Archibald Geikie
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Sir Archibald Geikie OM KCB PRS FRSE |
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Sir Archibald Geikie, by Wener & Son.
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| Born |
28 December 1835 Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Died |
10 November 1924 (aged 88) Haslemere, England |
| Nationality | Scottish |
| Fields | Geology |
| Notable awards |
Murchison Medal (1881) Wollaston Medal (1895) Royal Medal (1896) |
Sir Archibald Geikie OM KCB PRS FRSE (28 December 1835 – 10 November 1924), was a Scottish geologist and writer.
Geikie was born in Edinburgh in 1835, the eldest son of musician and music critic James Stuart Geikie and his wife Isabella Thom. The elder brother of James Geikie, he was educated at Edinburgh High School and University of Edinburgh.
In 1855 was appointed an assistant on the British Geological Survey. Wielding the pen with no less facility than the hammer, he inaugurated his long list of works with The Story of a Boulder; or, Gleanings from the Note-Book of a Geologist (1858). His ability at once attracted the notice of his chief, Sir Roderick Murchison, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship, and whose biographer he subsequently became.
With Murchison some of his earliest work was done on the complicated regions of the schists of the Scottish Highlands; and the small geological map of Scotland published in 1862 was their joint work: a larger map was issued by Geikie in 1892. In 1863 he published an important essay "On the Phenomena of the Glacial Drift of Scotland", in Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, in which the effects of ice action in that country were for the first time clearly and connectedly delineated.
In 1865 Geikie's Scenery of Scotland (3rd edition, 1901) was published, which was, he claimed, the first attempt to elucidate in some detail the history of the topography of a country. In the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. At this time the Edinburgh school of geologists, prominent among them Sir Andrew Ramsay, with his Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain were maintaining the supreme importance of denudation in the configuration of land surfaces, and particularly the erosion of valleys by the action of running water. Geikie's book, based on extensive personal knowledge of the country, was an able contribution to the doctrines of the Edinburgh school, of which he himself soon began to rank as one of the leaders.
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