a lodge on the shore of the lake, where Desor and Vogt were installed to carry on the investigations. Vogt composed here the anatomical part of Desor's work on Fossil Fishes, the Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, and the German edition of Studies of Glaciers.
The controversy concerning glacial action was at its height. A theory had been proposed of an immense glacier having once occupied the Rhône Valley above Martigny, but Agassiz was still doubtful about it. He, with Desor, had visited the principal glacial fields of the Alps, and conceived a plan for studying a glacier continuously. In 1839 a party of about a dozen students, of whom Agassiz, Desor, Vogt, and Pourtales are best known to Americans, with guides and porters, established themselves by the lower glacier of the Aar, where they could watch its inner life. A suitable camping place was found by the side of an immense bowlder, and a lodge was instituted and given the name of the Hôtel des Neuchatelois. The hôtel was much visited during the four years the students occupied it by guests, many of whom became illustrious in science. Vogt's first book, Im Gebirg und auf den Gletschern, embodying his experiences there, was published in 1842.
The new glacial theory was still bitterly opposed, and by no one with more vigor than Leopold von Buch. It fell to Vogt to defend it before the German scientific meeting at Erlangen in 1840, and then at Mayence, both times in von Buch's presence. His expositions were interrupted by frequent objections from von Buch, who replied with all his force. Vogt, paying no attention to invectives and sarcasms of his antagonist, simply exposed the insufficiency of his arguments, and concluded with a protest against the road to free inquiry being barred by the mischievous principle of authority in science. He won the clay. Shortly after this Vogt and Agassiz differed on a question concerning the award of credit for discoveries and publications and separated.
Vogt spent three years in Paris, working busily and producing many zoölogical and biological memoirs; published his Text-book of Geology and Petrifactions, and figured prominently in the formation of the Society of German Physicians, which has become a very important body. In the text-book he expressed doubts concerning the theory of a fluid nucleus within the earth, which everybody held then. Vogt's fame reached the general public through his Physiologische Briefe, a book which brought the science within the comprehension of the ordinary reader, while it was still welcome to the professional man. It treated the subject of generation with a plainness that had not been ventured upon in any other popular work; and it attacked the doctrine of the survival of the soul, affirming, in effect, that all the properties designated as mental activity
