In trying to form a just estimate of our debt to the early English pioneers, we have to avoid two extremes. We must remember the parable of the dwarf standing on the giant’s shoulders. It ill becomes those who owe Climbers’ Guides, and to some extent good maps, to the labours of the pioneers to discount their achievements. But the other extreme is also a danger. We need not pretend that every man who climbed a virgin peak in the days when nearly every big peak was virgin was necessarily a fine mountaineer. All praise is due to the earliest explorers, men like Balmat, Joseph Beck, Bourrit, De Saussure, and the Meyers, for in those days the country above the snow-line was not only unknown, it was full of imagined terrors. These men did a magnificent work in robbing the High Alps of their chief defence--superstition. But in the late ’fifties and early ’sixties this atmosphere had largely vanished. Mr. X came to the A valley, and discovered that the B, C, or D horn had not been climbed. The B, C, and D horn were average peaks with a certain amount of straightforward snow and ice work, and a certain amount of straightforward rock work. Mr. X enjoys a fortnight of good weather, and the services of two good guides. He does what any man with like opportunities would accomplish, what an undergraduate fresh to the Alps could accomplish to-day if these peaks had been obligingly left virgin for his disposal. Many of the pioneers with a long list of virgin peaks to their credit would have made a poor show if they had been asked to lead one of the easy buttresses of Tryfan.