Note 10 — LETTER XXXIV.

My readers may at first be little interested by this uneventful narrative; but they will find it eventually delightful, if they accustom themselves to classic and sincere literature; and as an account of Swiss life now fast passing away, it is invaluable. More than the life of Switzerland,—its very snows,—eternal, as one foolishly called them,—are passing away, as if in omen of evil. One-third, at least, in the depth of all the ice of the Alps, has been lost in the last twenty years; and the change of climate thus indicated is without any parallel in authentic history. In its bearings on the water supply and atmospheric conditions of central Europe, it is the most important phenomenon, by far, of all that offer themselves to the study of living men of science: yet in Professor Tyndall’s recent work on the glaciers,10 though he notices the change as one which, “if continued, will reduce the Swiss glaciers to the mere spectres of their former selves,” he offers no evidence, nor even suggestion, as to the causes of the change itself.