“In 1834 the naturalist Jean de Charpentier, while walking along a country road with a Swiss woodcutter, got to talking about the rocks on the roadside. The woodcutter matter-of-factly told him that the boulders had come from a zone of granite some distance away, carried by the Grimsel glacier which had extended in the past as far as the town of Bern.

Charpentier was delighted, for he had come to such a view himself; but when he raised the notion at scientific gatherings, it was dismissed.