The High Alps: a Natural History of Ice and Snow

Abstract

DR. TUTTON'S book is written by a lover of mountains for those who desire to know more about the ice and snow which they meet on glacier expeditions, and about the nature and causes of the glaciers themselves. The first part of the book contains a good popular description of the physics and chemistry of water, snow, and ice. It leads naturally to a second part in which snow and ice are considered in the mass, as they occur upon high mountains. This second part includes an excellent, and not too long, account of the development of the theory of glacier movement (and interesting information concerning recent variations in mass of the glaciers); and a chapter on glacier phenomena—moraines, crevasses, and lakes—all treated in a simple manner. An account of scientific work upon Mont Blanc, and the story of the Mont Blanc observatories, which find place No. 3212, VOL. 127] in the third part of the book, might perhaps have been more logically placed in the second part. The story of the Mont Blanc observatories is of particular interest, as it is abstracted from an account written for the author by M. Joseph Vallot himself shortly before his death. A topographical description of the chief mountain groups of the Alps might perhaps more logically have been placed in the third part of the book than in the second, which concludes with a brief historical sketch of the conquest of the great alpine summits.

The High Alps: a Natural History of Ice and Snow.

Dr. A. E. H. Tutton. Cheaper edition. Pp. xvi + 319+48 plates. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd., 1931.) 10s. 6d. net.