xxxviii Obitum^y Notices of Felloivs deceased. 



the season he broke down under it. In his feverish dreams, as he lay ill 

 in the shepherd's house below the Arnaboll ridge, he used to fancy that 

 the gneiss was still moving westward on the overthrust fault which he 

 bad discovered and mapped, and that both he and the house would be 

 crushed by the advancing mass. So ended Lapworth's work in the 

 north-west of Scotland. 



In 1883 the Geological Survey commenced their operations in the 

 Durness-Eriboll region and on November 13, 1884, there appeared in 

 ' Nature ' a preliminary account of their work. It consisted of an 

 Introduction by Dr. now Sir Archibald Geikie, in which he frankly 

 abandoned the Murchisonian view, and a Eeport by Messrs. Peach and 

 Horne which proved that the Surveyors had arrived at practically the 

 same conclusions as Lapworth, both as regards the stratigraphy and the 

 metamorphism. The following extract from a letter to me dated 

 November 14, will show how he received the news that he had been 

 forestalled as regards publication : — 



" The matter has ended beautifully ... I am too late with the 

 publication of my results, but that is a matter of no consequence as the 

 facts are out distinctly and clearly." 



Keferring to the communication to the Geologists' Association in his 

 final paper "On the Close of the Highland Controversy,"* he wrote, 

 on p. 98 : — " It is not referred to in this place as establishing any 

 selfish claim to priority, for the officers of the Survey reached their 

 conclusions in complete ignorance of my results and from a totally 

 different direction, while they have gone far beyond me in working out 

 the details," and on p. 102, "The old subject of dispute has utterly 

 disappeared and there is no longer any reasonable excuse for dissension. 

 We have all been partly right and partly wrong. It is time for a hearty 

 laugh all round, a time to shake hands and be friends." 



It was Lapworth's intention to return to the district after the 

 complete results of the work of the Geological Survey had been 

 published, but the opportunity never occurred. This is to be regretted 

 for there are certain statements in his communication to the Geologists' 

 Association which require further elucidation. For example, he states 

 that " in some cases the original dividing plane (either bedding plane or 

 fault plane) of two successive rock-sheets has been twisted into the form 

 of spirals, cornucopias, etc." It must be remembered that he possessed 

 to a remarkable degree, the faculty of thinking in three dimensions. A 

 few facts observed on the surface suggested to him a hypothesis as to the 

 kind of deformation to which a rock-sheet had been subjected, or, in 

 other words, as to its course undergrpund and where it should reappear. 

 The hypothesis was then tested by further observation and at once 

 discarded if its predictions were not verified. He was constantly 

 forming such hypotheses and discarding or modifying them until he 

 * ' Geol. Mag.,' December 3, vol. 11, p. 98 (1885). 



