e simpler or more clearly
uniformitarian. And even the catastrophists, though they met Lyell
amicably on almost no other theoretical ground, were inclined to admit
the plausibility of his theory of erratics. Indeed, of all Lyell's
nonconformist doctrines, this seemed the one most likely to meet with
general acceptance.
Yet, even as this iceberg theory loomed large and larger before the
geological world, observations were making in a different field that
were destined to show its fallacy. As early as 1815 a sharp-eyed
chamois-hunter of the Alps, Perraudin by name, had noted the existence
of the erratics, and, unlike most of his companion hunters, had puzzled
his head as to how the bowlders got where he saw them. He knew nothing
of submerged continents or of icebergs, still less of upheaving
mountains; and though he doubtless had heard of the Flood, he had no
experience of heavy rocks floating like corks in water. Moreover, he
had never observed stones rolling uphill and perching themselves on
mountain-tops, and he was a good enough uniformitarian (though he would
have been puzzled indeed had any one told him so) to disbelieve that
stones in past times had disported themselves differently in this regard
from stones of the present. Yet there the stones are. How did they get
there?
The mountaineer thought that he could answer that question. He saw about
him those gigantic serpent-like streams of ice called glaciers, "from
their far fountains slow rolling on," carrying with them blocks of
granite and other debris to form moraine deposits. If these glaciers had
once been much more extensive than they now are, they might have carried
the bowlders and left them where we find them. On the other hand, no
other natural agency within the sphere of the chamois-hunter's knowledge
could have accomplished this, ergo the glaciers must once have been more
extensive. Perraudin would probably have said that common-sense drove
him to this conclusion; but be that as it may, he had conceived one of
the few truly original and novel ideas of which the nineteenth century
can boast.
Perraudin announced his idea to the greatest scientist in his little
world--Jean de Charpentier, director of the mines at Bex, a skilled
geologist who had been a fellow-pupil of Von Buch and Von Humboldt
under Werner at the Freiberg School of Mines. Charpentier laughed at
the mountaineer's grotesque idea, and thought no more about it. And ten
years elapsed befo
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