Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland

Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Joseph Vernet, Hubert Robert and Gustave Courbet. A Cambridge don goes underground in the Jura and Savoy with a thermometer and a candle, to settle why ice forms in certain caves in summer and melts in winter. Browne made the descents himself between 1861 and 1864, and reports the measurements, the ropes and the peasants' explanations with equal seriousness. It is Victorian science at its most engaging: a man arguing with a mountain about physics. Sixty plates of mountain and ice by Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner run alongside Browne's descent, matching the underground cold with the painters' own Alpine light.