Browsing named entities in Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition. You can also browse the collection for Alpine, Ga. (Georgia, United States) or search for Alpine, Ga. (Georgia, United States) in all documents.

Your search returned 12 results in 9 document sections:

Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition, Chapter 1: 1807-1827: to Aet. 20. (search)
he mountain the weather remained perfectly clear and calm. Under a blue sky they watched the lightning, and listened to the thunder in the dark clouds, which were pouring torrents of rain upon the plain and the Lake of Lucerne. The storm lasted long after night had closed in, and Agassiz lingered when all his companions had retired to rest, till at last the clouds drifted softly away, letting down the light of moon and stars on the lake and landscape. He used to say that in his subsequent Alpine excursions he had rarely witnessed a scene of greater beauty. Such of his letters from Zurich as have been preserved have only a home interest. In one of them, however, he alludes to a curious circumstance, which might have changed the tenor of his life. He and his brother were returning on foot, for the vacation, from Zurich to their home which was now in Orbe, where their father and mother had been settled since 1821. Between Neuchatel and Orbe they were overtaken by a traveling carr
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition, Chapter 3: 1828-1829: Aet. 21-22. (search)
s. I hope yet to prove to you that with a brevet of Doctor as a guarantee, Natural History may be a man's bread-winner as well as the delight of his life. . . . In September Agassiz allowed himself a short interruption of his work. The next letter gives some account of this second vacation trip. To his parents. Munich, September 26, 1828. . . .The instruction for the academic year closed at the end of August, and our professors had hardly completed their lectures when I began my Alpine excursion. Braun, impatient to leave Munich, had already started the preceding day, promising to wait for me on the Salzburg road at the first spot which pleased him enough for a halt. That I might not keep him waiting, I begged a friend to drive me a good day's journey, thinking to overtake Braun the first day on the pleasant banks of the Lake of Chiem. My traveling companions were the younger Schimper [Wilhelm], of whom I have spoken to you (and who made a botanical journey in the sout
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition, Chapter 9: 1837-1839: Aet. 30-32. (search)
ntrepidity and ardor hardly fell short of his own; by Mr. Dinkel as artist, and by one or two students and friends. These excursions were a kind of prelude to his more prolonged sojourns on the Alps, and to the series of observations carried on by him and his companions, which attracted so much attention in later years. But though Agassiz carried with him, on these first explorations, only the simplest means of investigation and experiment, they were no amateur excursions. On these first Alpine journeys he had in his mind the sketch he meant to fill out. The significance of the phenomena was already clear to him. What he sought was the connection. Following the same comparative method, he intended to track the footsteps of the ice as he had gathered and put together the fragments of his fossil fishes, till the scattered facts should fall into their natural order once more and tell their story from beginning to end. In his explorations of 1838 he found everywhere the same phenom
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition, Chapter 10: 1840-1842: Aet. 33-35. (search)
re chosen. Both of these had accompanied Hugi in his ascension of the Finsteraarhorn in 1828, and both were therefore thoroughly familiar with all the dangers of Alpine climbing. The lower Aar glacier was to be the scene of their continuous work, and the centre from which their ascents of the neighboring summits would be made. that the habitual bed of the torrent was dry. The journey was accomplished in a week without any untoward accident. In the summer of 1841 Agassiz made a longer Alpine sojourn than ever before. The special objects of the season's work were the internal structure of these vast moving fields of ice, the essential conditions of thful seasons Agassiz and his companions had yet passed upon the Alps. Though quoting his exact language only in certain instances, the account of this and other Alpine ascensions described above has been based upon M. E. Desor's Sejours dans les Glaciers. His very spirited narratives, added to my own recollections of what I had
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition, Chapter 11: 1842-1843: Aet. 35-36. (search)
ws of classification. Sometimes he illustrates the fossil by the living world, sometimes he finds the key to present phenomena in the remote past. He reconstructs the history of the glacial period, and points to its final chapter in the nearest Alpine valleys, connecting these facts again with like phenomena in distant parts of the globe. But however wide his range and however various his topics, under his touch they are all akin, all coordinate parts of a whole which he strives to understand He was but thirty-seven years of age, and at that time the most intrepid and the most intelligent of the Oberland guides. His death was felt as a personal grief by the band of workers whose steps he had for years guided over the most difficult Alpine passes. The summer's work continued and completed that of the last season. On leaving the glacier the year before they had marked a net-work of loose boulders, such as travel with the ice, and also a number of fixed points in the valley walls
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition, Chapter 15: 1847-1850: Aet. 40-43. (search)
wage, and wishes to change all underground London into a fossil cloaca of pseudo coprolites. This does not quite suit the chemists charged with sanitary responsibilities; for they fear the Dean will poison half the population in preparing his choice manures! But in this as in everything he undertakes there is a grand sweeping view. When are we to meet again? And when are we to have a stand — up fight on the erratics of the Alps? You will see by the abstract of my memoir appended to my Alpine affair that I have taken the field against the extension of the Jura! In a word, I do not believe that great trunk glaciers ever filled the valleys of the Rhone, etc. Perhaps you will be present at our next meeting of the British Association at Edinburgh, August, 1850. Olim meminisse juvabit! and then, my dear and valued and most enlightened friend, we may study once more together the surface of my native rocks for auld lang syne. . . . From Charles Darwin. Down, Farnborough, Kent, Jun
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition, Chapter 17: 1852-1855: Aet. 45-48. (search)
e, as in the Mississippi, the species differ at different heights of the river basin. . . . To Professor S. S. Haldeman, Columbia, Pennsylvania. Cambridge, July 9, 1853. . . . While ascending the great Mississippi last spring I was struck with the remarkable fact that the fishes differ essentially in the different parts of that long water-course,— a fact I had already noticed in the Rhine, Rhone, and Danube, though there the difference arises chiefly from the occurrence, in the higher Alpine regions, of representatives of the trout family which are not found in the main river course. In the Mississippi, however, the case is otherwise and very striking, inasmuch as we find here, at separate latitudes, distinct species of the same genera, somewhat like the differences observed in distinct water-basins; and yet the river is ever flowing on past these animals, which remain, as it were, spell-bound to the regions most genial to them. The question at once arises, do our smaller riv
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition, Chapter 18: 1855-1860: Aet. 48-53. (search)
stribution of organic forms in curves of equal density of occupation represents in great degree the inflexions of the isothermal lines. . . . I am charged by the king, who knows the value of your older works, and who still feels for you the affectionate regard which he formerly expressed in person, to request that you will place his name at the head of your long list of subscribers. He wishes that an excursion across the Atlantic valley may one day bring you, who have so courageously braved Alpine summits, to the historic hill of Sans Souci. . . . Something of Agassiz's astonishment and pleasure at the encouragement given to his projected work is told in his letters. To his old friend Professor Valenciennes, in Paris, he writes: I have just had an evidence of what one may do here in the interest of science. Some six months ago I formed a plan for the publication of my researches in America, and determined to carry it out with all possible care and beauty of finish. I estimated
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition, Chapter 23: 1871-1872: Aet. 64-65. (search)
ciers running back into a large massif of mountains, and fed by many a neve on their upper slopes. The depth as well as the length of this glacier remains somewhat problematical, and indeed all the estimates in so cursory a survey must be considered as approximations rather than positive results. The glazed surface of the ice is an impediment to any examination from the upper side. It would be impossible to spring from brink to brink of a crevasse, as is so constantly done by explorers of Alpine glaciers where the edges of the cracks are often snowy or granular. Here the edges of the crevasses are sharp and hard, and to spring across one of any size would be almost certain death. There is no hold for an Alpine stock, no grappling point for hands or feet. Any investigation from the upper surface would, therefore, require special apparatus, and much more time than Agassiz and his party could give. Neither was an approach from the side very easy. The glacier arches so much in the