United States or Benin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The Swiss from all the German cantons were to meet there. Poor Rudy, one could well say that he had not taken the happiest time to visit Bex; now he could return and that was what he did. He took the road over Sion and St. Maurice, back to his own valley, back to his own mountain, but he was not down-cast.
But there are some far-transported masses of granite and gneiss which are still larger, and which have been found to contain 50,000 and 60,000 cubic feet of stone; and one limestone block at Devens, near Bex, which has travelled 30 miles, contains 161,000 cubic feet, its angles being sharp and unworn.
Every day this new mud-bank pushes out farther and farther into the water, so that in process of time the whole basin will be filled in, and a level plain, like that which now spreads from Bex and Aigle to Villeneuve, will occupy the entire bed from Montreux to Geneva. Turn mentally to the upper feeders of the Po itself, and you find the same causes equally in action.
And go they did, settling for a month at Bex, a little town up the valley of the Rhone, remarkable for its heat, its dirt, its lovely scenery, and the remarkable perfection to which its inhabitants had brought the goître, nearly every one being blessed with an unsightly bunch upon the neck, which they decorated with ribbons and proudly displayed to the disgusted traveller.
This knowledge he had brought from home with him. Now it so happened that Rudy had business at Bex and it was quite a journey there, for the railroad was not completed.
He writes him from the neighborhood of Bex, his home in the valley of the Rhone, the classic land of glacial work; but he writes of Agassiz's special subjects, inviting him to come and see such fossils as were to be found in his neighborhood, and to investigate certain phenomena of upheaval and of plutonic action in the same region, little dreaming that the young zoologist was presently to join him in his own chosen field of research.
Agassiz was among those who received this hypothesis as improbable and untenable. Still, he was anxious to see the facts in place, and Charpentier was glad to be his guide. He therefore passed his vacation, during this summer of 1836, at the pretty town of Bex, in the valley of the Rhone.
Word Of The Day