[Illustration: THE AIGUILLE AND DÔME DU GOÛTER, MONT BLANC] The climb was, beyond question, a great feat for a philosopher of forty-seven, and it brought the name of de Saussure under the notice of thousands of people who would never otherwise have heard of him. A still greater feat, accomplished a little later, was the camping out, for something over a fortnight, on the Col du Géant. But it is not upon either of these feats that de Saussure’s real fame reposes. He is reckoned among great men partly because he was the first student of geology who knew his business, and partly because he is the only Alpine writer of his period whose works have stood the test of time. The geologists who preceded him fall into two classes. There were the mere fossilizers, who had about as much claim to be considered men of science as have the stamp-collectors of the present day; there were the theorists who geologized, so to say, in the air, threw out hasty generalizations from their studies, and thought it beneath their dignity as philosophers to correct these hypotheses by the further observation of phenomena. De Saussure combined their methods. His life was one long, patient study of geological phenomena. But he collected in order to collate; his aim was always to see the part in its relation to the whole, the particular in its relation to the general; and he had a fine contempt for the amateurs who collected fossils in the same spirit in which they might have collected pottery or bric-à-brac. ‘The one aim,’ he wrote, ‘of most of the travellers who call themselves naturalists is the collection of curiosities. They walk, or rather they creep about, with their eyes fixed upon the earth, picking up a specimen here and a specimen there, without any eye to a generalization. They remind me of an antiquary scratching the ground at Rome, in the midst of the Pantheon or the Coliseum, looking for fragments of coloured glass, without ever turning to look at the architecture of these magnificent edifices.’ The most remarkable thing, however, is that de Saussure, being a geologist, should have been a stylist. He certainly never meant to be one. He would never have written a book merely to show his skill in word-painting; his one purpose in writing was to communicate discoveries of importance. At the time when Bourrit was making himself famous by his picturesque descriptions of the Alps, the greater man wrote to him modestly: ‘I too have an idea of publishing something on the natural history of these mountains. It is with that end in view that I have been studying them for so many years.’ And in the introduction of his great work, he apologizes for what seems to him the baldness of his style: ‘More practised in climbing rocks than in polishing phrases, I have attempted nothing more than to render clearly the objects which I have seen, and the impressions which I have felt.’