ontologists of Great Britain, with none of whom,
except Lyell, had I any previous personal acquaintance; and through him
I obtained not only leave to examine all the fossil fishes in public and
private collections throughout England, but the unprecedented privilege
of bringing them together for closer comparison in the rooms of the
Geological Society of London. A few years later he visited Switzerland,
when I had the pleasure of showing him, in my turn, the glacial
phenomena of my native country, to the study of which I was then
devoting all my spare time. After a thorough survey of the facts I had
collected, he became satisfied that my interpretation of them was likely
to prove correct, and even then he recalled phenomena of his own
country, which, under the new light thrown upon them by the glacial
phenomena of Switzerland, gave a promise of success to my extraordinary
venture. We then resolved to pursue the inquiry together on the occasion
of my next visit to England; and after the meeting in Glasgow of the
British Association for Advancement of Science, we started together for
the mountains of Scotland in search of traces of the glaciers, which, if
there was any truth in the generalizations to which my study of the
Swiss glaciers had led me, must have come down from the Grampian range,
and reached the level of the sea, as they do now in Greenland.

On the fourth of November of that year I read a paper before the
Geological Society of London, containing a summary of the scientific
results of that excursion, which I had extended with the same success to
Ireland and parts of England. This paper was followed by one from Dr.
Buckland himself, containing an account of his own observations, and
another from Lyell on the same subject. From that time, the
investigation of glaciers in regions where they no longer occur has been
carried to almost every part of the globe. Before giving a more special
account of this expedition, I will say a word of the mass of facts which
I had brought from my Alpine researches, on which my own convictions
were founded, and which seemed to Buckland worthy of careful
consideration. To explain these more fully to my readers, I must leave
the Scotch hills for a while, and beg them to return with me to
Switzerland once more.

Thus far I have spoken chiefly of the advance of glaciers, and very
justly, since they are in constant onward motion, being kept within
their limits only by a waste at their