In 1855 and the two following years Sir Charles and Lady Lyell travelled much on the continent, and always with a view of studying existing nature so as to comprehend the past. He was gratified by finding that most of the rising teachers in Germany were using his books as text books for their lectures, and that the doctrines of Hutton he had elaborated were so much appreciated. In Switzerland, Lyell interested himself more than ever about the great remains of former ice action on the rocks. He was at one time disposed to believe that certain masses of mud containing angular stones, derived from a distance, could have been produced by the sea, but not finding any remains of marine animals, or evidence of such action as the ice would produce in rounding and waterwearing stone, he began to examine the influence of glaciers in wearing rocks and carrying the rubbish down with them. He was of course aware that there had been an age of cold in Switzerland, corresponding to the glacial epoch of Europe to the north, and he was therefore prepared to find some proofs of the former great extension of glaciers beyond their present limits. He was disposed to believe that the Alps were higher than they now are in that age of cold. In order to account for the former action of ice and the production of huge moraines, in comparison with which those now found at the glacier foot are pigmies, Lyell wrote: “In the glacial period, when the weight of ice was enormously greater, when in the region of the Alps there was so little melting, when glaciers at present only ten, fifteen, and twenty miles long, and from three hundred to one thousand feet deep, were fifty to one hundred, and even one hundred and fifty miles long, and four thousand feet deep (and if there is any truth at all in the generally received theory of the old Swiss glaciers, such must have been their gigantic dimensions), one may readily grant that the pressure and friction were so much in excess of what we now see as to explain the contrast between the ice work done in the olden times, and that accomplished in our own days, to say nothing of the probably disproportionate length of the periods compared.” He noticed an old terminal moraine, in advance of the new one of the Rhone glacier, covered with wild plants, some in full flower, and cut through in two places by the river; its height was only fifteen feet, and its width ninety feet. He went underneath the Viesch glacier in the Upper Vallais, and beyond it; in consequence of its having melted much, he saw a rounded and domed surface of granite, smooth, and with straight furrows a quarter of an inch deep exactly in the direction of the onward movement of the glacier. On the Ruffelhorn, on the right lateral moraine, that is on the surface of the ice close to the rocks, he saw a splendid mass of granite, angular in shape, and measuring fifty-nine feet long, forty-nine feet wide, and forty-two feet high. Its sides were polished and furrowed.