"When then is the ice which is found here, and in such quantities that this cavern serves the few opulent nobility in the neighborhood as an ice house, formed? Surely in winter, though not by the first frost, not so soon as ice is formed in the open air. No doubt, from the little communication this cavern has with the atmosphere, it will be but little and slowly affected by the change. Should therefore, Mr. Bel, or any of his friends, have come here to verify the common report at the commencement of a severe frost, when the whole country was covered with ice and snow, they might still have found nothing here but water, or the ice of the preceding winter in a state of thaw, and the cavern relatively warm; and likewise, should they have visited it in a warm spring, which had succeeded to a severe winter, they might have found nothing here but frost and ice; and even the fresh melted snow, percolating through the roof of this cavern, might again have been congealed to ice. I observed frequently in Germany in the severe winter of 1794-5, on a sudden thaw, that the walls of churches and other public buildings, on the outside were white and covered with a hoar frost, and the windows on the same side covered with a rime." Dr. Franz Sartori, in 1809, was a strong believer in the summer ice theory, and wrote of the flies and the gnats, the bats and the owls, and the foxes and the hares coming to Szilize to winter. Alexander von Humboldt, in 1814, says about the Cueva del Hielo on the Peak of Teneriffe that so much snow and ice are stored up in winter that the summer heat cannot melt it all, and also adds that permanent snow in caves must depend more on the amount of winter snow, and the freedom from hot winds, than on the absolute altitude of the cave. Dewey, in 1819, thought that the ice in the Snow Glen at Williamstown was a winter formation. Professor M. A. Pictet visited Saint-Georges, Le Brezon and Montarquis and in 1822 endeavored to prove that they are cold current caves and that the ice in them is due entirely to draughts causing evaporation. He believed in the theory of the ice forming in summer more than in winter and that it could not be the residue of a winter deposit. He therefore argued that it must be due to descending currents of air which he thought would be most energetic in summer; that they would become at least as low as the mean annual temperature of the place and be still further cooled by evaporation. The strange thing about his theories is that he does not seem to have personally observed any draughts either at Saint-Georges or Le Brezon, but the fact that the ice was evidently not an accumulation of winter snow led him to try to reconcile what he had himself seen with de Saussure's theories about windholes.