Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition

‘ [341] a terrestrial glacial theory, there can be little risk that such a doctrine should take too deep a hold of the mind. . . . The existence of glaciers in Scotland and England (I mean in the Alpine sense) is not, at all events, established to the satisfaction of what I believe to be by far the greater number of British geologists.’

Twenty years later, with rare candor, Murchison wrote to Agassiz as follows; by its connection, though not by its date, the extract is in place here: ‘I send you my last anniversary address, which I wrote entirely myself; and I beg you to believe that in the part of it that refers to the glacial period, and to Europe as it was geographically, I have had the sincerest pleasure in avowing that I was wrong in opposing as I did your grand and original idea of my native mountains. Yes! I am now convinced that glaciers did descend from the mountains to the plains as they do now in Greenland.’

During the summer of 1842, at about the same date with Murchison's letter disclaiming the glacial theory, Agassiz received, on the other hand, a new evidence, and one which must have given him especial pleasure, of the favorable impression his views were making in some quarters in England.