A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [210]
They knew there was something odd about the past. The European landscape was littered with inexplicable anomalies—the bones of arctic reindeer in the warm south of France, huge rocks stranded in improbable places—and they often came up with inventive but not terribly plausible explanations. One French naturalist named de Luc, trying to explain how granite boulders had come to rest high up on the limestone flanks of the Jura Mountains, suggested that perhaps they had been shot there by compressed air in caverns, like corks out of a popgun. The term for a displaced boulder is an erratic, but in the nineteenth century the expression seemed to apply more often to the theories than to the rocks.
The great British geologist Arthur Hallam has suggested that if James Hutton, the father of geology, had visited Switzerland, he would have seen at once the significance of the carved valleys, the polished striations, the telltale strand lines where rocks had been dumped, and the other abundant clues that point to passing ice sheets. Unfortunately, Hutton was not a traveler. But even with nothing better at his disposal than secondhand accounts, Hutton rejected out of hand the idea that huge boulders had been carried three thousand feet up mountainsides by floods—all the water in the world won't make a boulder float, he pointed out—and became one of the first to argue for widespread glaciation. Unfortunately his ideas escaped notice, and for another half century most naturalists continued to insist that the gouges on rocks could be attributed to passing carts or even the scrape of hobnailed boots.
Local peasants, uncontaminated by scientific orthodoxy, knew better, however. The naturalist Jean de Charpentier told the story of how in 1834 he was walking along a country lane with a Swiss woodcutter when they got to talking about the rocks along the roadside. The woodcutter matter-of-factly told him that the boulders had come from the Grimsel, a zone of granite some distance away. “When I asked him how he thought that these stones had reached their location, he answered without hesitation: ‘The Grimsel glacier transported them on both sides of the valley, because that glacier extended in the past as far as the town of Bern.' ”
Charpentier was delighted. He had come to such a view himself, but when he raised the notion at scientific gatherings, it was dismissed. One of Charpentier's closest friends was another Swiss naturalist, Louis Agassiz, who after some initial skepticism came to embrace, and eventually all but appropriate, the theory.
Agassiz had studied under Cuvier in Paris and now held the post of Professor of Natural History at the College of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Another friend of Agassiz's, a botanist named Karl Schimper, was actually the first to coin the term ice age (in German Eiszeit), in 1837, and to propose that there was good evidence to show that ice had once lain heavily across not just the Swiss Alps, but over much of Europe, Asia, and North America. It was a radical notion. He lent Agassiz his notes—then came very much to regret it as Agassiz increasingly got the credit for what Schimper felt, with some legitimacy, was his theory. Charpentier likewise ended up a bitter enemy of his old friend. Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
At all events, Agassiz made the field his own.