237 
EE VIEWS. 
The Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain. By Professor 
A. C. Eamsa}^ F.E.S. London : Stanford. 1863. 
This little book, by the Local Director of the Geological Surv^ey of Great 
Britain, and President of the Geological Society of London, is founded on 
a course of six lectures that 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 particidar 
moment, just as Professor Huxley has turned his similar lectures to a pur- 
})ose suited to the advance of his school. Such, however, we cannot make 
out to be the case, udIcss the object of Professor Eamsay was to make an 
opportunity for asserting that having handled stones for five-and-twenty 
years, he knew a chipped flint when he saw it (p. 111). Unless this is so, 
or we have in our obtuseness missed the points of prominent novelt}', the 
three lirtle 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 inquisitiveness 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 perambulatii.g 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 
miles away. jNIen are not now content to take things as they are, but are 
intent on knowing what tbey have come from. Even the \^ orking 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 flints, and inquires what was their origin. " Experience 
tells us," says Professor Eamsay, "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 necessary, 
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 \^ith 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 subse(]uent re- 
search has shown that this theory will not hold, for, amongst other reasons, 
there are gneissic rocks or almost all ages in the geological scale. Aban- 
doning then the terms 'igneous' and 'primitive' for granitic and gneissic 
rocks, and retaining the term ' primary,' is there not an inconsistency ? Still 
more, is not the abandoning the terra ' igneous ' a fatal concession for the 
internal heat and gradual cooling down doctrines to which geologists, and 
the Professor amongst them, still cling like drowning men to straws? Is or 
is Professor Eamsay 's explanation very intelhgible or very logical, to our 
mind. " Now," says he, " I must briefly endeavour to give you an idea of 
the theory of metamorphism. The simplest kind is of the nature w hich I 
hinted at in the last lecture, namely, when an igneous comes into contact 
with a stratified rock, and when having remained for a long tiiue in a 
