|
During the six years from
1857 to 1862 Sir Andrew Ramsay spent a part of each summer but one
abroad. It was in this part of his life that he accomplished almost all
the work in foreign geology which he ever did. There will therefore be
some convenience in the treatment of the subject if we group the tours
together in one chapter.
From what has been stated
in the foregoing pages it will be clear that the ice-fever in geology
had now got full hold of him. He had seen a little of Swiss glaciers,
but not nearly enough to enable him to answer all the questions which
the glacial phenomena in Britain were continually putting to him. He
therefore determined to devote as much time as he could spare to the
study of ice and its work outside the narrow limits of the British
Isles, while neglecting no opportunity of investigating the subject
within these limits. By a happy accident he was soon able to carry out
this determination in a far fuller manner than he could have dreamed to
be possible. How this came about is told in a letter to his brother
William. ' Certain of the great steam-boat companies, at the
solicitation of the Canadians, have put a few free passages to America
and back at the disposal of the leading scientific societies to [enable
delegates] to attend a meeting of the "American Association for the
Advancement of Science," which takes place at Montreal on the 12th
August [1857]. Failing Sir Roderick, the Geological Society have deputed
me to represent them, so I go in an honourable position.' Taking Mrs.
Ramsay with him, he sailed on the 29th July.
This was by far the most
enjoyable and instructive of all his foreign expeditions. His friends,
Sir William Logan and Professor James Hall of Albany, spared no pains to
ensure his seeing everything that he wished to see, or which they
thought it important from a geological point of view that he should
visit. His time was thus economised to the utmost. He was taken from
point to point, so that in the course of exactly two months he had
travelled over a large extent of country, and had been conveyed over
those tracts which were specially of service to him in reference to the
problems in which he took interest.
From Montreal Logan
carried the two travellers to Ottawa and up the St. Lawrence by the
Thousand Isles and Lake Ontario to Niagara, thence to Lake Huron. At
Sarnia, Hall met them, and brought them into New York State by Genisee
to his hospitable home at Albany, from which centre they made excursions
to Schoharie, the Helderberg, and Catskill Mountains. Descending the
Hudson to New York, they found there that almost all the persons to whom
they had introductions were absent on holiday. They therefore passed on
to Newhaven, and paid a short visit to Professors Dana, Silliman, and
Brush, thence to Boston, where they were delighted to meet Agassiz, and
so back to Montreal and Quebec for the voyage home.
The chief geological
fruits of this expedition were given partly in a discourse to the Royal
Institution, but more fully in a paper read before the Geological
Society. Ramsay had not yet realised the massiveness of the land-ice of
the Glacial Period. Like most of the geologists of the day, he still
regarded the ' drift' as the result of transport by icebergs, and to the
same agency he attributed the striae on the sides and summits of the
hills. He recognised the remarkably ice-worn character of Canadian
topography, but he did not yet associate that character with a former
extensive glaciation by land-ice. Nevertheless he now beheld the effects
of this glaciation on a far grander scale than he had ever before seen
them, and unconsciously he was accumulating material that would enable
him to get rid of the paralysing idea that the land must have been
submerged beneath the ocean as far as the highest striations or drift
deposits could be traced. He was not, however, able entirely to divest
himself of the old error until the summer of 1861.
In the summer of 1858
Ramsay and Tyndall made an expedition together into Switzerland for the
purpose of studying the phenomena of glaciers and ice-action. The
results of their conjoint observations on this occasion are to be found
in the writings of each explorer. Tyndall had not specially examined the
proofs of the former greater extension of the glaciers of the Alps, and
Ramsay, to whom this was a matter of supreme interest in connection with
his investigations in Britain, took pains to direct his companion's
attention to the subject during the course of the excursion. Arriving at
Grindelwald, they undertook some preliminary climbing among the
ice-filled valleys of that district, and Ramsay proved himself so expert
a pedestrian that Christian Lauener deemed it quite practicable to
proceed on the proposed series of ascents with only himself as guide.
They crossed by the Strahleck Pass over to the Finsteraar and Unteraar
glaciers, spent some time at the Grimsel studying the marvellous
evidence of the vast dimensions of the ancient Alpine ice, went to the
Rhone glacier, and then to Viesch, the Æggischorn and the Marjelen See,
where they remained some days taking measurements of the thickness of
the ice and the depth of the glacier-lake, and making observations of
the temperature of the air. Ramsay had here the great satisfaction of
watching the origin and movements of icebergs. Descending the Rhone
valley to Visp, they walked up to Zermatt with the intention of
ascending Monte Rosa. The ample details of geological observations in
Ramsay's note-book of these rambles were afterwards condensed by him in
his essay on the Old Glaciers of Switzerland and Wales. They show how
continually his experience in Britain enabled him to interpret the
phenomena in the Alps, and, on the other hand, how the existing
snow-fields and glaciers of the Alps gave new clearness to his
conceptions of the vanished ice-sheets of his native country. One or two
citations from the note-book may fittingly find a place here.
'Viesch, 30th
July.—Started at nine for the Æggischorn. On the partial clearing of the
mist, ascended the mountain. Tyndall and Lauener pushed on before me,
and were at the top twenty minutes or so earlier than I was. The day is
not far past when 1 was at least a match for either of them. Tyndall
cannot believe that at forty-four and a half years my best days, as
regards strength and agility, should be gone, and he makes no allowance
for my having reached the top of the curve, and begun to descend on the
other side.
'The summit of the peak
consists of piled blocks of gne.issic rocks, rent by frost and weather,
and heaped on each other in wild confusion, like the summits of the
Glyders, or Y Tryfan, above the passes of Nant Francon and Llanberis.
The view from the summit was, indeed, grand. Below on the north and west
lay the Great Aletsch glacier, seemingly as much larger than all the
other glaciers I have yet seen, as the St. Lawrence is larger than the
Severn, Thames, or Seine. There it lay below us, broad, smooth, and
sweeping, although crevassed and somewhat crumpled. The moraines looked
small upon it. On the left it descended into the valley, and on the
north it was lost in the far recesses of those Alpine giants, the
Jungfrau, Monch, and Finsteraarhorn. On the north-west the glacier is
joined by two great tributaries, one the Ober Aletsch glacier, the other
the Middle Aletsch glacier, stretching up among the snows and awful
cliffs of the Aletschhorn, the peak of which rises more than 13,000 feet
above the sea. This summit is higher than the Jungfrau. White sunny
mists were seething round it, half veiling and adding to its majesty.
'Seemingly close below
lay the Marjelen See, with the glacier branching into it, and breaking
off in large masses, which floated away eastward as tabular bergs before
the wind, and grounded on the desolate shores. Clearly the glacier once
sent off a branch down this valley, for besides that it partially does
so still, the rocks on the hills by the lake are moutonndes high up on
either side. The glacier must then have sent off a branch that united
with the Viescher glacier, and at a certain period of its history it
sought the valley of the Rhone by two channels, that of the Aletsch and
that of the Viescher glacier.'
On reaching Zermatt he
found letters telling him that his mother had had a serious attack of
bronchitis, but had somewhat rallied. Next day he made the following
entry in his note-book :—
'Zermatt, 9th
August.—Found at the post office a black-edged envelope, which at once
told me that my mother was dead. I merely read the first few lines, and
then ran up the mountain after Tyndall, towards the Riffel Hotel, but he
had gone to the end of the Gorner glacier, and I outstripped him. When
halfway up, exhausted with my speed, I turned and saw two figures far
below by the glacier, whom I guessed to be Tyndall and Lauener. During
the half-hour they took to come up to me I had leisure to read my wife's
letter, and my grief found a little vent. Tyndall came up, anu I marched
down to him with my hat drawn over my eyes. We arranged that Lauener
should go down and countermand the guide, who next day was to accompany
me up Monte Rosa, and Tyndall persuaded me that instead of starting so
late, it would be better to remain with him and go next day. So we
ascended to the Riffel.'
He started homeward early
next day, and walked the rough thirty mues of valley down to Yisp to
regain his portmanteau, and catch the diligence for Bex. Finding when
there that he could reach London almost as soon by sleeping at Bex as by
going on to Geneva, he remained to have a look at the famous blocks of
Monthey. He 'wandered among them half a summer's day, pleased and amazed
by their beauty and great size, and the evidence of power conveyed to
the mi' id while reflecting on the agency that bore these ponderous
masses and left them perched on this hill, from 500 to 600 feet above
the Rhone, I he largest, twenty-two paces in length, and nearly equally
broad anil high, has on its flat summit a good - sized summer - house
with a small garden containing cherry-trees.'
On reaching England, and
realising there amid all the old familiar surroundings the blank that
had now fallen upon his life, with the rupture of his oldest and
tenderest associations, he made the following entry in his diary :—
'On the 29th July 1858 my
dearest mother died at the Bridge of Allan. She had been a few days
ailing, a little breathless, and in bed. William had gone to Glasgow,
and was telegraphed for; when he got back at six o'clock all was over.
There may have been many as good, but none better than our mother. She
died in her eighty-fifth year, surrounded by love. She truly lived all
her days, in health and cheerfulness, in peace, love, and honour, with
her faculties and cheerfulness clear to the last, loving books and
mirth, and writing a good letter :n a clear hand to the very end. When
my father died she must have been fifty-three years old. I was then
thirteen. She had but ,£1000 and a house. Then came a time that would
have crushed a weaker spi-it. But she battled for us, arid keeping
college and other boarders, brought us all up respectably. William was
apprenticed to Napier, the engineer, and I went at that early age
into--'s counting-house, and passed through many battles ere I emerged
from mercantile life and got launched in the world of science. These
times, which I look on as hard, though I was when young merry enough, my
mother never grumbled at, but doing a duty was happy in it, and when we
began to do well and made her give it up, she almost missed for a time
the employment to which she had been used for eighteen years.
'Ere her death she had
thirteen years of peace and quietness, and every year endeared her more
to those who knew her best. My wife loved her like a veritable daughter,
and all the children that approached her loved her also. Her memory is
so pleasant to me, and all her deeds, her courage, kindness, charity,
and goodness ; she lived her time in the world so well, and so
completely fulfilled a good woman's mission, that though I miss her, and
every now and then think "I must write to my mother," yet my sorrow is
tempered by a thousand pleasant reflections. She lived to the last happy
and contented, beloved by all, happy in all her children, and she
scarcely seemed to die, so easy was it to pass from one world to
another.
On returning to England
from this Alpine excursion Ramsay had to address himself to a long
course of arduous labour. Partly from the necessities of his official
position, and partly from his own voluntary act in undertaking various
pieces of work outside the claims of the Survey, he was now involved in
a greater pressure of mental toil and accompanying worry than had ever
befallen him before. The inspecting duty in the field was every year
becoming more exacting, as the staff of officers increased and the area
of survey augmented. But had that been his chief or only occupation, he
would have made it in some measure a kind of holiday employment. But
there was now a large and growing amount of literary work thrown upon
him which was unknown in the older days of the Survey. Sir Roderick
Murchison had arranged that each of the one-inch maps, as it was
published, should be accompanied with an explanatory memoir, so that the
public might be put in possession of the chief data used in the
construction of the map, and of the information needful for its proper
interpretation. These memoirs were to be edited by the Local Director
from the manuscript notes supplied to him by the officers who had
surveyed the ground. He sometimes had to furnish additional material
from observations of his own, and the amount of editorial supervision
was thus often exceedingly heavy. Then the great Memoir on North Wales
still dragged its slow length along. From various causes, but chiefly
from the want of sufficiently full notes by one or two of his
colleagues, Ramsay had been unable to make rapid progress with this
large and detailed volume ; though it had been for so long his chief
indoor employment, and though he again in the autumn of 1858 took a
house in Scotland for three months, this time at St. Andrews, in order
to push it forward.
Another task occupied
some part of his thought and time. He had planned a descriptive
catalogue of the rock-specimens in the Survey collection in the Jermyn
Street Museum, and while assigning certain portions of it to three of
his colleagues, had kept the main share of the work in his own hands. As
ultimately published, this volume formed an excellent compendium of
British geology. In particular, the account of the successive volcanic
episodes in the Palaeozoic period in Britain was by far the best which
up to that time had appeared, and it was mainly the work of Ramsay
himself.
But over and above these
official labours his hands were full of work. He at this time condensed
the information on the published Survey maps, and produced a geological
map of England and Wales on the scale of twelve miles to an inch, which
is still the most serviceable general map of the kingdom. He prepared a
Friday evening discourse for the Royal Institution on the geological
results of his Canadian excursion, and wrote out a fuller statement of
the subject for the Geological Society. He drew up for the well-known
volume, Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, a chapter on the old glaciers of
Switzerland and Wales. This essay, full of original observation, and
suffused with the charm of freshness and enthusiasm, is one of the most
important and delightful Which he ever wrote. It was reprinted as a
separate little volume, and has long taken its place among the choice
classics of glacial geology. He now began to write for the Saturday
Reviczy, and for a number of years continued to furnish occasional
articles to that journal, chiefly on geological topics, but without the
technicalities of the more formal communications to learned bodies.
His habit at this time,
when in country quarters >n the autumn, was to write during every
available hour of daylight, and only to go outside for exercise when it
was too dark any longer to see his manuscript. In the end the strain
proved too great both on his brain and on his eyes. In the summer of
1859 he accompanied Murchison into the North-West Highlands of Scotland,
and assisted him in the preparation of his discourse for the British
Association at Aberdeen. He seemed tolerably well and merry at that
meeting, but afterwards, when out among the hills in the south of
Scotland, he complained of weariness. [During one of these rambles with
me in Fife our conversation turned on the Boulder clay and the mysteries
of its origin. We both felt how unsatisfactory was the received
explanation of iceberg action and submergence. I was thus led to study
this deposit, and to reach thereby the conclusion, at which Ramsay also
simultaneously and independently arrived from a consideration of other
evidence, that the great glaciation was the work of land-ice. This
change of view was completed before the summer of 1861.] The symptoms of
mental exhaustion increased during the autumn He had for the first time
taken a permanent house in London, having hitherto only occupied
furnished rooms. But hardly had he settled in the new home when it
became evident that he was in no fit condition for London life, and more
particularly to undertake his usual course of lectures at the School of
M;nes. Towards the end of December it was arranged that the lectures
should be given by his colleague Jukes, while Ramsay himself went to the
house of his helpful and sympathetic friend, Dr. Wright of Cheltenham,
under whose care, with entire cessation of work and worry, it was
anticipated that speedy convalescence would be secured. But the recovery
was not to be so easily effected. He was ordered to abstain from all
work for a time, and in order to obtain complete rest and change, he and
Mrs. Ramsay with the children went abroad. He wrote to me just before
leaving (31st March i860) : ' I sail on Tuesday with bag, baggage,
fishing - basket, rod, flies, sketch-books, Shakespeare, and the musical
glasses in the shape of sundry minor authors. I am to be away, if
nothing specially intervene, for six months, but I think the less we say
about that the better; and if any one by any chance asks you anything
about it, several months is a convenient word, with the addition that I
join the Scotch geologists as soon as I come back, and also that Sir
Roderick says he will pay you a visit during my absence. Gossips have
been exaggerating my illness, and I know that, both on my own authority
and that of the doctor, you will do me the friendly turn to give a Hat,
blunt, sharp, plain, broad, profound, high, and indignant denial to any
statement that I am seriously ill. I am even now so wonderfully better
that I can do a good hard day's work at the office, albeit I am tired at
night, and therefore to set me up alike by day and by night, an entire
cessation for a while is needed.
Nearly two months were
spent in Bonn, and of this sojourn Ramsay used always to talk with much
enthusiasm. He loved the great river, and delighted to sit quietly
smoking and watching the ' breast of waters' as it swelled beneath him.
He made some pleasant friends, among whom he specially counted Von
Dechen, the venerable Noggerath, and young Ferdinand Zirkel. Professor
Zirkel has sent me a letter with his reminiscences of Ramsay, which is
here inserted:—
My first meeting with the
never-to-be-forgotten Ramsay was in the spring of i860, in Bonn, so far
as I remember, towards the end of April or beginning of May. One day my
fatherly patron and official chief, Von Dechen, sent for me and told me
that an English geologist, a man of great importance, had come to Bonn
with his wife, to spend some time there for the sake of his health, and
in order to make some geological excursions in the neighbourhood. As
Dechen himself had not time, I was asked to accompany and guide the
stranger in these rambles. No request could have been more agreeable to
me. Although I was then only twenty-two years of age, yet I knew the
nearer and farther environs of my native town as well as anybody. I was
at that time a pupil of the Prussian State-Mining Institute.
So I waited on Ramsay,
who was staying at Ermekeil's Grand Hotel Royal on the Rhine, and then
began a series of blissful days. Sometimes for the whole day, sometimes
in the afternoon only, we rambled in the Siebengebirge, to the Roderberg,
to the Laacher See, to the Devonian Eifel-limestone at Bensberg, and
many other places.
When we got back Ramsay
would usually have me to sup with him and his wife in the hotel. I
conceived at that time an enthusiastic admiration for Ramsay, both for
his amiable, simple, and straight forward nature, and for his acuteness
and his range of acquirements in geological matters. I remember in a
gully in the trachyte-tuff he suddenly made a couple of steps forward,
exclaiming, 'There is a dyke!' and there, sure enough, was a dyke of
solid trachyte, which nobody had ever noticed before in this
well-frequented path.
I think Ramsay spent a
happy time that season in Bonn. Dechen once gave an evening party in his
honour. His intercourse with old Noggerath would have been greater, had
the latter not been utterly ignorant of English. I got on extremely well
with Mrs. Ramsay.
In the summer of 1860 I
made a journey to Iceland, and as, on my return, I spent a short time in
England, I then saw Ramsay again. During the first days of my stay in
London he was in the country, but I met him on the last day in the
Museum, Jermyn Street, in company with Lyell. I told him a good deal
about my tour in Iceland, and he presented me with several books.
In 1868 I once more saw
Ramsay, both before and after my visit to Scotland. He lived at that
time in Upper Phillimore Place, in Kensington, where I spent an evening,
and met Howell and Hull. As I left London he gave me a letter to you,
and this letter I presented to you in Largs on Monday, 8th June 1868
(according to my diary). That was the day when I had the good fortune to
make the personal acquaintance of my friend Geikie.
The last time I saw
Ramsay was at the meeting of the British Association at Sheffield in
1879, when I was staying with Sorby.
From Bonn Ramsay and his
family moved up the Rhine, and then ascended the Moselle to Alf and
Bertrich. There he established himself for a while, and spent his time
fishing in the river, exploring the Eifel volcanoes, and gazing with
ever - increasing interest upon the great tableland and the valleys cut
out of it by the Moselle and its tributaries. From that quiet life he
journeyed to Treves, then "back to Heidelberg, and into the Black
Forest. He attended the tercentenary celebration of Basle University,
and even got as far as Munich. But in October he was once more back in
England.
The following portion of
a letter to Mrs. Cook-man (4th July) from Bertrich gives a picture of
how the time passed there. 'Having stayed seven weeks at Bonn, and
excursed and fished, we steamed up the Rhine to Coblenz, slept one night
there, and next morning steamed up the Moselle to Alf, where we remained
a fortnight, walkinng and idling, and fishing again. I assure you I can
throw a fly as prettily as need be. But who shall describe the glories
of the Moselle with its unutterably tortuous windings, its vineyards,
its quaintly-gabled towns, and all its castles, so stately in decay! I
am going to buy one for 50 or 100 thalers (£7 : 10s. or £15), and :n
memory of my late illness, take my title from it—Baron Beilstex.
'Bertrich is a pretty
little village, with two or three hotels, baths, and gardens with music
in them twice a day. Gaiety there is none, but peace and quiet and a
billiard table. The village is set in a deep valley, and three extinct
volcanoes crown the tableland above, for hills proper there are none. I
have been on foot with a Dutchman (whom I lamed) all over the Eifel, and
have seen lots of extinct volcanoes — most interesting. The structure of
the country, its physical geography in fact, is most curious— a great
tableland, about 1200 feet high, through which the Moselle and other
rivers run in deep valleys. On this tableland are perched old volcanoes
of Miocene (that is, of Middle Tertiary) age. The valleys are of older
date than the volcanoes, for sometimes you see a lava-stream that has
run from the mouth of the craters into the valley below. The Devonian
strata of the tableland are awfully disturbed, not by the volcanoes, but
by far older forces. It was a great plain, so to speak, with valleys
scooped out of it long before the lava began to flow.
"'We leave this soon,
but, before doing so finally, will pay a visit to Treves, to see the
northern capital of the Emperor Constantine.'
Though these months on
the Continent were spent as far as possible in idleness, Ramsay could
hardly find himself face to face with new scenes without being led to
notice and reflect on the features in them which bore on any of the
questions on geology and physical geography which had always been with
him such favourite subjects. His excursions among the Eifel cones and
craters gave him fresh material for his work among the old volcanoes of
Wales, and for his lectures at the School of Mines. His rambles over the
great tableland of that region, and among the streams which have so
deeply trenched it, furnished him with illustrations of river-action of
which, though he perhaps hardly realised at that time their
significance, he was in a few years to make excellent use.
The sojourn in Germany,
and the idleness enjoined upon him, had one effect, which was the first
to strike the eyes of his friends when he got back to England. He had
buried his razors when he left home, and returned with a bushy beard,
which he continued to wear during the rest of his life. But though much
better in general health than when he went abroad in spring, he was
still far from having regained his old vigour and power of work. Indeed,
it is doubtful if he ever again was capable of enduring the same mental
and physical strain as he had been before his illness. He had again to
be assisted in his lectures durmg the winter, and was still unable for
much literary exertion. The Welsh Memoir had to stand aside. Once or
twice in the course of the summer of 1861 he amused himself with writing
a paper for The Saturday Review, including one of the best of his
contributions to that journal, on 'Lyell and Tennyson'—an essay which,
with its humour, its poetry, its geological aroma, anil its literary
deft ness, is an excellent sample of his fugitive pieces.1
Later in the summer he
went once more with Mrs. Ramsay to Switzerland for more mountaineering,
and to cross over to the Italian side, in order to see the great glacier
moraines of Ivrea. The general outline of this expedition is given in a
letter to his sister, written from the Stachelberg on the 4U1 September
: ' Ever since we left home we have had perfect weather. We have only
had two half rainy days in all, and generally there has not been a cloud
m the sky. Louisa and I travelled as far as Cologne together without
stopping. I then went di ect for another day and night to Teplitz, in
Bohemia. Thence, after three days' rest and light work, I descended the
Elbe to Dresden, across Saxony and Bavaria to Lindau, on the Lake of
Constance, and having travelled two days and nights, reached Berne at
ten o'clock at night, not a bit tired. Next morning after breakfast I
joined Louisa and Mr. and Miss Johnes and Mrs. Cookman at Thun—the most
lovely-spot in the universe. I stayed there from Friday till Monday, and
then left them by steamer on the lakes for Meiringen. There I shouldered
my knapsack at four in the afternoon, and marched alone up the long,
rough valley of the Hasli "Thai to the Grimsel, which I reached well
tired at half past ten.
'I met Tyndall there and
some other ftiends, spent a day on the Rhone glacier, and ascended the
Seidel-horn alone. Next day, Tyndall not being very well, I walked to
Obergestalen, and the day following crossed with a guide over a famous
pass called the Ober Aar Joch to the yEggischorn. It took thirteen
hours, ten of which were spent on the ice. The pass is about 11,500 feet
high.
'In the meanwhile Louisa
and the party came round by the Gemmi Pass, great part of which can be
done on horseback, and the second day after my arrival joined me at the
Æggischorn. We took them up a mountain over 10,000 feet high, and on the
Great Aletsch glacier, which is the longest in Europe. Thence we went to
Visp, in the Rhone Valley, and next morning at six they rode and I
walked up the valley to Zermatt, which we reached about six o'clock at
night
'We stayed at Zermatt six
days, on one of which I, with some others, ascended the Lyskamm, 14,891
feet high. There were eight of us, with five guides and two porters to
carry provisions. Having slept at the Riffelberg, which saves a climb of
some 2000 or 3000 feet, we started at twenty minutes to two in the
morning and crossed the Great Gorner glacier by the light of a full
moon. At dawn we were at the foot of Monte Rosa on the snow, and by
11.40 we reached the top of the Lyskamm. We went in two parties, all
roped together. The final ascent was excessively steep, all on snow and
ice. Sometimes we had one leg in Italy and the other in Switzerland.
That part took nearly three hours. The descent proved nearly as
difficult as the ascent, but we all got back to the Riffelberg by 7
p.m., and down to Zermatt by a little after nine, having been nearly
twenty hours on foot. Several previous attempts had been made to scale
this mountain, but all had failed.
' From Zermatt we all
crossed the Theodul Pass (about 11.000 feet) into Italy. The ladies rode
up to the ice of the glacier, which they reached at seven in the
morning. They had then three hours walking on the ice and snow, and by
twelve o'clock we were at Breuil, where we rested and slept. Next day
they rode on asses to Chatillon, a beautiful old Roman and Italian town.
Next day with Dr. Sibson we drove to Ivrea, where we stayed a day, and
then cm by Chiavasso, Milan, and the Lake of Como to Lugano, where we
stayed two days, and left the Johnes. Sibson. Louisa, and I came across
the St. Bernhardino Pass in a diligence to inter Rhein, near the sources
of the Rhine. There we halted three days, and Sibson and I scaled two
mountains among the glaciers, one of which took fourteen hours. Thence
we came by the Via Mala to Glarus and Elms, "did" another splendid pass,
and came on here. To-morrow is our last day on the ice ; 011 Friday we
shall be in Zurich, and on Monday evening at our own house in
Kensington,'
So far as his physical
powers were concerned, Ramsay seems to have returned to England
invigorated by his Alpine exercise. But he had not regained his old
elasticity of mind, and soon began again to complain of the weariness of
work. Nevertheless, he braced himself for the duties of the winter, and
succeeded in getting through his lectures to the students at the School
of Mines without help. He likewise found himself able at last to sit
down to a congenial task, and to commit to writ'ng the thoughts and
conclusions which had been shaping themselves in his mind for several
years past regarding the origin of lake-basins. This problem in physical
geography had never been seriously attacked, and no tenable solution of
it had yet been proposed. It was his experience in Canada, and the sight
of the lake-sprinkled surface of the ancient gneiss of that region which
first definitely called Ramsay's attention to this subject, though he
had returned from America still in the belief that the older and greater
glaciation was accomplished by floating ice during a time of
submergence. But the recognition to which he had now come, that that
glaciation was the work of the grinding action of stupendous sheets of
land-ice, gave an entirely new turn to his thoughts regarding the
terrestrial contours of glaciated regions. In his journeys in Wales,
Scotland, and Switzerland he was now always on the watch for facts
bearing on the connection between the traces of ice-movement and the
contours of the ground over which the ice had moved. He had at last come
to the conclusion that the prodigious abundance of lakes in the
glaciated regions of the northern hemisphere could not be accounted for
unless they were connected in some way with ice-action, and he inferred
that in a vast number of cases, where the lakes lie in rock-basins,
these basins have actually been scooped out by the grinding power of
land-ice. These observations and inferences he now proceeded to
elaborate as a paper for the Geological Society.
Before the paper was
ready, however, the presidency of the Society was vacant, and there was
a general feeling that it should be offered to Ramsay, if the state of
his health would allow him to accept ;t. The President usually confers
with former presidents of the Society in regard to his successor before
actually proposing a name to the Council; but on this occasion the
President, Leonard Horner, was in Florence, and unable to take any
personal part in the negotiations. Lyell strongly favoured Ramsay s
nomination. Murchison was afraid of the strain upon his colleague, if he
accepted the duties of this office in addition to all that he already
had to discharge, and urged him to consult his medical adviser. On the.
3rd February 1862 Ramsay's diary received the following entry: ' Sir R.
-n a great fuss because I had not seen Haden [his doctor]. Drove out to
Haden's at one o'clock. He vowed by Jove that he would not stand between
me and the presidency. So I drove back and told Sir R., and he said that
that settled the matter.'
So at the Anniversary, on
the 21st February, he was duly elected President—an honour well earned
by twenty-one years of continuous devotion to geology, and the large
part taken by him in the work of the Geological Survey. In the evening
he began his duties by presiding at the annual dinner of the Society,
where, with the Duke of Argyll on his right, and Lord Ducie on his left,
and most of the leaders of geological science around him, he had the
satisfaction of seeing a company of nearly ninety assemble to celebrate
the foundation of the oldest geological society. Those of that company
who still survive will remember the admirable way in which the new
President spoke. Never before had he so distinguished himself in the
difficult art of post-prandial oratory. In returning thanks for his
health he showed a quiet dignity and simplicity, with touches at once of
humour and pathos, which went straight to the hearts of the listeners,
and called forth many rounds of applause.
At the very next evening
meeting of the Society the President gave his paper on lake-basins. Its
conclusions were so startling a novelty in geological physics, and were
based on such a mass of detail, requiring careful study, that they could
hardly be adequately discussed by an audience which heard them for the
first time. Ramsay did not read, but spoke his paper, and being full of
the subject did full justice to it. 'Lyell,' as he said afterwards,
'damned the paper with faint praise, and Falconer vigorously opposed it.
It was admirably defended by Huxley. The meeting was so lively as to
remind us of the old days of Buckland and Sedgwick.' Some account of the
theory propounded in this paper will be given in a subsequent chapter of
this biography. It was attacked by various writers, notably by Lyell,
Murchison, Falconer, and Ball, and to some of the onslaughts made on it
its author replied in the pages of the Philosophical Magazine and The
Reader.
The following letter,
written towards the end of this year, gives a picture of the reception
of the paper, and the ferment that arose from it:—
London, 9th December
1862.
My dear Mrs. Cookman—By
this post I send you the other pamphlet on the origin of Alpine, Welsh,
American, Schwartzwald, and Scandinavian lakes. The smaller one I sent
you the other day was a pendant to it, and was written a propos of a
paper by Tyndall in the Phil. Mag.} in which he ran the theory of what
ice has done to a wild extreme.
It was published in The
Times also, and I thought it a pity to let it be supposed that my theory
led to such extravagance.
I do not suppose you will
find fault w'th the paper on the ground that it wants boldness. When :t
was read Dr. Falconer of Indian-fossil elephant celebrity made an
onslaught on it of forty minutes. I observe that most of the men older
than myself repudiate it, while most of the younger bloods accept it.
Lyell rejects, but then I have Darwin, Hooker, Sir William Logan, jukes,
and Geikie. When I explained the theory to Sir William before it was
read, he said: If you don't publish it for America, I will.
So strong was the
opposition among the older and more staid fellows of the Geological
Society that Ramsay used to assert that had he not been the President,
and thus in a manner privileged, the Council would have voted against
the publication of the paper, except in briefest abstract.
Before the end of the
first week in September 1862 Ramsay was glad to escape once more from
London to Switzerland. There were various geological matters which he
longed to investigate more fully, and as he went this time with only his
friend Dr. Sibson, an accomplished mountaineer, he was free to arrange
his route as the work to be done might require. Making straight for
Geneva, the travellers first went to Bex, and rambled once more among
the blocks of Monthey. The weather proved most unfavourable for
mountain-climbing, and after waiting some days in rain and mist, they
resolved to move into the sunnier clime of the Italian side. Crossing by
the Sanetsch Pass from Gsteig to Sion, they were fortunate to find the
clouds clearing away. ' Ere we reached the watershed,' he wrote to Mrs.
Ramsay, ' there was no mist, except in some of the great corries and up
on the highest peaks. The sun shone brightly. We diverged a little from
the road to see the end of the Sanetsch glacier. The pass is 7123 Paris
feet high. There is therefore no snow on it. While lunching on the
moraine we said: " Let us leave our baggage here, and go up the glacier
to the Tour de St. Martin and see the great cliffs that overlook the
Valais." So at twelve we started, well roped together; but the glacier
proved so easy that there was no real occasion for the rope. In two
hours and a half we were across the glacier, and saw those noble cliffs
1000 feet and more plump down. We also saw a flock of more than
twenty-five chamois not far off, and all the great range across the
Valais, from Mont Blanc to Monte Rosa, clouded in places. In an hour and
a half we were back at our baggage, and started for Sion at five
o'clock. In two hours it was dark, and the guide being nobody, I went
ahead, and on a true Swiss road, by torrent and in forest, piloted all
safe to Sion by instinct. We got there at half-past ten, having walked
fifteen hours.'
Once more in the valley
of the Rhone, they ascended to the Bel Alp and the ^Eggischorn to make
further observations on the great Aletsch glacier and its surroundings.
Then retracing their steps, they made their way by Turtmann over to the
Italian side, and so down the Val d'Aosta to Ivrea, and thence to Turin.
Once in the capital of Piedmont, Ramsay called on his friend Quintino
Sella, known abroad as an able geologist, but to the mass of his own
countrymen familiar only as their distinguished Minister of Finance. Of
the short rme hi Turin Mrs. Ramsay received the following pleasant
narrative: 'From the post office I went to the Ministry of Finance. The
attendant in the ante-room, doubtful of a stranger in a wide awake, said
the Minister was engaged with the Minister of Home Affairs, and would be
so until late in the evening. I sent in my card, and he came back with a
changed countenance and ushered me in. Sella shook me by both hands, and
said he was uncommonly glad to see me, and that if I would wait till he
wrote a note, he would himself take me to Gastaldi. . . . Gastaldi
received me like an old friend, and he has been almost constantly with
me ever since. . . .
'I have just come back
from the Ministry a decorated man, with white and gold cross and green
ribbon! The royal letter and decree are to follow. . . . I leave
to-night, and cross Mont Cenis, arresting myself perhaps at Macon for
the second night.'
The knighthood thus
conferred through the instrumentality of Signor Sella was that of the
order of SS. Maurice and Lazarus—a distinction offered, not only in
recognition of the scientific attainments of the Local Director of the
Geological Survey of Great Britain, but also as a mark of the
appreciation of his services to Italian officers sent at various times
to England on missions of scientific inquiry.
The end of this month of
Alpine rambling concluded Ramsay's journeys abroad as an active
geologist. For eight years he did not again leave this country. He had
now practically accomplished the foreign travel of his life, and though
he was able in later years to revisit some of the scenes which he had
traversed in the full vigour of manhood, it was rather with a view to
rest and change, or, where any scientific work was attempted, it was
more for the purpose of testing conclusions already made than with the
view of fresh exploration and new deduction. |
