Geikie, James; The Great Ice Age and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man. 1st edition, New York Appleton and Company, 1874. Octavo, pp. xxv, 545, 4 (ads), 17 plates and maps, some folded, including map in rear pocket.
The work is complete and in the original blue stamped cloth with gilt cover and spine vignettes and gilt spine titles. The binding is tight with light bumping to corners, light darkening to spine. The text is clean with owner’s book plate (Rev. Edwin A. Dalrymple D.D.) on paste down. In very good condition.
James Geikie (1839-1915) was, like his brother Sir Archibald Geikie (1835-1924) a Scottish geologist. Both graduated from Edinburgh University. James Geikie’s research on glaciation was of major importance.
Geikie joined the Geological Survey and much of his research was on mapping glacial deposits in Scotland. This fieldwork led to evidence of warmer periods during ice ages. Further studies throughout Europe provided the needed evidence to support his idea.
Up to 1874 very few geologists considered the idea of a prehistoric ice age. After studying the Glen Roy area, in 1839, Charles Darwin published a paper on the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Darwin suggested that three lines running horizontally, halfway up Glen Roy, were the shorelines of an ancient sea. The idea that the lines indicated the former presence of a glacier that damned up the valley and created a loch had never been considered. In his 1874 book titled The Great Ice Age, James Geikie provided all the evidence needed to prove that Darwin was wrong and that all of Scotland and much of England had been covered in glacial ice.
He shows the striated markings on rocks all over the British Isles, the presence of erratic boulders, left behind by ice sheets as they retreated, and the deposits now known as glacial moraines, that were pushed ahead of glaciers as they advanced, and left in place when the glaciers retreated. In this book, Geikie proved that the continental Ice Age was real.
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