James Geikie, the Man and the Geologist. Marion I. Newbigin
would have “rounded off the family so nicely.” The much-loved daughter did not appear on the scene till many years afterwards.
From the 1863 diary two short entries may be quoted, for they stand side by side on the same page, and are in many ways very characteristic of the man. The first relates to a day spent in indoor work, though with the careful corollary that this was not due to the weather. Opposite this formal entry is written:—“Mouth filled with cursings and my heart with evil thoughts, all owing to the squalling and girning of an ill-natured, red-headed, unwashed, petted, fractious imp—the son and heir of our landlord, the shepherd.” Some of the epithets have been omitted—the provocation was doubtless extreme!
The following day was spent in the open air, and opposite stands this:—“Meet J. Y. on top of Black Law; walk back to Summerhope by way of the old churchyard. Exquisite moonlight night. Scene inexpressibly sad—feel of course very sentimental; and have a whole troop of depressing thoughts and reminiscences—some of which cause me to heave sighs like the bellows of the Village Blacksmith. The ingenious biographer will never guess what these sighs were for, nor have I any intention of enlightening him.”
Finally, we may note that the holidays of the years 1863 and 1864 were both spent in Scotland, the first on the shores of the Solway and on the coast of Ayrshire; the second on the Moray Firth, then north to Brora and south-west to Fort William and Oban. Both seem to have been largely devoted to geological work, but were on a less ambitious scale than many of those of later years.
The late spring and summer of 1864 saw James Geikie beginning work in Ayrshire, where he was stationed for some years. With the end of 1864 we may say that his introductory period of life on the Survey closed.
CHAPTER III
“The Great Ice Age”: (1) Years of Preparation
1865–1871
The year 1865 saw James Geikie, as already stated, doing Survey work in Ayrshire, and this, with its continuation, the laborious and sometimes tedious mapping of the Lanarkshire coalfield, kept him in the west till 1872. Of these years of patient toil, diversified by independent research upon the drifts, by geological holidays, and by the making of translations of Heine and other German poets, comparatively little has been preserved. His correspondents in these early days were chiefly the members of his own family, and most of his letters have been destroyed, except where the presence of some cherished verses determined their preservation. From the scanty records in the diaries, from the few letters that remain, and from the published account of his surveys, it is, however, possible to indicate broadly the course of his daily life.
In 1865 he was stationed in South Ayrshire, Girvan and Cumnock being two of his centres there. The most notable event of the year, however, was a visit to Norway in July to August. Unfortunately, only the barest notes of this visit remain, and, except for the descriptions of fiord scenery in Prehistoric Europe and elsewhere, we do not know what impressions were obtained.
It was apparently chiefly a steamboat journey, with short excursions to glaciers and other areas of special interest to the traveller. Boat was taken from Newcastle to Aalesund, then viâ Molde and Christiansund (where a brief note records an exquisite sunset about eleven, with sunrise following at one) to Trondhjem. After a day in this town the journey was continued to Rödö and Melövar. From this point a trip was made in a boat with four men for twenty miles up the fiord to visit the Fondalen ice-field. Several days were spent here, and various glaciers were visited and presumably studied. A return was then made to Melövar, and the steamer journey continued to Tromsö. After a day here James Geikie went on to Skjervö, where he arrived at 2 A.M., as is carefully recorded, and put up at a merchant’s house, no inn being available. Here he was most hospitably received, and enjoyed his brief glimpse of a Norwegian interior. Next day a boat was taken across the fiord to the Jökul-fjeld, and an apparently profitable excursion, which included icebergs and icefalls among the objects seen, ended at a fisherman’s cot at midnight. Next day was spent idling about, because the wind was adverse, which suggests that the boat was a sailing-boat, and the start was not made till evening, so that the whole night was passed on the water, Skjervö not being reached till six in the following morning. Two days were spent here, and then the steamer taken to Loppen, from which an excursion was made to Bergsfiord, where the glacier was visited. Another excursion was made to Öksfjord, and the steamboat rejoined as far as Hammerfest, the furthest point reached. On the return journey the call at Christiansund permitted of an expedition, taken in company with the geologist Dr. Dahll, during which a “fierce controversy” took place. Finally, a Dutch steamer brought the traveller from Bergen to England after what must have been a most instructive tour.
The following year, 1866, found him still in Ayrshire. Little record of it is left, beyond the tale of work, and the publication of his first scientific paper. By this time he had moved to the north of Ayrshire, where he was also in the following year. This year, 1867, witnessed the appearance of his first glacial paper, this being “On the Buried Forests and Peat Mosses of Scotland, and the Changes of Climate which they indicate,” a subject which was to engage his attention more or less closely for the remainder of his life. His spare time was still occupied with the translations, many examples of which occur in his letters to his sisters. Occasionally his muse took less serious forms, as may be seen from the lines given on next page, which appear in a letter much of which is taken up with translations from “that lugubrious poet in whose stanzas the word weinen is rarely omitted—it may be sweetly rendered by the English whining.” The lines mentioned follow some criticisms of the habits of the inhabitants of an Ayrshire town, where the society, in James Geikie’s words, was “eminently peeous and drouthie.” The lines are as follows:—
Takin’ toddy a’ the week,
Comes the Sabbath day,
Then to Kirk three times they gang,
And sleep the fumes away.
In the same letter he complains that in this particular town the invariable question put to you by strangers whose acquaintance you make is, “What church do you attend?” He adds that he had not acquired the reputation of a regular church-goer, so that one suspects that something less than the three times a day had to suffice in his case. From this period probably dates an anecdote which he used to tell himself of a somewhat unfortunate visit to a place of worship where, tired out by his week’s work in the open air, and not perhaps greatly interested in the discourse, he fell asleep so soundly as ultimately to fall out of the pew—at the end of which he was sitting—headlong into the aisle. He had the presence of mind to remain there with his eyes closed, and was carried out by sympathetic acquaintances, who thought he had been suddenly overtaken by serious illness. But when the feet of the young men were already at the door, the apparently unconscious patient opened his eyes and winked at one of his friends to indicate that the fate of Eutychus had not overtaken him on this occasion. The bearer opposite, with an innocence which did credit to his piety, had not thought of the obvious explanation of the accident, and in his astonishment nearly dropped his burden. History does not, unfortunately, tell whether his loyalty enabled him to keep the matter to himself and so preserve his friend’s reputation. For these, it must be remembered, were days when a geologist invariably ran the risk of being suspected of “unsoundness,” by the mere fact of his occupation, and was, therefore, one for whom jesting on the threshold of a church was particularly dangerous.
In this year of 1867 Mr. (now Dr) John Horne joined the Survey, and very shortly afterwards made James Geikie’s acquaintance. There thus began a friendship which lasted to the end. Almost from the first Mr. Horne shared Geikie’s enthusiasm for glacial work, and so early as 2nd April 1868 a letter from the latter to one of his sisters records the fact that “Young Horne has got me a lot of information, and I shall certainly get a lot more.” From this time, indeed, James Geikie constantly asked his colleagues for notes about the glacial phenomena in the areas they were respectively surveying, and for friendship’s sake was freely supplied with these. Thus in the course of time he acquired a large amount of detailed information about the different parts of Scotland, with