17 
Professor GrrKrE appeared in Nature, frankly giving up the 
Morcuison1an view, which he had held for many years, and 
acknowledging that Professor Nicon was practically right. He 
stated that when the new mapping of the Highlands was 
undertaken, he decided on adopting a scale of six inches to the 
mile, and gave special instructions to the surveyors to divest 
themselves of all prepossessions in favour of established views, 
and to map the actual facts, without regard to theory. As the 
work proceeded he went to inspect it, and “ with every desire 
to follow the interpretation of my late chief, I criticised 
minutely each detail of work upon the ground, but I found the 
evidence altogether overwhelming against the upward succession 
which Mourcutson believed to exist in Erribol, from the base of 
the Silurian strata into an upper conformable series of Schists 
and Gneisses.” He then described how, at Durness, the 
overlying Schists had been thrust westwards across all the 
other rocks for at least ten miles. By the aid of a map, copied 
from one made by Messrs Pracu and Horns, Mr Lucy pointed 
out the position of the various beds, in accordance with the 
new reading of them, and also gave a description of their 
mineralogical and lithological characters. 
Mr Lucy concluded his paper, which was illustrated by a 
large collection of the rocks of the district, by the following 
extract from the address of Professor Bonney, the late President 
of the Geological Society :-— 
When Dr GeIkir declares an hypothesis maintained by one whose 
memory is justly dear to him, in support of which he himself in his younger 
days played an important part, must be abandoned, he shows himself superior 
to that too common weakness which fears to admit a mistake, and he gives 
the best hope for the future of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. As 
a worker in Petrology, I can testify how the Murcuison1an hypothesis has 
lain like an incubus on the investigator, impeding his progress in what 
seemed legitimate inductions from observed facts, and being invoked by his 
opponents as a kind of Fetish. I yield to no one in reverence for our great 
men of old; I marvel at what they accomplished with the means at their 
disposal ; but I should think it wrong to the memory of searchers after truth 
did I invoke their names to arrest its progress, and use the dead hand of the 
departed to paralyse the living worker. There is no revelation in science ; 
Cc 
