August 30, 1906 J 



NA TURE 



439 



" the most assured convictions " that he deemed it 

 " not only justifiable but a positive duty to express 

 such convictions with all the certainty that is felt." 

 The "certainty," however, extended to so many sub- 

 jects that he migfht well remark that " some, perhaps 

 many, of my contemporaries in my later years have 

 thought me very confident in my opinions, and very 

 aggressive in my expression of them." He com- 

 plained of Huxley's aggressive style of writing, but 

 when ho penned his strongly-worded articles and 

 letters he seems to have been unconscious that the 

 same complaint might not seldom be brought against 

 himself. 



There is no intimation in these volumes to what, if 

 any, extent the author of the Autobiography had 

 journals or letters to rely upon in writing it. The 

 preface states that " memory was invoked to bring 

 back from the storehouse of the past all that had 

 specially impressed him." That he had a tenacious 

 memory can well be believed, but it has undoubtedly 

 played him false in a number of instances, some of 

 which are to be regretted. Thus he misdates certain 

 tr;insactions by a whole year. He refers to Lady 

 Lyell, whom he intimately knew and admired, as 

 " a sister of Leonard Horner, a man of whom much 

 had been expected by his college friends, from his 

 eminent abilities." Lady Lyell, however, was the 

 daughter, not the sister, of Leonard Horner, and the 

 Duke confounds two brothers. It was Francis Horner 

 who passed away comparatively young ; Leonard, who 

 wrote an excellent memoir of his brother, lived until 

 1864, when he died in the seventy-ninth year of his 

 age. 



\ more extraordinary mistake occurs on p. 289 of 

 the .Vutobiography in the following sentence : — 



"It does seem a marvellous fact that no knowledge 

 of the wonders of Staffa had ever reached the world 

 till it had been visited and described by a scientific 

 Englishman, Sir Stamford Raffles." 



Now StafTa, though not belonging to the Duke of 

 .Argyll, lies near to his favourite island of lona, and 

 opposite to his estates in Mull. He had been in- 

 timately familiar with it during many cruises among 

 the isles, and must be supposed to have been 

 acquainted with that classic of Scottish geographical 

 description, Pennant's second "Tour in Scotland," 

 in which so much of the scenery, natural history, 

 and antiquities of the kingdom was for the first time 

 described and figured. That volume was published in 

 1774, and one of its distinguishing features was the 

 appearance in it of the earliest account of the wonders 

 of Staffa, communicated to the author by no less a 

 personage than Joseph Banks, afterwards the dis- 

 tinguished president of the Royal Society, who like- 

 wise contributed a number of excellent drawings of 

 the cliffs and caves of the island, which were repro- 

 duced by Pennant, and form some of the best plates 

 in his book. Sir Stamford Raffles, who spent his 

 life in the East, was not born until 1781, seven years 

 after the account of StafTa had been given to the 

 world. He and Banks were both " scientific English- 

 NO. 1922, VOL. 74] 



men" and' great travellers, though how the Duke 

 came to confound the one with the other is difficult 

 to understand. 



Another error, more serious than a mere lapse of 

 memory, is to be found on p. 350, where it is gravely 

 asserted that 



" Smith of Jordanhill was the real founder of the 

 Glacial Theory, which has played so great a part in 

 recent geology. It is commonly assigned to Agassiz, 

 but he did not visit this country till 1840." 



No one would for a moment wish to disparage the 

 importance of the discovery made by James Smith in 

 1839, when he found among the extinct shells of the 

 Clyde basin a number of northern forms, and con- 

 cluded from them that " it seems probable that the 

 climate of Europe was colder during the newest 

 Tertiary than during the Recent period." But he did 

 not venture to propound a " theory " of any kind, 

 nor did he refer to ice in any form, .\gassiz, how- 

 ever, though he did not visit this country until 1840, 

 had already spent some years in the study of glacial 

 phenomena among the Alps, and as far back as 1837 

 had announced his opinions as to the former greater 

 extension of the ice of central Europe and of the 

 northern hemisphere. When he came to Britain he 

 was able to demonstrate the existence here of the 

 same types of glaciation as are found in Switzer- 

 land, and he thus produced further overwhelming 

 evidence in favour of the views which he had already 

 published. The Duke has here suffered his 

 antagonism to these views to blind him to the 

 historical facts of the case, and the same spirit of 

 opposition has led him to conclude his reference to 

 the subject with a characteristically sarcastic allusion 

 to the " fads and faddists " that have followed in the 

 track of the great Swiss naturalist. 



It is in many ways a misfortune that the Duke of 

 .Argyll did not live to carry his Autobiography down 

 through the central and later parts of his life, and to 

 review in the calm of his old age the controversies, 

 scientific and other, in which he had been engaged. 

 The din of conflict had long ceased, and many of 

 those with whom he had crossed swords had passed 

 away. It would have been interesting and instructive 

 to learn from his own pen how the questions in debate 

 looked to him after the long lapse of years ; to dis- 

 cover whether time had modified the confident 

 assurance with which he used to do battle, or had 

 left him in the same convinced and defiant frame of 

 mind in which he fought. Up to their close, his 

 chapters reveal not the slightest symptom of the 

 mental enfeeblement of old age. Indeed, he never 

 wrote more vigorously or with more apparently voluble 

 ease than in this .Autobiography. It contains many 

 passages which might be collected as examples of an 

 admirable style of composition, and among his varied 

 contributions to literature it will not be surprising 

 if this latest effort of his pen shall outlast in general 

 acceptance any of his previous writings. 



The chapters which follow the Autobiography give 

 a most inadequate picture of what the Duke was in 

 his prime and of what he did. The chapter on his 



