998 Recent Literature. [December, 



Geikie's Geological Sketches. 1 — This collection of essays, by- 

 one of the foremost geologists of the day, not only contains some 

 matter of purely geological interest, but will serve, by the genial 

 spirit and clear, attractive literary style of the author to attract 

 the notice of that large and increasing class in the community— 

 our general readers. The study of geology has gained new in- 

 terest and fascination in these latter days in connection with bio- 

 logical questions, and from the fact that no tourist can travel 

 through a land and appreciate the nature of its people, without 

 taking into account the qualities of the soil they inhabit. While 

 writerst like Buckle and perhaps Taine have carried to an ex- 

 treme the independence of man and nature, overlooking the social 

 and moral forces, as well as the laws of heredity; how dependant 

 the making of a people like the Knglish, for example, has been 

 upon the physical geology of Great Hritain is well brought out 

 by Professor Geikie in the closing sketch of this book— a chapter 

 which will, perhaps, interest the thoughtful reader as much as any 

 in the book. 



Again, fresh attention is being called, especially by some Ameri- 

 can and Canadian geologists, to the pervasive and powerful 

 agency of so simple a geological agent as rain in eroding lake 

 basins and river valleys ; this hitherto not sufficiently appreciated 

 agent having been kept too much in the background by extreme 

 glacialists. The effect on the mind of so good and fair an ob- 

 server as our author, of the results of atmospheric erosion in the 

 volcanic region of Auvergne in France, bears the strongest and 

 clearest testimony to the past as well as present intensity of plu- 

 vial forces, which have done nearly, if not quite as much as plu- 



But none the less is Professor Geikie on proper occasions, a 

 staunch glacialist, and in the interesting record of his Norwegian 

 journeys, we have fresh confirmation by an expert, of the well- 

 grounded theory that laid ice once capped Scandinavia as well as 

 Scotland, the present representatives being but pigmies compared 

 with the former rivers of ice, which filled and remolded, aided 

 by subglacial streams, the valleys of Northwestern Europe. 



In the essay on rock-weathering we have further evidence that 

 it will not do to build public structures of freestone or marble 

 in northern countries like Great Britain or the Northern United 

 States. • 



( reikie's record of his rapid journey to Montana and 

 the Yellowstone Park, which have been widely read and appreci- 

 ated, find here a place of permanent preservation, and the stimu- 

 lus of foreign observation and travel in the mind of one brought 

 up in so small and isolated a geological area as the British Isles, 



^Geological Sketches at Home and Abroad. By Archibald Geikie, LL.D-. 

 F.R.S. Director General of ti of the United Kingdom, wi 



ill* tr ti n New York, Macmillan & Co., 1882. 121x10, pp. 33 2 - 



