Reviews — The Survey Memoir on the Scottish Uplands. 473 



750 pages, printed clearly upon good paper, illustrated by about 

 120 cuts of sections, sketch plans, and the like scattered through 

 the letterpress, together with 18 full-page plate reproductions of 

 excellent photographs of typical field-sections and field-structures, 

 all printed in a manner to do them full justice ; while in addition we 

 have seven equally good full-page reproductions of microphoto- 

 graphic rock-structures collected at the end of the volume, two 

 full - page plates of fossils, and a coloured index map and index 

 sections of the region surveyed ; and all for the modest price of 15s. 

 It is to be hoped that now the Survey officers have thus demonstrated 

 the possibility of issuing to the public a work in all these respects 

 worthy of the Survey, they will insist that no future monograph 

 shall fall below this standard. 



For this is precisely as it should be. It is but reasonable, to 

 say the least, that this national Survej'^, the current cost of which 

 is borne by the people, should do its utmost to publish its results 

 in the form most attractive and beneficial to the people, and at the 

 lowest possible price ; that the results of the Survey work — their 

 maps and their memoirs — should be taken advantage of by as large 

 a number of people as possible, not only for the sake of the 

 advancement of the material prosperity of the country, but for the 

 sake of the progress and influence of British geological knowledge 

 at large. 



To lovers of British geology it is mortifying to acknowledge 

 how few persons, educated or uneducated, know, or care to know, 

 anything of that science which of all sciences is the one pre- 

 eminently British. And yet how naturally does every well-read 

 geologist, not only British, but foreign, accept it as a trite and 

 open secret that the primal source and foundation of the upward 

 progress of our country, from the days of the great Elizabeth 

 to those of the greater Victoria, has been the vast store of mineral 

 wealth that Nature has placed around the homes and under the very 

 feet of our people — a store of mineral wealth which, when contrasted 

 with the insignificant size of the country, is equalled in no other land 

 under the sun. Talk of the great landed nobles as we may, boast of 

 the sturdy yeomen of the land and the hardy sailors of the seas, 

 yet at the back of them all, back of all our national progress and 

 prestige, lie the great coalfields and ironfields, that have founded 

 and fed the great manufacturing districts. These in their turn have 

 furnished employment and subsistence to our teeming populations, 

 have brought wealth, leisure, influence to our middle classes; and 

 have afibrded to the nation at large the means of trade and intei*- 

 communicatiou at home, of transport and commerce on the seas, and 

 of conquest and colonization abroad. 



And how thoroughly does every well-seasoned British geologist 

 know that the vast extent and sway of our political British empire, 

 upon which we boast that the sun never sets, is more than paralleled 

 by the worldwide rule and dominance of the British empire of 

 geological principles and ideas — an empire to which every geologist 

 living takes by iuiplication the oath of allegiance the day he 



