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Show 65. order of things was eternal, and that man was mortal. He recognized that a perfect creation could answer our questions, but was under no obligation to do so. Certainly he hoped that he could take a step toward perfect health by using all of his senses and faculties. That in itself was satisfying. Muir had also inherited a disciplined approach to the creation from Louis Agassiz, who had introduced the method of close inspection and comparison to American schools. Agassiz told the student to look closely and long at natural objects. But when it came to glacial studies, Muir was in a quandary. Agassiz's glacial studies, Etudes sur les Glaciers, was the definitive text. Agassiz had lived on them, and had studied their mechanics, and determined what glaciers were. As he kept his attention on these geological agents, he had asked, what were their origins, how did they move, how were they influenced by external agents, and how did they change their environment? Muir needed to know these things, but he could not observe them in the Sierra. He felt a need to witness a landscape in the midst of a glacial age, and already hoped to go to Alaska for that purpose, but in 1873 Muir had to accept Agassiz's findings, and could only look at rocks the glaciers had carved. He started not on the glaciers, but in the Sierran canyons. The glacier as a geological agent provided a possible answer to his primary scientific concern: "In particular the great Valley has always kept a place in my mind. How did the Lord make it? What tools did He use? How did he apply them and when?" But Muir's insistence on the glacial origin of Yosemite only |