Letters from «el Veleta». An unpublished text of the naturalist Guillaume-Philippe Schimper (1847)

Abstract

At the beginning of the summer of 1847, the Alsatian naturalist Guillaume-Phillippe Schimper, accompanied by the industrialist Daniel Dollfus-Ausset, made an expedition to Sierra Nevada. The editorial results were very scarce, only two notes published in institutional yearbooks, but their repercussion was important, since Schimper was the first to describe the Sierra Nevada ibex and who established a theory about quaternary glacierism that remained in force for a long time. Dollfus-Ausset, on his part, was the promoter of taking the first photograph that exists on Sierra Nevada. From the very heart of the Sierra, Schimper addressed two letters to his colleague Dr. Mougeot, which provide additional information on that trip and which are published and translated for the first time in this paper.