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!