362 LIFE AT DOWN. ALT AT. 33-45. [1848. 



companied Mr. Milne in his visit to Glen Roy. " I got R. 

 Chambers to give me a sketch of Milne's Glen Roy views, 

 and I have re-read my paper, and am, now that I have heard 

 what is to be said, not even staggered. It is provoking and 

 humiliating to find that Chambers not only had not read 

 with any care my paper on this subject, or even looked at the 

 coloured map, so that the new shelf described by me had not 

 been searched for, and my arguments and facts of detail not in 

 the least attended to. I entirely gave up the ghost, and was 

 quite chicken-hearted at the Geological Society, till you 

 reassured and reminded me of the main facts in the whole 

 case." 



The two following letters to Lyell, though of later date 

 (June, 1848), bear on the same subject : 



" I was at the evening meeting [of the Geological Society], 

 but did not get within hail of you. What a fool (though I must 



say a very amusing one) did make of himself. Your 



speech was refreshing after it, and was well characterized by 

 Fox (my cousin) in three words * What a contrast ! ' That 

 struck me as a capital speculation about the Wealden Con- 

 tinent going down. I did not hear what you settled at the 

 Council ; I was quite wearied out and bewildered. I find Smith, 

 of Jordan Hill, has a much worse opinion of R. Chambers's 

 book than even I have. Chambers has piqued me a little ; * 

 he says I ' propound ' and ' profess my belief that Glen Roy is 

 marine, and that the idea was accepted because the ' mobility 

 of the land was the ascendant idea of the day.' He adds some 

 very faint iipper lines in Glen Spean (seen, by the way, by 

 Agassiz), and has shown that Milne and Kemp are right in 

 there being horizontal aqueous markings (not at coincident 

 levels with those of Glen Roy) in other parts of Scotland at 

 great heights, and he adds several other cases. This is the 

 whole of his addition to the data. He not only takes my line 



* 'Ancient Sea Margins, 1848.' should be " the mobility of the land 

 The words quoted by my father was an ascendant idea." 



