SOME NEW BOOKS 
‘‘LET uS Now PRAISE Famous MEN!” 
THE FounDERS oF GEoLocy. By Sir Archibald Geikie. 8vo, pp. x+ 298. London: 
Macmillan & Co., 1897. Price, 6s. net. 
Ir, as Emerson has said, all history may be read in the lives of a few 
great men, this may be regarded as specially true of the history of 
science. The facts of science, no doubt, are accumulated by a multi- 
tude of workers; but ideas have their genesis in the brains of the 
leaders, and the growth of the ideas may best be studied as it took 
place originally in the minds of a few individuals. Hence Sir Archi- 
bald Geikie, when eager to dispel the lamentable ignorance of most of 
us concerning the historical development of geology, could have chosen 
no better means than this skilful and charming narration of the 
endeavours of the early pioneers. 
The occasion of this work was the inauguration of the George 
Huntington Williams Lectureship at Johns Hopkins University, and 
one can imagine the delight with which American geologists listened 
to the polished periods and lucid exposition of Sir Archibald. Some 
of the perorations, indeed, are better adapted to the lecture-platform 
than the study, and an occasional weakness in the usually correct and 
forceful style suits the written less than the spoken word. Careful 
revision, for instance, would have eliminated such a sentence as this: 
“His father . . . died while the son was still very young, to whom 
he left a small landed property in Berwickshire.” We test the author 
by his own high standard. 
The geologists referred to in this book are—Leibnitz and Buffon 
(who, however, are not regarded as among the founders of geology, but 
as the last of the cosmogonists), Guettard, Desmarest, Pallas, De 
Saussure, Lehmann, Fuchsel, Werner, D’Aubuisson, Von Buch, 
Hutton, Sir J. Hall, Giraud-Soulavie, Cuvier, A. Brongniart, Omalius 
dHalloy, Rev. J. Michell, William Smith, Murchison, Sedgwick, 
Logan, Agassiz, Nicol, Sorby, Lyell, and Darwin. Many others are 
mentioned incidentally and, in relation to these, the pioneers. For 
the expressed purpose of the book, this list is an excellent one. No 
doubt, every one that has read much in the early literature of geology 
will be ready with suggestions for its amendment. The fact is that 
a vast number of these old writers were not so ignorant or so foolish 
as we are too ready to suppose. Guettard is one whose claims have 
been strangely overlooked, and we are delighted to see this admirable 
appreciation of his many services to our science. But the list, it will 
be noticed, is almost entirely confined to French, German, and British 
geologists: Linnaeus and Wallerius are dismissed in a single line. 
Linnaeus, however, did more than arrange certain minerals in one of 
his kingdoms of nature: he studied the strata in which minerals and 
organised fossils occurred, travelling through Sweden and makiag 
