Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/773

Rh never any thing more chimerical than that here assigned for the postponement of my book and its probable improvement. The "struggle" in the council had no influence upon me, for this good reason, if for no other, that I knew absolutely nothing of the character of the struggle. In Nature, for May 22, 1873, Prof. Huxley has effectually disposed of this hypothesis; and those who care to look at the opening sentences of a paper of mine in Mr. Francis Galton's "Vacation Tourists for 1860," will find there indicated another reason for the delay. I may add, that the only part I ever took in relation to Principal Forbes and a medal was to go on one occasion to the Royal Society with the express intention of recommending that he should have one.

The features of character partly revealed by his biographer also explain that tendency on the part of Principal Forbes to bring his own labors into relief, to the manifest danger of toning down the labors of others. This is illustrated by the foot-note appended to page 419. It is also illustrated by his references to Rendu, which, frequent and flattering as they are, left no abiding impression upon the reader's mind. By some qualifying phrase the quotation in each case is deprived of weight; while practical extinction for eighteen years was, as already intimated, the fate of the "generous" and "hospitable" Agassiz.

Toward the close of the "Life" his biographer, while admitting that "to say that Forbes thoroughly explained the behavior of glaciers would be an exaggeration," claims for him that he must "ever stand forward in the history of the question as one of its most effective and scientific promoters." This meed of praise I should be the last to deny him, for I believe it to be perfectly just. To secure it, however, no bitterness of controversy, no depreciation of the services of others, was necessary. One point here needs a moment's clearing up. The word "theory," as regards glaciers, slides incessantly, and without warning, from one into the other of two different senses. It means sometimes the purely physical theory of their formation, structure, and motion, with which the name of Principal Forbes is so largely identified. But it has a wider sense where it embraces the geological action of glaciers on the surface of the globe. For a long time "glacier theory" had reference mainly to the geological phenomena; it was in this sense that the words were employed by Principal Forbes in his article in the Edinburgh Review, published in 1842. It is in this sense that they are now habitually applied by M. Agassiz, and in relation to the theory thus defined it is no more than natural for his supporters to assign to M. Agassiz the highest place. I mention this to abolish the mystification which threatens to surround a question which this simple statement will render clear.

I trust I may be permitted to end here. Strong reasons may cause