万物简史 第608期:冰河时代(5)（在线收听）

He lent Agassiz his notes—then came very much to regret it as Agassiz increasingly got the credit for what Schimper felt, with some legitimacy, was his theory. Charpentier likewise ended up a bitter enemy of his old friend. Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

他把他的笔记借给了阿加西斯——后来他为此懊悔不已，因为阿加西斯越来越把他的观点据为已有，而希姆帕尔合情合理地觉得那是他的理论。夏庞蒂埃最后也成了他老朋友的死对头。亚历山大·冯·洪堡也是阿加西斯的朋友。他曾经这样论述科学发现的三个阶段：首先，人们拒绝承认它是正确的；然后，人们拒绝承认它的重要性；最后，人们把功劳归于别人。

At all events, Agassiz made the field his own. In his quest to understand the dynamics of glaciation, he went everywhere—deep into dangerous crevasses and up to the summits of the craggiest Alpine peaks, often apparently unaware that he and his team were the first to climb them. Nearly everywhere Agassiz encountered an unyielding reluctance to accept his theories. Humboldt urged him to return to his area of real expertise, fossil fish, and give up this mad obsession with ice, but Agassiz was a man possessed by an idea.

话虽如此，阿加西斯还是致力于这一领域。为了了解冰川作用力，他哪里都去——钻进极其危险的裂缝深处，爬上极为陡峭的阿尔卑斯山峰，而且往往好像不知道，他和他的队员所攀登的是人类以前从未登临过的山峰。可是，几乎无论阿加西斯到哪里，人们对于他的理论总是将信将疑。洪堡要求他停止这种对于冰川的近乎狂热的考察，重新回到他所擅长的鱼类化石研究上来，可是阿加西斯是个受一种观点支配的人。

Agassiz's theory found even less support in Britain, where most naturalists had never seen a glacier and often couldn't grasp the crushing forces that ice in bulk exerts. "Could scratches and polish just be due to ice?" asked Roderick Murchison in a mocking tone at one meeting, evidently imagining the rocks as covered in a kind of light and glassy rime. To his dying day, he expressed the frankest incredulity at those "ice-mad" geologists who believed that glaciers could account for so much.

在英国，支持阿加西斯理论的人更是少得可怜，因为那里的大多数博物学家从未见过冰川，往往无从理解冰川巨大的作用力。“难道岩石层面刮擦和磨光的痕迹仅仅归因于冰川作用吗？”在一次会议上，罗德里克·莫奇生以一种嘲讽的口吻问道，显然想当然地认为这是因为那些岩石表面覆盖着一种又轻又滑的冰霜。直到他临死的时候，他都对那些把什么都归因于冰川作用的。“冰川狂”地质学家们表示出强烈的不信任感。