Local peasants, uncontaminated by scientific orthodoxy, knew better, however. The naturalist Jean de Charpentier told the story of how in 1834 he was walking along a country lane with a Swiss woodcutter when they got to talking about the rocks along the roadside. The woodcutter matter-of-factly told him that the boulders had come from the Grimsel, a zone of granite some distance away. "When I asked him how he thought that these stones had reached their location, he answered without hesitation: 'The Grimsel glacier transported them on both sides of the valley, because that glacier extended in the past as far as the town of Bern.' "
相反，当地那些没有受科学界正统学说影响的农民知道得更多。瑞士博物学家让·德·夏庞蒂埃讲述了这样一个故事：1834年，他和一位瑞士伐木工人行走在一条乡间小道上，他们随便聊起路边那些随处可见的大石块。伐木工人非常直率地告诉他，这些岩石来自离那里很远的格里姆瑟尔地区。“当我问他这些岩石是怎样来到他所在的地区时，他毫不犹豫地回答说：‘格里姆瑟尔冰川沿着山谷把它们带到了这里，因为那次冰川曾一度延伸到了伯尔尼镇。’”

Charpentier was delighted. He had come to such a view himself, but when he raised the notion at scientific gatherings, it was dismissed. One of Charpentier's closest friends was another Swiss naturalist, Louis Agassiz, who after some initial skepticism came to embrace, and eventually all but appropriate, the theory.
夏庞蒂埃不禁大喜过望，因为他本人早已得出这样的看法。可是当他在一次科学集会上提出这一观点时，却遭到人们的冷遇。夏庞蒂埃最好的朋友，一位名叫路易斯·阿加西斯的瑞士博物学家起初对这一观点持怀疑态度，之后又慢慢地接受，最后是全力支持这个理论。
Agassiz had studied under Cuvier in Paris and now held the post of Professor of Natural History at the College of Neuchatel in Switzerland. Another friend of Agassiz's, a botanist named Karl Schimper, was actually the first to coin the term ice age (in German Eiszeit), in 1837, and to propose that there was good evidence to show that ice had once lain heavily across not just the Swiss Alps, but over much of Europe, Asia, and North America. It was a radical notion.
阿加西斯曾在巴黎师从居维叶，当时担任瑞士纳沙泰尔州立学院自然史教授。他的另一位名叫卡尔·希姆帕尔的朋友是一位植物学家。事实上，正是希姆帕尔于1837年首先创造出了冰河时代（德语词Eizeit）这个词。他认为，有许多证据表明冰盖不仅厚厚地覆盖瑞士阿尔卑斯山，而且覆盖了欧洲、亚洲和北美洲的大片地区。这是一个极其激进的观点。