THE ALPS.*
Is' any man has a claim to expert knowledge of the Alps it is Professor Bonney. A former President of the Alpine Club and one of the " old guard " of mountaineers, a famous geologist who has never forgotten Lyell's maxim that in the education of a geologist travel is the first, second, and third requisite, he has every kind of qualification and experience. The present work is to some extent on the lines of his former book, The Alpine .Regions of Switzerland, long out of print. It gives the matured views on the construction of the Alpine system of a man who does not hesitate to criticise the conclusions of other writers in the same sphere, for, as he says truly, his on-n conclusions are based on more than forty years of travel. Everywhere in his chapters he appeals to first-hand evidence, what he observed in some such glen of the Tyrol or some little-known pass of the Valais. Nowadays for him climbing has had to yield place to gentler travel, and pioneering to speculation. " The irksomeness of railway journeys is greater, the miles are longer, and the mountains steeper than they used to be." So we have a work which is part scientific inquiry and part reminiscences.
This is not the place to discuss Professor Bonney's views on Alpine geology. He insists on the value of microscopic research as a clue to many problems, and the classification he adopts—virtually that of Raskin in Modern. Painters— enables him to group mountain forms in a way which ie intelligil le to the most unscientific traveller. There are the compact crystallines, as in the Adamello ; the slaty crystal- lines, as in the Chamonix Aignilles; the compact coherents, as in the Eiger and the Dolomites ; and the slaty coherents, as in the Buet and the inferior ridges of the Alps. He discusses at great length the processes of formation of the peaks and valleys, and finds the cause rather in the influence of weather and running water than in glacier action. The immensity of the formative process is well brought out. Take the Central Pennines in the neighbourhood of the Vispthal
" The Matterhorn and the Weisshorn are but little below 15,000 feet ; tho crystalline rocks begin to rise from the Italian plain at a level of about 800 feet, and from the Rhone valley of about 1,700 feet. Assuming that there has been no great change of level since thwe elevations were attained, tho Alps have been carved out of a great semi-cylindrical mass, the sagitta of which was nearly three miles and the chord well over fifty miles. Valleys have been carved in this mass, the beds of which, after a course of some six miles from the watershed (say 15,000 feet), have dropped down to about 5,000 feet above sea-level—or in other words, 10,000 feet of rock must have been carved away from above either Zermatt or Saaa Grund."
One of Professor Bonney's most interesting chapters deals with avalanches and rock-falls. Few people are aware how terrific some of the Alpine catastrophes have been. Visitors to the Vispthal remember the Bies glacier on the eastern face of the Weisshorn. In 1818 a considerable portion of it fell away, and blocks of ice were hurled half a league up the opposite slope of the valley! The same thing happened on the Altels, above the Gemmi, as recently as September 1895. The mass of ice swept into the valley, up the opposite side, and even into the further vale. The chalets were, of course, swept out of existence and 158 cows killed, largely by the wind of the fall ; many were carried as far as 1,000 yards, and their bodies left 1,000 feet above the place from which they had been blown. Even more deVructive are rock avalanches, such as the fall of the Rossberg in 1806, which Lady Shelley has described in her diary. In 1714 fifty-five chalets were destroyed by a fall from the cliffs of the Diablerets, and one man lived to tell the tale after having been buried for three months. One of the most terrible of accidents is caused by the sudden damming of streams by the movements • (1) The Building of the Alps. By T. G. Bonney. London : T. Fisher Unwin. [12s. ed. net.] —(2) Alpine Studies. By NV. A.B. Coolidge. London : Longman and Co. [7s. 6d. net]
of glaciers. Lakes are formed, which burst in time and sub- merge whale valleys. The destruction of the Baths of St. Gervais in 1892 was due to this cause.
Professor Bonney gives us valuable chapters on the flora and fauna of the Alps. The bear is now almost extinct ; the bouquetin flourishes owing to close preservation ; and the chamois is probably increasing for the same reason. The lammergeier is almost entirely a bird of the past, the last known having been found dead in the Vispthal in February 1887. In old days the chief wild beast of the Alps was the dragon, and among the last seen were one which flew over Mount Pilatus in 1679 and one two ells long Alain in the Val Bregaglia in 1702. Heaven knows what the things were, but to-day we have a very good substitute in the mountain rail- ways. In his closing chapter the author summarises the contrasts of his long experience and the changes " that fleeting time procureth." In the 'sixties those who could not ride or walk had to be content with glimpses of the Alps from the high roads. Now a paralytic can be hauled up to the high snows. The innovation has its merits. Mountaineers have no longer to spend a day or two sweltering in the hot trench of the Rhone valley, the prey of flies by day and mosquitoes by night. It is a great thing for the climber to be able to get quickly through the ugly parts of the journey. Dauphine inns in the old days were a purgatory for the body, and Pules: irritans was the commonest specimen of the Swiss fauna. Still, reform has its drawbacks :—
" The mountains then were restful ; now in many parts travel is a 'scurry,' a railway station a seething crowd. Most travellers then went to the Alps because they loved them. They needed no other attraction than what nature could provide—flowers and forests, torrents and waterfalls, crags and peaks, glaciers and snow- slopes. Now, whatever may be the grandeur of the scenery, that soon palls on visitors unless they can get their lawn tennis and their golf, as at an English watering-place. In old times one seldom returned home from the Alps without some addition to the number of one's friends ; now the average traveller is unattractive, and a crowded sable-d-manger, especially with the much-vaunted separate tables, gives no opportunity for getting so far as acquaint- ance. The modern hotel is more luxurious, but it is possible to fare over-sumptuously even on an Alpine tour ; and being number 144 in a caravanserai is a very different thing to the home-like feeling of an inn which was not too large for host and guest to know something one of another."
Mr. Coolidge is probably, of all living climbers, the one most learned in Alpine literature and history, as well as in Alpine topography, and if any man could write a guide to the whole chain it is he. His book, The "tips in Nature and History, is a storehouse of curious facts and laborious inquiries, and every writer on the subject uses it as a quarry for materials. His new book is partly a collection of historical studies supplementary to that work and partly a series of travel pictures. Mr. Coolidge began his climbing career while he was still in his teens, and had made remarkable ascents before he took his degree at Oxford. Among the papers printed here some of the best were read to the Alpine Club thirty years ago. There is an excellent account of the three routes up Mount Viso, including the steep north-east face, of which Mr. Coolidge made the first ascent in 1881. Excellent, too, is the story of the second ascent of the Meije in 1878, M. de Castelnau having made the first in the preceding year. Our only criticism of these papers is that the careless reader may forget the date at which they were written, and take Mr. Coolidge's information about inns and the relative difficulty of routes as if it represented his considered judgment to-day. It would have been better, perhaps, if he had recast the papers. There are also some interesting records of his early climbs in winter, a branch of the sport in which he was one of the earliest pioneers ; and, as a con- tribution to our knowledge of a singularly obscure part of the chain, there is a chapter on the curious Dolomites in the Spliigen district. Mountaineers will value not least the chapter gp
on his dog Tchin el who climbed for many years with her
master. She like d wine, but took later to weak tea, which had such an effec on her nerves that after it she sat and howled for pure joy. The ice used to cut her paws, but she refused to wear leather shoes. Apart from numerous passes and smaller peaks, she ascended the Aletschhorn, Grand Combin, Monte Rosa, Eiger, Jungfrau, Winch, Finsteraarhorn, Wetterhorn, and Mont Blanc. She died of old age in Surrey in 1879 after a mountaineering career which would have done credit to most men.
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