SKETCH OF SIR ARCHIBALD GEIKIE. 259 



fame. To his aptitude in this application Nature largely ascribes 

 the success of his more popular works, which, it says, " will be 

 easily understood if we remember that in Sir Archibald's works 

 the traditional barrenness of geology is always smoothed and 

 adorned by a deep and intense feeling for Nature. Nobody has 

 done more than he to associate geological science with the appre- 

 ciation of scenery." Mr. G. K. Gilbert, in a review of his Text- 

 Book of Geology, remarks as a single departure in the volume 

 the elevation of physiographical geology to the rank of a major 

 division. " The same title, it is true, has been placed by Dana at 

 the head of a primary division of the subject, but it was used by 

 him in a different sense. With Dana it is a synonym for physical 

 geology; with Geikie it is 'that branch of geological inquiry 

 which deals with the evolution of the existing contours of the 

 dry land/ So far as the subject has had place in earlier treatises, 

 it has been regarded as a subdivision of dynamical geology, and 

 the classification which placed it there was certainly logical. In 

 dynamical geology, as formulated by Geikie, the changes which 

 have their origin beneath the surface of the earth (volcanic action, 

 upheaval, and metamorphism) and the changes which belong ex- 

 clusively to the surface (denudation and deposition) are separately 

 treated. In physiographical geology the conjoint action of these 

 factors of change is considered with reference to its topographical 

 results. Starting from geological agencies as data, we may pro- 

 ceed in one direction to the development of geological history, or 

 in another direction to the explanation of terrestrial scenery and 

 topography, and if the development of the earth's history is the 

 peculiar theme of geology, it follows that the explanation of to- 

 pography, or physiographical geology, is of the nature of an inci- 

 dental result — a sort of corollary to dynamical geology. The sys- 

 tematic rank assigned to it by Geikie is an explicit recognition of 

 what has long been implicitly admitted — that geology is con- 

 cerned quite as really with the explanation of the existing fea- 

 tures of the earth as with its past history." 



The subject was first formally presented from this point of 

 view in the Lectures on the Scenery of Scotland viewed in Con- 

 nection with its Physical Geology, which were delivered in 1865. 

 At this time, as Mr. A. H. Green remarks in his review of a new 

 edition of the lectures in 1887, the controversy respecting Hut- 

 ton's theory of denudation as the main and most efficient agency 

 in shaping the earth's surface was at its height. The author ac- 

 knowledged in the preface to his second edition that his views 

 when first published ran directly counter to the prevailing im- 

 pressions on the subject ; but now, after a lapse of twenty-two 

 years, they were accepted as part of the general stock of geologi- 

 cal knowledge. " How largely," Mr. Green says, " this result is 



