18411882] ICE-ACTION 151 



the compliment of thinking Murchison not seeing as worth Letter 500 



nothing ; but I confess I am astonished, so glaringly clear 



after two or three days did the evidence appear to me. Have 



you seen last New Edin. Phil. Journ.^ it is ice and glaciers 



almost from beginning to end. Agassiz 2 says he saw (and has 



laid down) the two lowest terraces of Glen Roy in the valley 



of the Spean, opposite mouth of Glen Roy itself, where no one 



else has seen them. I carefully examined that spot, owing to 



the sheep tracks [being] nearly but not quite parallel to the 



terrace. So much, again, for difference of observation. I do 



not pretend to say who is right. 



To J. D. Hooker. Letter 501 



Down, Oct. 1 2th, 1849. 



I was heartily glad to get your last letter ; but on 

 my life your thanks for my very few and very dull 

 letters quite scalded me. I have been very indolent and 

 selfish in not having oftener written to you and kept my ears 



priest. Buckland travelled on horseback over a large part of the south- 

 west of England, guided by the geological maps of William Smith. In 

 1813 he was appointed to the Chair of Mineralogy at Oxford, and soon 

 afterwards to a newly created Readership in Geology. In 1823 the 

 ReliquicE Diluviance was published, a work which aimed at supporting 

 the records of revelation by scientific investigations. In 1824 Buckland 

 was President of the Geological Society, and in the following year he left 

 Oxford for the living of Stoke Charity, near Whitchurch, Hampshire. 

 The Bridgewater Treatise appeared in 1836. In 1845 Buckland was 

 appointed Dean of Westminster ; he was again elected president of the 

 Geological Society in 1840, and in 1848 he received the Wollaston medal. 

 An entertaining account of Buckland is given in Mr. Tuckwell's Remi- 

 niscences of Oxford, London, 1900, p. 35, with a reproduction of the 

 portrait from Gordon's Life of Buckland. 



1 The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, Vol. XXXIII. (April- 

 October), 1842, contains papers by Sir G. S. Mackenzie, Prof. H. G. Brown, 

 Jean de Charpentier, Roderick Murchison, Louis Agassiz, all dealing with 

 glaciers or ice ; also letters to the Editor relating to Prof. Forbes' account 

 of his recent observations on Glaciers, and a paper by Charles Darwin 

 entitled " Notes on the Effects produced by the Ancient Glaciers of 

 Carnarvonshire, and on the Boulders transported by Floating Ice." 



2 The Glacial Theory a?id its Recent Progress, by Louis Agassiz, loc. 

 tit., p. 216. Agassiz describes the parallel terraces on the flanks of Glen 

 Roy and Glen Spean (p. 236), and expresses himself convinced "that the 

 Glacial theory alone satisfies all the exigencies of the phenomenon " of 

 the parallel roads. 



