One friend, scarcely mentioned thus far in this biography, was yet,
from the beginning, the close associate of Agassiz's glacier work.
Arnold Guyot and he had been friends from boyhood. Their university
life separated them for a time, Guyot being at Berlin while Agassiz
was at Munich, and they became colleagues at Neuchatel only after
Agassiz had been for some years established there. From that time
forward there was hardly any break in their intercourse; they came
to America at about the same time, and finally settled as
professors, the one at Harvard College, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and the other at the College of New Jersey, in
Princeton. They shared all their scientific interests; and when
they were both old men, Guyot brought to Agassiz's final
undertaking, the establishment of a summer school at Penikese, a
cooperation as active and affectionate as that he had given in his
youth to his friend's scheme for establishing a permanent
scientific summer station in the high Alps.
In a short visit made by Agassiz to Paris in the spring of 1838 he
unfolded his whole plan to Guyot, then residing there, and
persuaded him to undertake a certain part of the investigation.
During this very summer of 1838, therefore, while Agassiz was
tracing the ancient limits of the ice in the Bernese Oberland and
the Haut Valais, and later, in the valley of Chamounix, Guyot was
studying the structure and movement of the ice during a six weeks'
tour in the central Alps. At the conclusion of their respective
journeys they met to compare notes, at the session of the
Geological Society of France, at Porrentruy, where Agassiz made a
report upon the general results of his summer's work; while Guyot
read a paper, the contents of which have never been fully
published, upon the movement of glaciers and upon their internal
features, including the laminated structure of the ice, the
so-called blue bands, deep down in the mass of the glacier.* (* See
"Memoir of Louis Agassiz" by Arnold Guyot, written for the United
States National Academy of Sciences, page 38.) In the succeeding
years of their glacial researches together, Guyot took for his
share the more special geological problems, the distribution of
erratic boulders and of the glacial drift, as connected with the
ancient extension of the glaciers. This led him away from the
central station of observation to remoter valleys on the northern
and southern slopes of the Alps, where he followed the descent of
the glacial phenomena to the plains of central Europe on the one
side and to those of northern Italy on the other. We therefore
seldom hear of him with the band of workers who finally settled on
the glacier of the Aar, because his share of the undertaking became
a more isolated one. It was nevertheless an integral part of the
original scheme, which was carried on connectedly to the end, the
results of the work in the different departments being constantly
reported and compared. So much was this the case, that the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account