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

‘ [264] for a time over a world previously covered with a rich vegetation and peopled with large mammalia, similar to those now inhabiting the warm regions of India and Africa. Death enveloped all nature in a shroud, and the cold, having reached its highest degree, gave to this mass of ice, at the maximum of tension, the greatest possible hardness.’ In this novel presentation the distribution of erratic boulders, instead of being classed among local phenomena, was considered ‘as one of the accidents accompanying the vast change occasioned by the fall of the temperature of our globe before the commencement of our epoch.’

This was, indeed, throwing the gauntlet down to the old expounders of erratic phenomena upon the principle of floods, freshets, and floating ice. Many well-known geologists were present at the meeting, among them Leopold von Buch, who could hardly contain his indignation, mingled with contempt, for what seemed to him the view of a youthful and inexperienced observer. One would have liked to hear the discussion which followed, in special section, between Von Buch, Charpentier, and Agassiz. Elie de Beaumont, who should have made the fourth, did not arrive till later. Difference of opinion, however, never disturbed