- Fan. 20, 1870] 
NATURE 307 
Mackintosh’s pages. He complacently remarks that hi 
views “more or less agree with opinions held by Si) 
R. I. Murchison, Sir Charles Lyell, Professor Phillips 
Mr C. Darwin, and others. This argumentum ac 
hominem, we imagine, will hardly be relished by some at 
least of these gentlemen. Mr. Mackintosh should remem- 
ber that if his views are sound, the citation of such names 
is not necessary, while, if they are erroneous, not all the 
big names in England can save them from the oblivion to 
which they are doomed. 
The author of this volume has evidently never travelled. 
He tells us, too, that he purposely refrained from reading 
until his views were formed, “lest a bias should be given 
to his opinions.” And his reading, since these unbiassed 
opinions were elaborated, appears to have consisted 
mainly of the recent journals and magazines in which 
he himself has-been writing. And yet a man without 
travel, and without reading, sits down to write a book on 
the character and origin of the scenery of a country! 
He has taken his own little corner of the earth and 
framed his theory out of it, forgetful of the wide 
world outside; which must be studied as a whole, if 
one would well understand any part.» While reading the 
book with laudable perseverance, we have had fou 
lines of “Don Juan” constantly suggesting themselves, 
where the poet describes a certain easy-minded old 
gentleman as one who 
«Saw with his own eyes the moon was round, 
Was also certain that the earth was square, 
Because he had journeyed fifty miles and found 
No Sign that it was circtlar anywhere.” 
We presume that Mr. Mackintosh’s views would “ more 
or less ag-ee” with those of this philosopher as to the 
~ shape of the moon, and generally as to matters of fact 
regarding which there can be no dispute. Like the same 
worthy, too, he does not take things on trust. He uses 
his own eyes and draws his own inferences. He is certain 
of his convictions, because he has journeyed so many 
miles and found no sign that these convictions could be 
anything but true. Unfortunately, however, he has cither 
made his journeys with a foregone conclusion in his mind, 
or they have been too limited to enable him fully to under- 
stand what the subject really is of which he proposes to 
treat ; or, what is probably the truth, he lacks that ground- 
ing in exact knowledge of geological structure which 
is absolutely necessary to one who wishes to elucidate the 
history of a land surface. 
So much for the general purpose of the volume. Its 
plan and execution are sadly unmethodical. It is divided 
into three books ; but, in spite of the explanation of this 
arrangement given in the preface, it is not easy to trace 
any clear distinction in the subjects of the divisions. The 
reader is jerked from one topic to another, getting of some 
of them the merest glimpse, so that after a little he begins 
to experience something of the feeling of unrest which 
comes over him at another time when he tries to pick out 
the details of a landscape from the window of an express 
train. There is no index to the book, and unless a passage 
is specially noted down at the time of perusal its subse- 
quent recovery is troublesome. Altogether the volume 
suggests to the reader the idea that he has here a multi- 
-farious collection of jottings and excerpts from note-books, 
strung together with not much reference to their con- 
Jrom glacial action.” 
jection. For example, the First Book, according to the 
cable of contents, consists of “ Introductory remarks on 
the causes of dentidation and origin of natural scenery 
in various parts of the world.” Under this comprehensive 
title come just twenty-one pages, in which a word or two 
are said about faults and fractures, the fact that rains, 
frosts, rivers, and glaciers are denuding agents is alluded 
to and not denied, while about fourteen pages, or two- 
thirds of Book I., are devoted to desultory remarks on 
sea-bottoms, Irish eskers, oceanic currents, waves in 
Norway, waves in Shetland and Caithness, waves on the 
coast of Ireland, sea escarpments in Ireland, remarks on 
Irish cliffs, sea~-coast cwms in Ireland, beachless shores, 
denudation of Norway, denudation of South America and 
Australia. This introduction is really a very fitting one 
to the rest of the book. It shows how the hue of the 
author’s spectacles not only colours all his own observations, 
but will not let him see the true tint of the observations 
of other people. For instance, he professes to condense 
from Forbes’s work an “account of the most striking 
physical features of Norway, excepting those resulting 
Hamlet with the Prince of Den- 
mark omitted was nothing to this. If there is one 
country in the world more marvellously eloquent of 
glacial action than other countries it is Norway. That is 
the one grand physical feature of the peninsula ; every 
fjord, every fjeld points to the grinding power of ice. Yet 
a writer on denudation, anxious as to the impartiality of 
his views, ventures to writé about the sculpturing of the 
present physical features of Norway, and to pass the 
glaciers and snowfields by. Again, he cites Australia as a 
recently emerged area, where there cannot have been any. 
“Jong-continued action of rains and streams.” But he 
takes no hote of the old river gravels, with cappings of 
basalt, hundreds of feet above the level of the present 
streams, which point to the passage of a vastly protracted 
period of subaérial erosion. 
Perhaps no passage in the book shows better the author’s 
obliquity of vision, and his consequent (though no doubt 
unintentional) unfairness, than one in this same introduc- 
tory chapter, where, in lieu of giving the reader a general 
view of what denudation is, he states, on the authority of 
Mrs. Somerville, that a tidal current in the Shetlands runs 
at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, while “ te average 
velocity of the river Rhone ts nota mile and a half an 
hour. No one unacquainted with the subject would be 
likely to escape the inference which the writer probably 
intended should be drawn, that even a rapid river like the 
Rhone has not more than a tenth of the erosive power of 
some marine currents. Now, though there can be no 
doubt that some of the most rapid currents known flow 
among the Orkney and Shetland Islands, yet we take leave 
to question whether any of them ever reach by any means 
so high a velocity as fifteen miles an hour. Yet even grant- 
ing that they do, they are quite exceptional, and it was 
long ago shown by Dr. Fleming that their erosive power, 
over a surface of rock is nearly, if not wholly; #7, for they 
cannot even rub off the crust of tender barnacles. But to 
set down the average velocity of the Rhone as “not a 
mile and a half an hour!” Shade of old Rhodanus! have 
mercy upon Mr. D. Mackintosh if that gentleman ever gets 
near enough the “rushing of the arrowy Rhone.” A mile 
and a half an hour! why, that is a véty feeble velocity 
