237 



REVIEWS. 



The Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain. By Professor 

 A.C.Ramsay, F.R.S. London: Stanford. 1863. 



This little book, by the Local Director of the Geological Survey of Great 

 Britain, and President of the Geological Society of London, is founded on 

 a course of six lectures thai were delivered to working men in the Museum 

 of Practical Geology in January and February of this year, and seemingly 

 published immediately after their close. This would lead one to suspect 

 they were intended to be the vehicle of some special views at a particular 

 moment, just as Professor Huxley has turned his similar lectures to a pur- 

 pose suited to the advance of his school. Such, however, we cannot make 

 out to be the case, unless the object of Professor Pamsay was to make an 

 opportunity for asserting that having handled stones for five-and-twenty 

 years, he knew a chipped Hint when he saw it (p. 111). Unless this is so, 

 or we have in our obtuseness missed the points of prominent novelty, the 

 three little letters which represent the commercial value of all labours 

 would appear to be the motive for sending out to the world lectures of the 

 most elementary character. 



They open pleasantly enough with a reference to the good old days, 

 when those who thought upon the matter at all were content to accept the 

 world as it is, and to believe it always was so. The incpuisitiveness of 

 the present age has made man, however, a more restless animal than he 

 was a century ago, and instead of being a kind of perambulating vegetable 

 in a limited locality, he travels by pent-up clouds with the speed of the 

 hurricane, and writes letters and draws portraits with lightning a hundred 

 mile- away. Men are not now content to take things as they are, but are 

 intent on knowing what they have come from. Even the working man 

 takes an interest in knowing the history of the soil his spade turns over, 

 and the rock his pick brings down. The lime-burner finds shells in his 

 chalk, and asks how they got there; the road-mender sees fish-scales and 

 sponges in his Hints, and inquires what was their origin. "Experience 

 tells us," says Professor Ramsay, "that at these courses of lectures a 

 number of my friends come to see me again and again, and that also there 

 are many new faces present ;" and for this reason he finds it necessaryj 

 while bound to teach the rudiments of our science, to vary his subjects as 

 much as possible. 



The first lecture is on Classification and Denudation; the second on the 

 Physical Structure of Scotland, chiefly dealing with contortion of strata 

 and metamorphism. In it the author tells the old story of a red-hot globe, 

 and a boiling sea, and a primitive crust of granite, in a manner worthy of 

 a Plutonist a hundred years ago. and then admits that subsequent re- 

 search has shown that this theory will not hold. for. amongst other reasons, 

 there are gneissic rocks of almost all ages in the geological seale. Aban- 

 doning then the terms 'igneous' and 'primitive' for granitic and gneissic 

 rocks, and retaining the term ' primary,' is there not an inconsistency P > s i ill 

 more, is not the abandoning the term ' igneous ' a fatal concession tor the 

 internal heat and gradual cooling down doctrines to which geologists, and 

 the Professor amongst them, still cling like drowning men to straws? !Nor 

 is Professor Pamsay's explanation very intelligible or very logical, to our 

 mind. 4, Now," says he, " 1 must brielly endeavour to give yon an idea of 

 the theory of metamorphism. The simplest kind is of the nature which I 

 hinted at in the last lecture, namely, when an igneous conies into contact 

 with a stratified rock, and when having remained lor a long lime in a 



