2.1 In the first part of this history, scientific understanding proceeded in a sequence of steps, each of which, while surrounded by hot and contentious disputes, more or less led to a steady advance, each discovery building on the previous. In this second part of the history, the development of thought and feeling is not so easily measured.   The contributions made by explorers, poets, philosophers, artists, writers and so on, often happened in parallel, each informing the other, gradually bringing about change over time. Nevertheless they brought about a change in the way Nature was appreciated as profound as that wrought by Science. Obscure as the beginnings necessarily are in this case, a reasonable place to begin is with the travellers and explorers – the "Tourists" - for it was their adventures which opened the eyes of all who followed.

2.2 In the middle of the seventeenth century, the tradition of the Grand Tour arose, undertaken most often by  young men of means, or those of more humble origin who could find a sponsor. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transport in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage. Though primarily associated with the British nobility and wealthy landed gentry, similar trips were made by wealthy young men of Protestant Northern European nations on Continental Europe, and from the second half of the 18th century, by some South and North Americans.  Larger numbers of Grand Tour-ists began their tours after the Peace of Münster in 1648, and in so doing launched what was to become by the end of the 20 th century  one of the most significant industries on the planet with the participation of around 1 billion travellers and an annual revenue of around 2 trillion dollars: tourism.

2.3 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the term tourism (perhaps its introduction to English) was by Richard Lassels (c. 1603–1668), an expatriate Roman Catholic priest, in his book The Voyage of Italy, which was published posthumously in Paris in 1670 and then in London. Lassels' introduction listed four areas in which travel furnished "an accomplished, consummate Traveller": the intellectual, the social, the ethical (by the opportunity of drawing moral instruction from all the traveller saw), and the political.

2.4 The idea of traveling for the sake of curiosity and learning was a developing idea in the 17th century. With John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), it was argued, and widely accepted, that knowledge comes entirely from the external senses, that what one knows comes from the physical stimuli to which one has been exposed.  Travel, therefore, was necessary  to develop the mind and expand knowledge of the world. As a young man at the outset of his account of a repeat Grand Tour, the historian Edward Gibbon remarked that "According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman."

2.5 The typical 18th-century sentiment was that of the studious observer travelling through foreign lands in order to be able to report his findings on human nature to those unfortunate enough to have stayed home. Recounting one's observations to society at large to increase its welfare was considered an obligation; the Grand Tour flourished in this mindset. The primary value of the Grand Tour, it was believed, lay in the exposure both to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent.

2.6A Grand Tour could last from several months to several years. It was commonly undertaken in the company of a Cicerone - a knowledgeable guide or tutor. Classics was the main study at Cambridge in those days and so Rome in particular was the natural goal for its students, being the source of both the language and history they studied of the Roman Empire – the greatest empire the world had ever seen, to that dat.  And so a particularly good study for ambitious Englishmen. Italy, and Rome in particular, was far from a mere museum of ancient history – it was home to some of the most spectacular Art currently being produced as well as a fountain head of modern Science, inspired by the likes of Galileo. The Grand Tour had more than superficial cultural importance according to E P Thompson, "ruling-class control in the 18th century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power." If the Roman Empire had been the greatest military power, modern Italy was now also the home of modern banking, finance and accounting. The great merchant houses such as the Medici and Lombard had generated vast fortunes from trade, which required sophisticated record keeping. Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar, first codified the modern system of double entry bookkeeping in his textbook Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità published in Venice in 1494. Pacioli is often called the "father of accounting" because he was the first to publish a detailed description of the double-entry system, thus enabling others to study and use it. So to embellish EP Thomspon’s insight, it may well be that some of these first Grand Tourists did not neglect the study of economic or military matters.

2.7 And so, the young men of England came to Italy in search of culture, science and the keys to power – the greatest intellectual works of mankind – to complete their education and prepare them for their various roles in Imperial Britain. But, in doing so, they had the necessary if rather burdensome task of crossing the Alps. And there, they stumbled more or less by accident, upon some of the greatest works of Nature: vast mountain scenery which turned out to be no less an inspiration to many of them than the all the works of men.

2.8 Annecy lies roughly half way between Cambridge and Rome, at the western edge of the Alps, around 70 miles by road from Mont Blanc. On the west side of the lake the ridge of Semnoz rises up steeply to give an unimpeded view across to Mont Blanc - so named because it is the only peak in the Alps which is snow capped all year round.  Further south of Lake Annecy is another steep ridge and spectacular forest walks around the village of Entrevernes. To the east the heights of La Tournette rise even more dramatically over the lake, as well as Col de Forclaz from where on a sunny day you get airplane views directly down upon the vivid blue lake.  Further north and closer to Annecy, are the equally steep slopes of Mont Veyrier and Mont Baron.

2.9 Dr Servettaz loved the lake for it magnificent mountain setting -  spectacular because of the proximity of such imposing mountains to the villages below and the lake below.  Mountain scenery now exerts a powerful effect on many people’s imagination and the Alps is one of the best known and best loved ranges in the world.  But it was not always so. When the Grand Tourists began to arrive the Alps were largely shunned by the locals as a fearsome and dangerous place where dragons live. We  now know that Alpine glaciers can be straight rivers of ice, long sweeping rivers, spread in a fan-like shape (Piedmont glaciers), and curtains of ice that hang from vertical slopes of the mountain peaks. The stress of the movement causes the ice to break and crack loudly, perhaps explaining why the mountains were believed to be home to dragons in the medieval period. The cracking creates unpredictable and dangerous crevasses, often invisible under new snowfall, which cause the greatest danger to mountaineers.

2.10 The discovery of the inspirational beauty of the Alps could be dated to the times of one Conrad Gessner who was the first naturalist to ascend the mountains in the 16th century, to study them, writing that in the mountains he found the "theatre of the Lord". A century would pass before he was followed by the great Alpine explorer – Horace Bénédict de Saussure – whose statue now stands proudly in the village of Chamonix. The Alps had already entered into the imaginations of generations of Grand Tourists, but the courageous expeditions of De Saussure seemed to mark a new turning point in the relation between human spirit and nature. His was not the trade or empire related exploration of Columbus, Cortez, or Cook. It was not the search for exotic peoples and cultures of Marco Polo. This was exploration of Nature for Nature’s sake. He seemed to be demonstrating that Man was no longer content to live in the shade of fearsome nature; he wanted to conquer it physically and intellectually.

2.11 During this period the Alps became a focal point for the most courageous and intellectually aspiring adventurers. They not only conquered the alps, they opened them up to scientific exploration and in doing so led to a change in understanding of the formation of rocks and the history of the earth itself, no less vertiginous than the Alps themselves.

2.12 Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740–1799), born in Geneva, was enamoured with the mountains from an early age; he left a law career to become a naturalist and spent many years trekking through the Bernese Oberland, the Savoy, the Piedmont and Valais, studying the glaciers and the geology, as he became an early proponent of the theory of rock upheaval. Saussure, in 1787, was a member of the third ascent of Mont Blanc.

2.13 Saussure was born in a patrician family of Geneva. His father Nicolas de Saussure was an agricultural author who may have sparked his early interest for botany. After attending the "Collège" of his hometown, he completed his studies at the Geneva Academy in 1759 with a dissertation on heat (Dissertatio physica de igne). In 1760, he made the first of his numerous trips to Chamonix, for the purpose of collecting plant specimens for Albrecht von Haller. He offered a reward to the first man to reach the summit of Mont Blanc, at the time unscaled. Inspired by his uncle Charles Bonnet, the young Saussure also worked on the physiology of plants and published Observations sur l'écorce des feuilles et des pétales (1762). The same year, at 22, he was elected professor of philosophy at the Academy of Geneva, where he lectured in Latin on physics, logics and metaphysics in alternate years. He would teach in this academic context until 1786, occasionally introducing his audience to geography, geology, chemistry and even astronomy.

2.14 His early interest in botanical studies and glaciers soon led Saussure to undertake other journeys across the Alps. In 1767, he completed his first tour of the Mont-Blanc, a trip that did much to clear up the topography of the snowy portions of the Alps of Savoy. He also carried out experiments on heat and cold, on the weight of the atmosphere and on electricity and magnetism. For this, he devised what became one of the first electrometers. Other trips led him to Italy, where he examined the Etna and other volcanoes (1772–73), and to the extinct volcanoes of Auvergne.

2.15 Although a patrician, Saussure held liberal views that induced him to present in 1774 a plan for a development of scientific education in the Geneva College, which would be open to all citizens, but this attempt was rejected. He was more successful in advocating the creation of the "Société des Arts" (1776), inspired by the London Society for the Improvement of Arts.

2.16 Obsessed by the measurement of meteorological phenomena, Saussure invented and improved many kinds of apparatus, including the magnetometer, the cyanometer for estimating the blueness of the sky, the diaphanometer for judging of the clearness of the atmosphere, the anemometer and the mountain eudiometer. Above all he devised a hair hygrometer for a series of investigations on the phenomena of atmospheric humidity, evaporation, clouds, fogs and rain (Essais sur l'Hygrométrie, 1783).

2.17 All his observations and experiments were summed up into seven Alpine journeys published in four quarto volumes, under the general title of Voyages dans les Alpes from 1779 to 1796 (There was an octavo issue in eight volumes, issued from 1780 to 1796). The non-scientific portions of the work were first published in 1834, and often since, as Partie pittoresque des ouvrages de M. de Saussure.

2.18 The Alps formed the centre of Saussure's investigations. He saw them as the grand key to the true theory of the earth, and they gave him the opportunity for studying geology in a manner never previously attempted. The inclination of the strata, the nature of the rocks, the fossils and the minerals received close attention.

2.19 He acquired a thorough knowledge of the chemistry of the day; and he applied it to the study of minerals, water and air. Saussure's geological observations made him a firm believer in the Neptunian: he regarded all rocks and minerals as deposited from aqueous solution or suspension, and attached much importance to the study of meteorological conditions. His work with rocks, erosion, and fossils would also lead him to the idea that the earth was much older than generally thought and formed part of the basis of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He carried barometers and boiling point thermometers to the summits of the highest mountains, and estimated the relative humidity of the atmosphere at different heights, its temperature, the strength of solar radiation, the composition of air and its transparency. Then, following the precipitated moisture, he investigated the temperature of the earth at all depths to which he could drive his thermometer staves, the course, conditions and temperature of streams, rivers, glaciers and lakes, even of the sea.

2.20 With the various instruments, many of which he invented, he showed that the bottom water of deep lakes is uniformly cold at all seasons, and that the annual heat wave takes six months to penetrate to a depth of 30 ft. in the earth. He recognized the immense advantages to meteorology of high-level observing stations, and whenever it was practicable he arranged for simultaneous observations being made at different altitudes for as long periods as possible.

2.21 In 1784, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, but died just fifteen years later, at the early at age of 54 without ever being able to pull all his theories of the origin of the earth together.

2.22 De Saussure’s work was celebrated on this death by another great scientist of the age, Georges Cuvier, in his “Eloge historiques de Bonnet et Saussure’ . “Et ce beau pays, si propre à frapper l'imagination, à nourrir le talent du poète ou de l'artiste, l'est peut-être encore d’avantage à réveiller la curiosité du philosophe, à exciter les recherches du physicien. C'est vraiment là que la nature semble vouloir se montrer par un plus grand nombre de faces.” And the tradition of his grand courageous scientific exploration was to be continued and even excelled by his successor Alexander von Humboldt.

2.23 The Alps were not only the preserve of courageous men. Marie Paradis (1778 – 1839) was the first woman to climb Mont Blanc. She was a poor maidservant who lived in Chamonix at that time part of the kingdom of Sardinia. On 14 July 1808, in the company of renowned mountain guide Jacques Balmat (possibly instigated by some of his sons, also guides), she became the first woman to climb Mont Blanc. The party camped on the Grand Mulets, and during the final ascent Paradis became fatigued and was assisted by her guides. On the summit, Paradis was in such poor condition that she had difficulty breathing, was unable to speak, and could not see. Mark Twain reports that she took her boyfriend with her, a detail not found in other sources. In 1809 she recorded her experience in an "admirably graphic and picturesque" account. Afterward she was known as "Maria de Mont Blanc". The second woman to climb Mont Blanc did so thirty years after her; when Henriette d'Angeville celebrated her successful ascent in Chamonix, she was congratulated by Paradis who had received her special, personal invitation.

2.24 Later, in the early fifties of the 19th century the taste for mountaineering rapidly developed, a great stimulus being given by the foundation of various Alpine clubs: the first being the English Alpine Club (founded in the winter of 1857–1858), followed in 1862 by the Austrian Alpine Club and in 1863 by the Italian and Swiss Alpine Clubs, and in 1874 by the French Alpine Club.

2.25  And so it was that the Grand Tour led to the opening up of the Alps to tourism, adventure, exploration and scientific enquiry and in doing so began to change how the world appreciated these great works of Nature. Nature, in the shape of the Alps, became a source of inspiration for the courageous and the ambitious, a mysterious place holding secrets which could unlock the history of the earth, and no longer a threat to be avoided but a wonder to be explored. A place to be passionate about.