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All this work could hardly be carried on single handed. In 1837 M. Edouard Desor joined Agassiz in Neuchatel, and became for many years his intimate associate in scientific labors. A year or two later M. Charles Vogt also united himself to the band of investigators and artists who had clustered about Agassiz as their central force.
Desor, who had been in Scandinavia before joining me here, called my attention at once to certain points of resemblance between the phenomena there and those which I had seen in the neighborhood of Boston.
Under these circumstances one would naturally look for fossils in the drift, and M. Desor, in company with M. de Pourtales, was the first to find them, at Brooklyn, in Long Island, which lies to the south of New York. They were imbedded in a glacial clay deposit, having all the ordinary character of such deposits, with only slight traces of stratified sand.
The sand, too, brought up with them resembled that of the bed of that river. Hence it is probable that they were carried to the oases by subterranean channels from the Nile. Desor, Die Sahara, Basel, 1871, p. 28; Stoppani, Corso di Geologia, i., p. 281. Barth speaks of common wells in Northern Africa from 200 to 360 feet deep. Reisen in Africa, ii., p. 180.
May this letter prove to you and to Madame Agassiz that I am petrifying only at the extremities, the heart is still warm. Retain for me the affection which I hold so dear. In the following winter, or, rather, in the early days of March, 1841, Agassiz visited, in company with M. Desor, the glacier of the Aar and that of Rosenlaui.
So much was this the case, that the intention of Agassiz had been to embody the whole in a publication, the first part of which should contain the glacial system of Agassiz; the second the Alpine erratics, by Guyot; while the third and final portion, by E. Desor, should treat of the erratic phenomena outside of Switzerland. The first volume alone was completed.
M. Desor, in a memoir on the Swiss and Italian lakes, suggested that they may have escaped being obliterated by sedimentary deposition by having been filled with ice during the whole of the glacial period.
At East Boston you cannot see what underlies this deposit; but no doubt it rests upon a rounded mass of granite, polished and grooved like several others in Boston harbor. . . In our journey to Niagara, Mr. Desor and I assured ourselves that the river deposits, in which, among other things, the mastodon is found with the fresh-water shells of Goat Island, are posterior to the drift.
At La Thene, in the northern angle of the lake of Neufchatel, a great many articles of iron have been obtained, which in form and ornamentation are entirely different both from those of the bronze period and from those used by the Romans. Gaulish and Celtic coins have also been found there by MM. Schwab and Desor.
A phenomenon of this kind is mentioned by Desor and Escher de la Linth in the Sahara Desert; Fraas quotes a similar observation made by Livingstone in the heart of Africa, and one by Wetzstein, who, not far from Damascus; saw hard basalt rocks split under the influence of the early morning freshness.
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