THE 



GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. 



NEW SERIES. DECADE III. VOL. VII. 



No. II.— FEBRUARY, 1890. 



ozR,xo-i:r>r.A.i J aeticles. 



D 



I. — Eminent Living Geologists. — No. 6. 

 Professor Archibald Geikie, LL.D., F.R.S. L. &E., 



DIRECTOR- GENERAL OF THE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. 



(WITH A PORTEAIT.) » 



OCTOR ARCHIBALD GEIKIE was born in Edinburgh in 

 1835. He was educated at the Royal High School — the most 

 famous of the many celebrated scholastic institutions of the "Modern 

 Athens," and at Edinburgh University. He became an Assistant 

 on the Geological Surve} r of Scotland in 1855, and in 1867, when 

 that branch of the Survey was made a separate establishment, he 

 was appointed Director. A few years later — in 1871 — he was elected 

 to fill the Murchison Professorship of Geology and Mineralogy in 

 the University of Edinburgh, when the chair for these subjects was 

 founded by Sir Roderick Murchison and the Crown in that year. 

 Subsequently he resigned these appointments, when at the beginning 

 of 1881 he was appointed to succeed Sir Andrew C. Ramsay, as 

 Director-General of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom, 

 and Director of the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street. 

 It is hardly necessary to say that during this period he has engaged 

 in an immense amount of official work. To begin with, he had the 

 direct supervision of the Survey of Scotland almost from its com- 

 mencement, and has mapped with his own hand many hundreds of 

 square miles of country, besides writing or editing all the published 

 Survey Memoirs descriptive of Scotland. Again, since becoming 

 Director-General in London, he has given special attention to the 

 petrographical department of the service, previously weak, but which 

 has now attained great strength and importance. Professor Geikie 

 was one of the first field-geologists in this country to perceive the 

 importance of microscopic investigation as an adjunct to field-work, 

 and to begin this investigation himself. One direct result of this 

 has been the great enlargement of the petrographical collection of 

 the Museum in Jermyn Street. Upwai'ds of 5000 slides of British 

 rocks have been prepared and are now available for the student in 

 this branch of investigation. 



The one-inch Geological Survey maps of England and of Ireland 



1 The portrait accompanying this Notice is most obligingly lent by George A. 

 Ferguson, Esq., Editor of the " Mining Journal, " in which periodical it appeared on 

 December 28th, 1889. and from the columns of which this notice has been largely 

 reproduced. — Edit. Geol. Mag. 



DECADE III. VOL. VII. NO. II. • 4 



