3 
1915-16.] Opening Address by the President. 
Roads of Glen Roy had been formed by glacier lakes, the view which is 
generally accepted at the present day. 
The land-ice theory thus propounded by Agassiz was adopted and 
confirmed by Buckland, Robert Chambers, T. F. Jamieson of Ellon, 
Sir Andrew Ramsay, and Sir A. Geikie in this country, and by Otto Torell 
in Sweden. But the iceberg hypothesis died slowly. It had gained a firm 
hold in the geological world. It deterred many stratigraphical geologists 
from spending time on what seemed to be an unprofitable task. Nearly a 
quarter of a century elapsed before it was adequately recognised that 
Agassiz had placed glacial research on a sound and permanent basis. 
Such was the stage of inquiry when James Geikie began to map these 
deposits in Scotland in 1861, as a member of the staff of the Geological 
Survey. As the work proceeded he evolved certain ideas regarding 
changes of climate in Pleistocene time, based on the succession of boulder 
clays with intercalations of sand, gravel, and peat, and on the cave deposits 
and Palaeolithic gravels of the south of England. He first gave expression 
to his views during a discussion at the British Association meeting in 
Edinburgh in 1871. This discussion followed the reading of a paper by 
Professor Boyd Dawkins on “ The Relation of the Quaternary Mammalia 
to the Glacial Period.” This communication was of prime importance, 
because it furnished a classification of the Quaternary Mammalia and 
attempted to explain the commingling of Arctic and Southern forms in 
the deposits in the south of England. He arranged the mammals in five 
groups, calling special attention to those indicating a cold climate, and 
those which are now only found in hot regions, such as the hyaena and 
hippopotamus. Boyd Dawkins maintained that the only mode of explain- 
ing this anomalous assemblage is to suppose that in those days the winter 
cold was very severe and the summer heat intense. Hence, in the summer 
the animals now found in warmer regions migrated northwards, and in 
the winter those now found in the Arctic regions moved southwards. 
The theory of seasonal migrations of Arctic and Southern mammals 
advocated in this paper was opposed by James Geikie, who maintained 
that the phenomena pointed to fluctuations of climate. The discussion 
impelled him to give an outline of his views in a series of articles in the 
Geological Magazine. Fully, convinced of the truth of his opinions, he 
lost no time in expanding those articles and developing them in detail in 
his volume The Great Ice Age, which appeared in 1874. 
What, we may ask, were the distinctive features of this epoch-making 
volume, which immediately arrested the attention of geologists all over the 
globe ? For the first time it gave a systematic account, of the phenomena 
