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. "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? [94] 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.