1862 HIS PAPER ON LAKE-BASINS 271 



which went straight to the hearts of the listeners, and 

 called forth many rounds of applause. 



At the very next evening meeting of the Society 

 the President gave his paper on lake-basins. Its 

 conclusions were so startling a novelty in geological 

 physics, and were based on such a mass of detail, 

 requiring careful study, that they could hardly be 

 adequately discussed by an audience which heard them 

 for the first time. Ramsay did not read, but spoke 

 his paper, and being full of the subject did full justice 

 to it. Lyell, as he said afterwards, damned the paper 

 with faint praise, and Falconer vigorously opposed 

 it. It was admirably defended by Huxley. The 

 meeting was so lively as to remind us of the old days 

 of Buckland and Sedgwick. Some account of the 

 theory propounded in this paper will be given in 

 a subsequent chapter of this biography. It was 

 attacked by various writers, notably by Lyell, Murchi- 

 son, Falconer, and Ball, and to some of the onslaughts 

 made on it its author replied in the pages of the 

 Philosophical Magazine and The Reader. 



The following letter, written towards the end of 

 this year, gives a picture of the reception of the paper, 

 and the ferment that arose from it : 



LONDON, gth December 1862. 



MY DEAR MRS. COOKMAN By this post I send 

 you the other pamphlet on the origin of Alpine, 

 Welsh, American, Schwartzwald, and Scandinavian 

 lakes. The smaller one I sent you the other day 

 was a pendant to it, and was written a propos of a 

 paper by Tyndall in the Phil. Mag., 1 in which he ran 

 the theory of what ice has done to a wild extreme. 



1 November 1862, p. 377. 



