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TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 999 
including Professors Harkness, Ramsay, Archibald Geikie, and Hull, for a long 
time carried all before them; but it is now admitted that each of these excellent 
observers was deceived by having seen only portions of the evidence, and that they 
based their conclusions on imperfect data. Nicol, though during the later years 
of his life he declined unavailing controversy, still continued to study the High- 
lands year by year, re-examining every joint in his armour and satisfying himself 
of its soundness. 
In the year 1877 I had an opportunity of visiting for the first time the interest- 
ing sections of Assynt and Loch Broom, in company with Dr. Taylor Smith, F.G.S., 
and Mr. Richard D. Oldham, now of the Geological Survey of India. Although 
I entered upon this task with the strongest prepossessions in favour of the 
Murchisonian hypothesis, yet what I saw there during several weeks of work 
convinced me that the theory of an ‘ Upper Quartzite’ and an ‘ Upper Limestone’ 
was altogether untenable, and that, so far as these two sections were concerned, 
Nicol’s interpretation was undoubtedly the correct one. I was greatly impressed 
with the proofs of enormous folding and faulting among these Highland rocks, and 
when, shortly afterwards, I had an opportunity of meeting Professor Nicol in this 
place, and of hearing from his lips many details of his later work, I strongly urged 
him to republish his conclusions with the fuller illustrations and arguments which 
he was then so well able to supply. To all my pleadings he made but one reply: 
important as he knew these discoveries to be, yet in his advancing years he thought 
but little of the glory of them compared to their painful consequences to himself— 
the breach of the old friendly relations with one he, to the end, so greatly loved and 
honoured. He strongly deprecated at that time the re-opening of a controversy 
associated for him with such bitter memories; but he expressed his full conviction 
that when sufficiently accurate topographical maps were in existence, and the 
whole district should be surveyed by competent geologists, the truth of all the 
essential parts of his teaching would be established.' 
Most completely have these anticipations of Nicol been fulfilled. During the 
last seven years many of the sections of the Western Highlands have been visited 
by different geologists, Dr. Hicks leading the way, and not a few papers have been 
published embodying the results of these new studies of some of the disputed points. 
Such an able review of this recent work has been lately drawn up by my friend, 
Professor Bonney, in his Anniversary Address to the Geological Society, that I 
need not go over the ground again, but will content myself by referring to that 
address and to two exhaustive papers read by Dr. Hicks before the Geologists’ 
Association for full details concerning this later work. It will be seen that while 
new methods of study have enabled them to improve or correct Nicol’s petrological 
nomenclature, the principal conclusions of nearly all these writers concerning the 
relations of the several rock-masses entirely support bis views on the subject. 
But very recently Nicol’s work has been tested in the way which he himself so 
earnestly desired. Professor Lapworth, who, like Nicol, was especially prepared 
for the task by long and patient study of the crumpled Silurian rocks of the 
Borderland, taking advantage of the newly-published Ordnance maps of Sutherland, 
proceeded in the summer of 1882 to Eriboll, bent on the task of unravelling the 
complicated rocks and of mapping them upon the large scale of 6 inches to the mile. 
Professor Lapworth’s detailed maps and sections were exhibited to the Geological 
Society on May 9, 1883, during the reading of a paper by Dr. Callaway, in which 
the views of Nicol also received a considerable amount of valuable support. 
In the same year, 1883, a detachment of the Geological Survey of Scotland, 
under the superintendence of Messrs. B, N. Peach and J. Horne, commenced the 
detailed mapping of the Durness-Eriboll district. How admirably these gentlemen 
have performed their task we all know, and I hope that some interesting information 
1 In my two earlier papers ‘On the Secondary Rocks of Scotland,’ published in 
1873 and 1874 respectively, I had employed the Murchisonian nomenclature for the 
older rocks of the Highlands whenever I had occasion to refer to them; but in the 
- third of this series of papers, published in 1878 (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxxiv. 
p. 660), I had no hesitation in abandoning this terminology for that of Nicol. 
