What could he do but, as he said in the letters to Norton, "lay his head to the very ground," and try to forget it all among the stones and the snows?
He wandered about geologizing, and spent a while at Talloires on the Lake of Annecy, where the old Abbey had been turned into an inn, and one slept in a monk's cell and meditated in the cloister of the monastery, St.Bernard of Menthon's memory haunting the place, and St.Germain's cave close by in the rocks above.

At the end of May he came back to England, and was invited to lecture again at the Royal Institution.

The subject he chose was "The Stratified Alps of Savoy." At that time many distinguished foreign geologists were working at the Alps; but little of conclusive importance had been published, except in papers embedded in Transactions of various societies.

Professor Alphonse Favre's great work did not appear until 1867, and the "Mechanismus der Gebirgsbildung" of Professor Heim not till 1878; so that for an English public the subject was a fresh one.

To Ruskin it was familiar: he had been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840, at the age of twenty-one; he had worked through Savoy with his Saussure in hand nearly thirty years before, and, many a time since that, had spent the intervals of literary business in rambling and climbing with the hammer and note-book.