64 
NATURE 
[ Woo. 16, 1882 
some parts. When a child is born, the husband goes to bed for 
thirty days, and the wife looks after the work. At the conclu- 
sion of the paper, Lord Northbrook and Col. Yule paid a well 
deserved tribute to the late Capt. Gill, Prof. Palmer, and Lieut. 
Charrington, Capt. Gill, our readers may remember, had him- 
self done some first-rate work on the South-East Chinese 
frontier, and described it in his ‘‘ River of Golden Sand ;” 
while Prof, Palmer’s loss as an Arabic scholar is almost 
irretrievable. 
SAMOYEDES report to Archangel that they have recently seen, 
south of Waigatz Island, the wreck of a large vessel crushed in 
the ice. If the statement be true, and if we remember their 
neyer-credited story of the unfortunate Yeammnette, it is more 
than probable that the vessel is either the Danish exploring 
vessel the Dijmphna, with Lieut. Hovgaard’s expedition, or the 
Norwegian steamer /Varna with the Dutch meteorological expe- 
dition, bound for Port Dickson, both of which in September last 
froze in in the Kara Sea, from which place the ice may subse- 
quently have carried the unfortunate vessel to where she now is 
stated to be. The last intelligence received from Lieut. Hovgaard 
was dated September 22, and addressed t> Herr Aug. Gamil, of 
Copenhagen, the principal promoter of the expedition, from 
which it appears that all was then well with both vessels, but 
that the Dijmphna was, when caught in the ice, some consider- 
able distance from shore, in fact in a spot where the whole force 
of the polar ice, when in drift, would strike her, Herr Aug. 
Gamil having telegraphed to the Russian Admiralty for any con- 
firmation of the above report, has reccived a reply that no official 
information on the subject has bee: reccived at St. Petersburg ; 
but that nevertheless instructions would be at once given to the 
officials on the north coast to scour the same, and gather further 
particulars, A search party is also being contemplat.d in 
Copenhagen, which will, if decided on, be lea by M. Larsen, a 
Dane, who accompanied the American expedition in search of 
the crew of the Feanwette, as the special artist of the ///austrated 
London News. 
THE German Government has raised the fund for the scientific 
exploration of Central Africa and other countries, which in 
1882-83 was fixed at 75,coo marks (3750/.) to 100,000 marks 
(5000/.) for the financial year 1883-84. 
THE AIMS AND METHOD OF GEOLOGICAL 
INQUIRY + 
Il. 
T will be observed that the results obtained by geologists 
could not have been arrived at had they confined themselves 
solely to the detection of resemblances and correspondences 
between the phenomena of the present and the past. The 
natural forces have always been the same in kind, if not in 
degree, and we can often watch the gradual development by 
their means of products which more or le-s closely resemble the 
rocks of our sections. But experimental evidence of this kind 
takes us only a short way, and we are sooner or later confronted 
by appearances, which are not reproduced by nature before our 
eyes. As another example of this I shall adduce one which, 
although it has far-reaching issues, has yet the merit of being 
readily comprehended without much prelim nary geological 
knowledge. It is moreover instructive as showing how the 
imaginative faculty works in a mind trained to clear and steady 
observation of nature. The fact that a large proportion of the 
lakes of the world rest in rocky hollows or basins had been long 
known before it occurred to any one to ask how such rocky 
hollows had come into existence. The question was first asked 
and the answer given by Prof. (now Sir) A. C. Ramsay. He 
had pondered over the problem for years before its solution 
dawned upon him. None of the ordinary agents of geological 
change -eemed capable of producing the phenomena. The 
most common of all denuding agents—water—certainly could 
not do so, for although it may dig long and deep trenches 
through rocks, water could not scoop out a basin like that 
occupied by Loch Lomond, or any of our Highland lakes. The 
tendency of water is, on the contrary, to silt up and to drain 
such hollows, by deepening the points of exit at their lower ends. 
Did the hollows in question occupy areas of depression—had 
* The Inaugural Lecture at the opening of the Class of Geology and 
Mineralogy in the University of Edinburgh, October 27, 1882, by james 
Geikie, LL.D., F.R.S. L. and E., Regis Professor of Geology and 
Mineralogy in the University. Continued from p. 46. 
they, in short, been formed by unequal subsidences of the 
ground? Some considerable inland seas, as for example the 
Dead Sea, and doubtless many larger and smaller sheets of 
water, owe their origin to local movements of this kind. But it 
is incredible that all the numerous lakes and lakelets of Northern 
Alpine regions could have originated in this way. In many 
cases these lakes are so abundant that it is hard to say of some 
countries, such as Finland, and large parts of Sweden, and even 
of our own islands, whether it is land or water that predomin- 
ates. If all these numerous and closely aggregated rock-basins 
represent so many local subsidences, then the hard rocks in 
which mst of them appear must have been at the time of their 
formation in a condition hardly less yielding than dough or putty. 
It was suggested that the lakes of the Alps and other hilly 
regions might have been caused, not by local sinkings confined 
to the valleys themselves, but by a general depression of the 
central high-grounds and water-sheds. The subsidence of the 
central mountains wou'd of course entail depression in the upper 
reaches of the mountain-valleys, and in this way the inclination 
of those valleys would be reversed—each being converted into 
an elongated rock-basin. But a little consideration showed that 
before the lakes of such a region as the Alps could have been 
produced in this manner, those mountains must have been some 
15,000 feet higher than at present. Or to put it the other way, 
in order to obliterate the Alpine lakes and restore the slopes of 
the valleys to what, if this hypothesis were true, must have been 
their original inclination, the Alps would need to be pushed up 
until they attained tnice their present elevation. Now, we are 
hardly prepared to admit that the Swiss mountains were 30,000 
feet high before the glacial period. If our Alpine and Northern 
lake-basins cannot be attributed to movements of depression, 
still less can they be accounted for by any system of fractures ; 
—they lie neither in gaping cracks n>r on the down-throw sides 
of dislocations. In a word, a study of the structure, inclination, 
and distribution of the rock-masses in which our lake-basins 
appear throws no light upon the origin of those hollows. We 
probably find in many cases that the position and form of a basin 
have been inflaenced in some way by the character of the rocks 
in which it lies—but we detect no evidence in the rock-masses 
themselves to account for its production. It is not necessary, 
however, that I should on this occasion mention each and every 
cause which has been suggested for the origin of rock-bound 
hollows, Some of these suggestions are unquestionably well 
founded. Forexample, there can be no doubt that certain lakes 
have been produced by the sudden damming-up of a valley in 
consequence of a fall of rock from adjoining slopes or cliffs ; 
others, again, occupy holes caused by the falling in of the roofs 
of caves and subterranean tunnels ; while yet others have been 
formed by a current of lava flowing across a valley and thus 
ponding back its stream, just as many a temporary sheet of 
water has been brouzht into existence in a similar way by the 
abnormal advance of a glacier. In these and other ways lakes 
have doubtless originated again and again, but the causes just 
referred to are all more or less exceptional, and manifestly in- 
capable of producing the phenomena so conspicuous in the lake- 
regions of Britain, Scandinavia, and the Alps. 
Ramsay, to whom the varied phenomena of glacier-regions 
had been long familiar, was struck by the remarkable fact that 
freshwater lakes predominate in Northern and Alpine countries, 
while they are comparatively rare in reyions further south and 
outside of mountainous districts. The great development of 
lakes in Finland finds no counterpart in the low grounds of 
southern latitudes. It is in regions where glacial action formerly 
prevailed that rock-basins are most numerous, and this suggested 
to Ramsay that in some way or other the lakes of the Alps and 
the North were connected with glaciation. The final solution of 
the problem flashed upon him while he was studying the glacial 
features of Switzerland. His scientific imagination enabled him 
to reproduce in his own mind the aspect presented by the Alps 
during the glacial period, when the great mountain-valleys were 
choked with glacier-ice, which flowed out upon the low grounds 
of Germany, France, and Northern Italy, so as to cover all the 
sites of the present lakes. He saw that under such conditions 
enormous erosion must have been effected by the ice, by means 
of the rocky rubbish which it dragged on underneath, and that 
this erosion, other things being equal, would be most intense 
where the ice was thickest and the ground over which it 
advanced had the gentlest inclination. Such conditions, he 
inferred, would be met with somewhere in the lower course of a 
valley between the steeper descent of its upper reaches and the 
