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

These were weeks of exquisite delight to Agassiz. The vessel often skirted the shore so closely that its geology could be studied from the deck. The rounded shoulders of the mountains, in marked contrast to their peaked and jagged crests, the general character of the snow-fields and glaciers, not crowded into narrow valleys as in Switzerland, but spread out on the open slopes of the loftier ranges, or, dome like, capping their summits, —all this afforded data for comparison with his past experience, and with the knowledge he had accumulated upon like phenomena in other regions. Here, as in the Alps, the abrupt line, where the rounded and worn surfaces of the mountains (moutonees, as the Swiss say) yield to their sharply cut, jagged crests, showed him the ancient and highest line reached by the glacial action. The long, serrated edge of Mount Tarn, for instance, is like a gigantic saw, while the lower shoulders of the mass are hummocked into a succession of rounded hills. In like manner the two beautiful valleys, separated by a bold bluff