Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/16

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10
AN APPRECIATION.

relations between Production and Consumption in the modern industrial system, involving a diagnosis of under-consumption or over-saving, as the main cause of trade depressions with their accompanying unemployment. The results of our work we published in a little book entitled "The Physiology of Industry," in 1891, which, though containing the germ of an economic theory that has since shown wide and various growth, was generally received either with indifference or reprobation. But it is not with the merits or demerits of this, his only published economic work, I am here concerned, but with the insight which this co-operation gave me into one of the strongest and most original natures that could anywhere be found. At first his climbing propensity appeared to me a somewhat barbarian enthusiasm, but as I came to know more closely his intellectual and emotional character, I got to understand how it fitted into the compact unity of physical and moral powers which made Mummery such a satisfactory man to know and to have for friend and companion. For, as from talk or reading I was drawn on to follow his mountaineering enterprises, and to know something of the methods which gave him such distinction there, I could not fail to recognise that the qualities and methods of his intellectual travels were essentially the same. As thinker he was powerful, courageous, alert, persistent, and, above all else, original in the proper meaning of that term, that of creative