ABSTRACT
In June 1837, the young princess Victoria became Queen. A month later, the new president of the Swiss Natural History Society, Louis Agassiz—likewise precocious for his office—informed stunned colleagues at a gathering in Neuchatel that all of Europe had once languished beneath a giant ice sheet thousands of feet thick. Ice Age theory was a scandal from the beginning, rapidly building to a climax in the autumn of 1840, when Agassiz—accompanied by his British champion, President of the London Geological Society, William Buckland—toured Scotland in search of tell-tale striations and polishings of rock that would signify ancient glaciation. Though largely blind to the Anthropocenic apparatus being erected around them, the interglacial Victorians Louis Agassiz, William Buckland and Charles Lyell made the initial breathtaking backwards leap of imagination to think of the Earth's icebound regions not as evidence of planetary cooling but as residual proof of a melted world.
