JAMES

See also:

• GEIKIE
• JAMES GEIKIE (1839- )
• GEIKIE, SIR ARCHIBALD (1835- )

GEIKIE (1839- )  , Scottish geologist, younger brother of Sir Archibald Geikie, was born at Edinburgh on the 23rd of August 1839 . He was educated at the high school and university of Edinburgh . He served on the Geological Survey from 1861 until 1882, when he succeeded his brother as Murchison professor of geology and mineralogy at the university of Edinburgh . He took as his special subject of investigation the origin of surface-features, and the part played in their formation by glacial action . His views are embodied in his chief work, The Great Ice Age and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man (1874; 3rd ed., 1894) . He was elected F.R.S. in x875 . James Geikie became the leader of the school that upholds the all-important action of land-ice, as against those geologists who assign chief importance to the work of pack-ice and icebergs . Continuing this line of investigation in his Prehistoric Europe (1881) , he maintained the hypothesis of five inter-Glacial periods in Great Britain, and argued that the palaeolithic deposits of the Pleistocene period were not post- but inter- or pre-Glacial . His Fragments of Earth Lore: Sketches and Addresses, Geological and Geographical (1893) and Earth Sculpture (1898) are mainly concerned with the same subject . His Outlines of Geology (1886), a standard text-book of its subject, reached its third edition in 1896; and in 19o5 he published an important manual on Structural and Field Geology . In 1887 he displayed another side of his activity in a volume of Songs and Lyrics by H . Heine and other German Poets, done into English Verse .

From 1888 he was honorary editor of 'the Scottish Geographical

Magazine .