DR. GEIKIE'S "SCENERY OF SCOTLAND." Tins is one of those
new editions which are much to be preferred to new books. Dr. Geikie is perhaps the most agreeable writer on geology now left to us. When his Scenery of Scotland originally appeared, in 1865, it had a distinct success, less perhaps in virtue of the scientific theory it expressed and exemplified, than of its picturesque descriptions, in which the ring of the geologist's hammer had the accent of poetry, some- . what perhaps as the drone of the bagpipe is positively musical
• The Scenery of Scotland, Viewed in Connection with its Physical Geology. By Archibald Geikie, LL.D., F.R.S. Second Edition. London: Macmil:an. 1::7.
when heard a sufficient number of miles off. Dr. Geikie has not only revised, but rewritten his work ; yet he has left his pretty passages standing. Above all, he has left this, which is the Iliad of his theories and of the physical history of Scotland in a nut- shell :—
" To sit on one of the Highland Hills that overlook the Firth of Clyde, and watch the ships as they come and go from all corners of the earth ; to trace village after village, and town after town, dotting the coast-line as far as the eye can reach ; to see the white steam of the distant railway rising like a summer cloud from among orchards and cornfields and fairy-like woodlands; to mark, far away, the darker smoke of the coal-pit and the iron-work hanging over the haunts of a busy human population ; in short, to note all over the landscape, on land and sea, the traces of that human power which is everywhere changing the face of Nature ;—and then to picture an earlier time, when these waters had never felt the stroke of oar or paddle, when these hillsides had never echoed the sound of human voice, but when over hill and valley, over river and sea, there had fallen a silence as of the grave, when one wide pall of snow and ice -stretched across the landscape ; to restore, in imagination, the vast ice-sheet filling up the whole wide firth, and creeping slowly and silently southwards, and the valley-glaciers into which this ice-sheet shrank, threading yonder deep Highland glens, which to-day are purple with heather and blithe with the whirring of grouse and woodcock ; to seal up the firth once more in ice, as the winter frosts used to set over it, and cover it with bergs and ice-rafts that marked the abort lived Arctic summer ; to bring back again the Arctic plants and animals of that early time, the reindeer, the mammoths, and their contemporaries ; and thus, from the green and sunny valley of the Clyde, with all its human associations, to pass at once, and by a natural transition, to the sterility and solitude of another Greenland, is an employment as delightful as man can well enjoy."
It is in this spirit that Dr. Geikie has not only written, but, we are happy to say, has, after a lapse of time which has led to a call for a second edition, also rewritten. His book is the enthusiasm of geology.
But it is something more. Dr. Geikie in a sense unconsciously performs for Scotland the process which Dr. Arnold recom- mended in regard to history in general. He writes its history backwards, and that mainly through his making a good use of his eyes, and of his geologist's hammer. The history of Scotch scenery is in a sense the history of Scotch nationality, or rather of the different Scotch nationali- ties. Take as an illustration of this doctrine, as embodied in his book, the different results of the Norse settlements on the East and West Coasts respectively. When the Norsemen landed on the East Coast of Scotland, "the broad selvage of low ground between them and the dark mountains in the distance offered them sites for their new homesteads, which by degrees were planted all along the coast within touch of each other." Along the seaboard of the Western Highlands, however, there was no such plain, the mountains shooting up from the very edge of the sea. Hence, although the Norse Vikings occupied the Shetland, Orkney, and Western Islands, and also held the Western sea-board, they were unable to plant a continuous line of settlements. They therefore " remained to the end Vikings- baysmen—familiar with every creek and headland, but never per- manently settling in the hilly interior, where the Celtic dalesmen and hardy mountaineers held their ground. Hence, when at last the political connection between Western Scotland and Norway was severed, the Norse population, no longer recruited from its mother-country, and hemmed in upon the sea by the near back- ground of mountains, could not maintain its individuality. It was gradually absorbed into the far more abundant Celtic population, which came down again from the interior to the coast."
Some, too, of the critical events of Scottish history have, Dr. Geikie demonstrates, been decided by scenery. Thus, had the topography in the vicinity of Bannockburn been, at the time of the battle of that name, what it is now—in other words, had the Carse of Stirling been a fertile, well-drained plain, and not a succession of bogs and meres—the end of that struggle wouli not have been what it was. Dr. Geikie is further able not only to trace Scotch history backward, but—though, of course, to a slighter extent—to trace it forward. For example, we doubt if a better answer could be given to the theorisings of certain sentimental politicians in regard to the Highlands than this :—
" The feral ground, or territory left in a state of Nature, is strictly defined by the areas of the older rocks, which, rugged and sterile, refuse to come within the limits of cultivation. These territories have, ever since the Ice Age, been the haunts of wild animals, and they remain so not, as some crude theorists contend, because the lordly proprietors of the ground have so determined, but because they are fit neither for crops, nor corn, nor herds of sheep. We hear much in these days of the shame and folly of allowing Highland landlords to keep such wide tracts as game-preserves, which might be turned to account in raising food for the people. But the experience of many centuries has shown that these regions are best left in their wild condition. It is a false political economy to attempt to become the master instead of the servant of Nature. She has marked out the tracts that can be reclaimed, but has set her seal as indelibly on those that must be left to herself, where her grandeur and her beauty are to remain sacred from the invasions of agriculture or of industry."
There are, of course, disputable points in this book,—points
which will perhaps be disputable in perpetuum. Dr. Geikie is an adherent of what he himself would term the "sculpture" theory in regard to Scotch topography, but which the Duke of Argyll styles "the great gutter theory," and which, as expressed
in general terms by Hutton, comes to this,—" that the surface features of the land are, in the main, due to the carving and sculpturing action of denudation." The Duke maintains that the forms of our mountains have been largely determined by their geological structure, and by faults, contortions, and subsidences in the strata of which they are composed.
But, after all, this looks to the novice a dispute about words, about the different meanings attached to " largely " and "in the main" (Dr. Geikie's own word, by-the-way, is "essentially ") ; for on the one hand, the Duke himself allows that "there has been, no doubt, enormous denudation ;" and on the other, Dr.
Geikie, as has recently been very pertinently pointed out by Mr. A. H. Green, asks his readers to "recognise that a belief in the paramount efficacy of superficial denudation in the origin of the features of the land is compatible with the fullest admission of the existence and potency of subterranean dis- turbance." Perhaps the truth will be found somewhere between Dr. Geikie and the Duke; "the great gutter theory" may stand a little modification, like the theory as to the action of ice. This is, however, a matter to be settled by the experts, and is practically of no consequence to the ordinary reader of The Scenery of Scolland,—that is to say, the amateur geologist, who is one of the happiest and most innocent beings on earth, and who has found a little learning about strata a delightful and not a dangerous thing. One of the new features of this new edition is a geological itinerary of Scotland fifty pages in length, very detailed and very lucid.
What with the steamboat and railway facilities now in exist- ence, with the help of Dr. Geikie's book, and with a tricycle for the level country roads, one ought not only to see Scotland comfortably, but to understand its history superficially, in six weeks.
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