On n'y voit nulle eminence Comme on voit en d'autres lieux; Cela me charme, et je pense Qu'on ne peut dire tant mieux, he finds the characteristics of the Alps, even in winter, such that they Sont si doux à mes yeux que d'aise ils en pétillent, and is even modern enough to speak of Et cet air net et sain, propre à l'esprit vital.[112] These three have been entirely overlooked hitherto; the only person of this period whom the modern mountaineer is told to claim as his spiritual brother is the botanist Conrad Gesner; but in claiming him they claim too much—for themselves. It is true that Gesner does write[113] that he never lets a year go by without climbing one or more of the Alps for exercise and pleasure as well as for botany; and that "whoever does not consider towering mountains preëminently worthy of more than ordinary attention is, to my mind, an enemy of Nature." But he goes on to show that the Alps meant far more to him than this much would prove. He looked on them as an epitome of all Nature's habits and experiments, the key to all Nature's secrets, to geology in the fullest sense of the word, structural, historical, dynamical; and that to a greater extent than is apparent at first sight, inasmuch as problems now treated as solved then belonged to dreamland and problems which seemed soluble there if anywhere are now known to be better studied elsewhere; the internal temperature of the earth, for instance, since it was not recognized in Gesner's day that there was any difference in kind between mountains and volcanoes.