84 Reviews—Geikie’s Text-Book of Geology. 
disguise his own want of sympathy. On the stratigraphical side he 
generally coincides with the majority of the day. 
Nevertheless he has compiled a section of some 800 pages on 
paleontological and historical geology, which for extent and com- 
pleteness is unequalled by anything yet published in Britain. Among 
the older rocks he is heavily handicapped by his intense anxiety to 
defend the peculiar position he has adopted with respect to the age 
of the Metamorphic rocks of the Highlands, and the sequence in the 
Southern Uplands, and by his amusing reluctance to admit that any 
British-born subject who has not been, or is not, a member of H. M. 
Geological Survey, can possibly produce anything worthy of notice 
in Geology. But when he once gets fairly out of the Silurian maze, 
his work is excellent. Every system in the ascending scale is 
described as a whole, the essential features of its rocks, and its 
special life types. Next, the local variations in its rock formations 
are noticed in order, commencing with Britain, and passing thence 
to Europe, America, Asia and Australia. Every page bears the 
impress of intense labour and care. No pains appear to have been 
spared to make the section a complete summary of our present know- 
ledge of the subject, and the student of comparative geology will 
find it an excellent work of reference, easy of search, and asa general 
rule thoroughly reliable. 
Finally, we have a comparatively brief section (Book VII.) re- 
stricted to the discussion of the evolution of the present land and 
water contour, or—as the author prefers to call it—to Physiographical 
Geology. This is merely a short summary of the broader facts and 
of the accepted theories of elevation and denudation, and is very 
modest and temperate in tone throughout. 
Looking back over the work as a whole, we see no reason for 
modifying the opinion expressed in the earlier paragraphs of this 
notice. Dr. Geikie’s ‘“‘ Handbook” is the most readable and com- 
plete work upon the entire subject yet issued to the public, and will 
prove of great value not only to the earnest student, but to all who 
are interested in the science of geology. ‘To the practised geologist 
it has an especial value, from the fact that it is a very accurate pre- 
sentation of what may be called the prevalent shade of geological 
opinion in Britain. It is an exponent of the ideas of that increasing 
number of geologists, who, whatever may be their professed tenets, 
unquestionably act and live as if the study of the materials and out- 
ward aspect of the great earth-building were the be-all and the end- 
all in geology. The moral the non-geological reader is certain to 
draw from a first perusal of the work is that while the study of rock- 
specimens and of the effects of geological agencies demands and is 
worthy of the life-long devotion of the geologist, and that at the last 
he is but a simple student, whose accumulated knowledge is but the 
merest fraction of the great sum of truth; yet, in the domain of 
historical and palzontological geology, any one who can take a dip 
or a strike, or can make a rough identification of a fossil from some 
standard monograph, is as good as the best. In the physical half of 
the work the author is himself a student among students, all aglow 
