It was an apology offered without affectation or false modesty. It announced a departure from the literary fashion of the day, which was to write of the mountains in the language of high-flown sentiment. Rousseau had set the fashion; Ramond de Carbonnière, the philosopher of the Pyrenees, was ready to carry it on; de Luc and Bourrit were doing what they could. De Saussure wished to announce himself as the disciple of none of these, but as the plain man who had made a careful study of his subject, and wished to be heard because of what he had to say and not because of his manner of saying it. He hardly understood that he was, in the full sense of the word, a man of letters--a literary artist. That is a point which has since been settled in his favour by his readers. He might easily have written a treatise that would have been invaluable to specialists and intolerable to everyone else. Guided by a sure instinct, he preferred to write the narrative of his journeys, taking the reader, as it were, by the hand, making him his confidant, showing him his discoveries in the order in which he makes them, and so luring him on to take an interest in a subject generally accounted dull. And, though his first care was always to observe, and to collate his observations, with a view to the advancement of learning, there always was in him something of the poet, which must out from time to time, temporarily giving the go-by to the man of science. One finds this vein of poetry in the writings of most men of science--naturally, seeing that they used gifts of imagination differing from those of the poet only in being disciplined and chastened, and ready to submit to the thraldom of the established fact. Sometimes, indeed, the vein of poetry has interfered with business, as in the case of the ingenious Scheuchzer, who laid himself out to prove that there were dragons in the Alps, or, in a less degree, in the case of Buffon. But, whether it interferes with business or not, there the vein of poetry almost always is. Such old men of science as Conrad Gesner, and such modern men of science as Huxley and Tyndall, have shown us with what striking effect it can be worked. It is because de Saussure worked it so well that his writings still live, though, regarded merely as textbooks, they have long since been superseded. The humanity of the man is continually flashing out at us in the reflections and anecdotes with which he illustrates the manners of the strange peoples in the strange places which he visited. Sometimes it is a flash of humour, as when he inquires the motives that impel men to be chamois-hunters, a trade that never pays. ‘It is the dangers,’ he concludes; ‘the constant alternation of hopes and fears, the continual emotion thus engendered, which excite the hunter, just as they excite the gambler, the soldier, the navigator, and even, to a certain extent, the naturalist of the Alps.’