Types of Scenery and their Influence on Literature

by Archibald Geikie

Excerpt from Types of Scenery and Their Influence on LiteratureAlthough geological details are not essential for the inquiry before us, nevertheless some knowledge of them will be found of service in enabling us to recog nize more clearly the essential features of a landscape, and to discriminate the real nature and extent of the diversities between the landscapes of different parts of the country. The fundamental elements of the scenery depend upon the nature and structure of the rocks that come to the surface, and the manifold varieties of external form arise from the constant succession of different geological formations.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

59 pages, Hardcover

First published July 28, 2015

About the author

Sir Archibald Geikie was a Scottish geologist. He was primarily interested in geomorphology and became the foremost advocate of the theory of land surface erosion through fluvial action, weathering agents and ice action during repeated ice ages. This replaced the predominant theory, that landmasses were subject to submarine sculpture before uplift. He also studied past volcanic action, and made the first attempt to group Scotland's sequence of eruptions chronologically. Studies of Scotland's Old Red Sandstone strata led to the first recognition of the widespread unconformity between the upper and lower group.

After leaving a banking career, Geikie undertook a year of study at the University of Edinburgh before financial restraints prevented him from continuing. In 1855, previous geological contact with Hugh Miller (1802 - 1856) and Sir Andrew Crombie Ramsay (1814 - 1891) secured him a mapping assistant post with the Geological Survey, then under the directorship of Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (1792 - 1871). During his employment, Geikie supplemented his official field duties with significant personal research, geological writings and preparation of papers for a variety of scientific societies. In 1867 he was appointed as the first Director in Scotland of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. In 1871 he became the first Murchison Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at the University of Edinburgh and combined the duties of both posts. In 1881 he was appointed the Geological Survey director-general for Great Britain. This required a move to London and Geikie reluctantly relinquished his professorship to his brother James Geikie (1839 - 1915).

Geikie published a large number of works during his career, in the form of books, textbooks, memoirs, biographies of geologists, essays and reviews. His works include The scenery of Scotland (1865), Life of Sir Roderick I. Murchison (1875) , Outlines of Field Geology (1876) , Text-book of Geology (1882) , The Founders of Geology (1897) , The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain (1897) and the co-authored Memoir of Edward Forbes, FRS (1861) .

Geikie was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1861 and Fellow of the Royal Society, London, in 1865. He was President of the Geological Society of London, 1891-1892 and 1906-1908, and was awarded their Wollaston Medal in 1895. He was awarded the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1896 and served as their president from 1908-1913. He was knighted in 1891, created Knight Commander of the Bath in 1907 and received the Order of Merit in 1913.

NAHSTE: Papers of Sir Archibald Geikie

Reviews

[Ralph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Africans could not have written the Nordic sagas, nor could the Vikings have written the mythological tales of the Australian aborigines...different cultures, obviously, but Sir Archibald Geikie, the author of this book derived from a public lecture delivered in 1898, claims that the reason the cultures of the world are different is geography, the effect land-forms such as rivers, fjords and mountains have on the human psyche. It is the reason why the British and the Norse have a tradition of sea tales while the Chinese do not. To illustrate his thesis, Sir Archibald looks much closer to home, the novelists and poets of the British Isles, citing such as Burns, Wordsworth and Scott. With excerpts from their naturalist poetry, he makes a case for his point of view. And were we to carry his argument into modern times, it would be hard to deny that such writers as Longfellow, Frost and Derleth were profoundly affected by the landscapes in which they dwelt. But the time in which Sir Archibald lived was a time of great change, the twilight of the Victorian Age; he was on the threshold of a period that would see the decline of the pastoral and the rise of the urban. In his time, most people lived in either rural or small village settings (this was also the case in America), but fewer than two generations later the scales would tip the other way, with the dominant force on literature being not the geography shaped by Hand of Providence, but the hand of man. And with the rise of cities came the decline of the "national literature" so beloved of the Victorians, for while different geographies may shape the minds of people toward different ends (and so producing myths and literature as varied as the landscape), cities are more alike than they are different. This book is an interesting glimpse into the idea of literature as shaped by genius loci.