] |
| VIII. | Voyage to Algeria to Observe the Eclipse | [429] |