The morning journal-courier., 1908-02-15
THE ALPINE CLUB It's Fiftieth Anniversary Has Just Been Cele-
 brated.
FEATS OF SOME MEMBERS
An Interesting Record of Aspiring and Dangerous Achieve
 ment.

The Alpine club, one of the most strenuous organizations of outdoor sport in the world, has just celebrat- ed it's fiftieth anniversary, and it is interesting to rev jew what has been accomplished in the domain If noun tain climbing From being an insigniti- cant few at the beginning the club has grown vastly with time until now its membership list includes persons from all over the world There were men who climbed before the advent of the Alpine Club, but their exploration and research assumed no tangible shape such as is accomplished to-day.
 Most of those who scrambled up steep ledges prior to 1858 were men of science, whose purpose was to ad- vance knowledge by experiment and observation. About the first of the early climbers was Jean Andre De Luc, whose hobby it was to ascertain at what temperature water would boil at a given altitude, and he boiled his kettle on the. top of the Buet and oth- CT higher places. After De Luc came Sausure, who regarded the mountains as the laboratory of the geologist, and at the same time there was Bamond de Carbonniere, who spent his life roaming the Pyrenees. About the year 1912 came some topographers and ge- ologists, the most prominent being the Meyers. They were the pioneers of the Jungfrau and Finsteraarhorn.
 Several years later there were Hugi, a botanist; Oswald Hoer, palaeontol- ogist, and Agassiz, Desor and Carl Vogt. Their main object was the study of glaciers, and at the Hotel des Neu- ehatelois, on the moraine of the lower Aaar. they spent several summers making ,ascents from time to time The first ascent of the Galenstock by De- sor and Dollfus- -Ausset belongs to this period Being pioneers they had a lot of obstacles to contend with, but they struggled bravely to achieve their ob- ject. although it was from a purely business standpoint. They were not sportsmen by any means, nor did they regard their climbing as a means of recreation, yet they paved the way for the sportsmen that came after them.
 In speaking of this jubilee the Field says: .'The first sportsmen in the Alps one always reads, was Mir Justice Wills; the first sporting move, 1t is said, was his ascent of the Wetterhorn In 1854. This is not quite true. Dourrit was climbing for sport when Saussure was climbing for the advancement of knowledge, though he was bad climber, being repeatedly baffied by Mount Blanc, and he even suffered from mountain sickness on the Buet The climbs of Father Placid,is- -Spes- cha in the Bundner Oberland were dis tinctly of sporting character; so was the first ascent of the Gross Glockner by the Bishop of Gurk in 1900; so were the early ascents of Mount Blanc by Beaufoy, Woodley, Doorthesen Count Matzewski and a number of oth- CTS. One could say the same of the pioneers of Mount Ross, the Velan and the Dent du Midi.
 But Justice Wills ascent of the Wetterhorn for his amusement does notwithstanding, mark an epoch. He set an example at time when there were plenty of energetic young men like himself in position to note it and follow it, Others had preached the gospel of climbing before him. Count Ulysses von Calls and Steinmuller, ped agogue and pastor of St. Gall, had done so in the pages of Alpina, the earliest Nfs l,x;, D,,t i, o;, appeal met with some immediate re- sponse, the enthusiasm had languished and died away again Justice Wills had imitators, first by the dozen, then by The score, then by the hundred.
 "The Munt Blanc de Seilon fell in the very year of his climb. The fol- lowing year saw the conquest of Mount Rosa and the Weissmies The aguille du Midi succumbed in 1856, and the Monch in 1857, and many minor ex- petitions were simultaneously under taken. Most of the climbers were young men from the English universi- ties spending their long vacations in Switzerland. The proposal to form a club was mooted among them, the earliest discoversble reference to the project being in letter from William Matthews, of St. Johns College, Cam bridge, to the Rev. ]. A. Hort, after ward professor of divinity at the same university. There we see the germ of the idea which culminated not only in the institution of the Alpine Club, but also in the publication, first of Peaks, Passes and Glaciers and subse- quently of the Alpine Journal
 "The formation of the club was like the blast of the trumpet summoning the walls of Jericho to fall down. In 1858 at least four first class peaks the Dom, the Nadelhorn, the Pig Nor teratsch and the Eiger yielded to the onset of the enthusiasts, and 1859 saw the conquest of the Aletschorn, the Bietschorn, the Bimpfischorn, the Grivola and Monte Leone. And it so continued year after year until 1865, the year of the first ascent not only of the Matterhorn, but also of the Grandes Jorasses, the Agiuille de Bion- assay, the Grand Cornier. the Obel Gabehorn, the Wellenkuppe and Monte Cristallo That was the great period-the golden age-of mountain eering, and it was a period in which the English climbers accomplished far more than climbers of all other nationalities combined.
 "A tabulated list which lies before ls shows that between 1854 and 1865 forty-three important mountains were climbed for the first time, and in thir- tv-two out of the forty-three cases the successful climbers were our country men. It only remained for climbers af- ter that, so far at least as the Alps were concerned, to gather up the fragments that were left over, and in this task also English climbers bore more than their share of the burden, Mont Collon. the Meoji, the Grande r,,.,o ,ha A;ouiIles RoupeS of Arollo