264 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that lie would be designated as liis successor, but it was found 

 that vigorous efforts were making to put in the office a man who 

 had only a very slender acquaintance with geology. To avert this 

 disaster, Professor Ramsay suggested to his associates that they unite 

 in recommending Sir Roderick Murchison. The recommendation 

 was heeded, and Murchison was appointed. 



In the summer of 1857 Professor Ramsay came to America to 

 attend the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science at Montreal. He was warmly received by our leading- 

 geologists, and visited the Great Lakes, examined the more remark- 

 able geological features of the State of New York, and was enter- 

 tained at ISTew Haven and Boston. " The chief geological features 

 of this expedition," Sir Archibald Geikie says, " were given partly in 

 a discourse to the Royal Institution, but more fully in a paper read 

 before the Geological Society. Ramsay had not yet realized the mas- 

 siveness of the land ice of the Glacial period. Like most of the 

 geologists of the day, he still regarded the ' drift ' as the result of 

 transport by icebergs, and to the same agency he attributed the striae 

 on the sides and summits of the hills. He recognized the remark- 

 ably ice-worn character of Canadian topography, but he did not yet 

 associate that character with a former extensive glaciation by land 

 ice. JSTevertheless, he now beheld the effects of this glaciation in 

 a far grander scale than he had ever before seen them, and uncon- 

 sciously he was accumulating material that would enable him to get 

 rid of the paralyzing idea that the land must have been submerged 

 beneath the ocean as far as the highest striations or drift deposits 

 could be traced. He was not, however, able entirely to divest him- 

 self of the old error until the summer of 1861." Four summer 

 vacations after this were spent, till 1862, in excursions to the Alps 

 and to points of geological interest in Germany, where " Ramsay 

 could hardly find himself face to face with new scenes without being 

 led to notice and reflect on the features in them which bore on any 

 of the questions in geology and physical geography which had always 

 been with him such favorite subjects." During these tours he was 

 revolving a problem that had never been seriously attacked, and of 

 which no tenable solution had yet been proposed — that of the origin 

 of lake basins. His attention had been directed to the subject in 

 America, although he formed no new opinions here. But the recog- 

 nition to which he had now (1861) come, that the older and greater 

 glaciation here was the work of stupendous sheets of land ice, " gave 

 a new turn to his thoughts regarding the terrestrial contours of 

 glaciated regions," and he came to the conclusion that " in a vast 

 number of cases, where the lakes lie in rock basins, these basins have 

 actually been scooped out by the grinding power of land ice." He 



