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Updated: June 26, 2025
He wrote to William Wake, then Archbishop of Canterbury, who promised his assistance. At last Court resolved to proceed into Switzerland, to stir up the French refugees disposed to help him in his labours. Arrived at Geneva, Court sought out M. Pictet, to whom he explained the state of affairs in France.
Professor Marc-Auguste Pictet, of Geneva, visited the Edgeworths this summer, coming over from Mr. Tuite's, of Sonna, where he was staying with Mr. Chenevix. He afterwards published an interesting account of his visit to Edgeworthstown in the Bibliotheque Britannique, as well as in his Voyage de trois mots en Angleterre, which was published at Geneva in 1802. Of Maria Edgeworth he says: *
A belief of the derivation of species may be maintained along with a conviction of great persistence of specific characters. This is the idea of the excellent Swiss vegetable palaeontologist, Heer, who imagines a sudden change of specific type at certain periods, and perhaps is that of Pictet.
The names of Kuhn, Weber, Sonne, Benfey, Grimm, Schwartz, Hanusch, Maury, Bréal, Pictet, l'Ascoli, De Gubernatis, and many others, are well known for their marvellous discoveries in this new and arduous field.
Saturday we saw the magnificent Salle of the Corps Legislatif, and in the evening passed some hours in the agreeable society of Madame de Vergennes and her daughters. Sunday we were very happy at home. Monday morning, just as we were going out, M. Pictet was announced; we neither heard his name nor distinctly recollected his looks, he is grown so fat and looks so well, more friendly no man can be.
Now is not all this a question of degree, of mere gradation of difference? We have seen that the judicious Pictet answers such questions as Darwin would have him do, in affirming, that, in all probability, the nearly related species of two successive faunas were materially connected, and that contemporaneous species, similarly resembling each other, were not all created so, but have become so.
The day after our arrival M. Delessert, he whom M. Pictet describes as a French Rumford, invited us to spend the evening with his mother and sister. We went: found an excellent house, a charming family, with whom we felt we were perfectly acquainted after we had been in the room with them for five minutes.
This truth is further illustrated in a most interesting manner by the impartial and highly competent testimony of M. Pictet, from whose calculations of what percentage of the genera of animals, existing in any formation, lived during the preceding formation, it results that in no case is the proportion less than one-third, or 33 per cent.
There were no stalactites and columns such as M. Morin had found in August 1828, nor even the low stalagmite which Pictet saw in 1822. The summers of 1828 and 1859 were exceptionally hot, and this fact has been held to account for the smaller quantity of ice seen in those years.
De Saussure's theory, as developed by M. Pictet, was no doubt satisfactory, so far as it was used to account for the phenomenon of 'cold-caves, but it seems to be insufficient as an explanation of the existence of large masses of subterranean ice; of which, by the way, De Saussure must have been entirely ignorant, for he makes no allusion to such ice, and the temperatures of the coldest of his caves were considerably above the freezing point.
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