Yours is a grand book, and I thank you heartily for the instruction and pleasure which it has given me.
For heaven's sake forgive the untidiness of this whole note.
LETTER 515. TO JOHN LUBBOCK [Lord Avebury]. Down, November 6th, 1881.
If I had written your Address (515/1. Address delivered by Lord Avebury as President of the British Association at York in 1881. Dr. Hicks is mentioned as having classed the pre-Cambrian strata in "four great groups of immense thickness and implying a great lapse of time" and giving no evidence of life. Hicks' third formation was named by him the Arvonian ("Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc." Volume XXXVII., 1881, Proc., page 55.) (but this requires a fearful stretch of imagination on my part) I should not alter what I had said about Hicks. You have the support of the President [of the] Geological Society (515/2. Robert Etheridge.), and I think that Hicks is more likely to be right than X. The latter seems to me to belong to the class of objectors general. If Hicks should be hereafter proved to be wrong about this third formation, it would signify very little to you.
I forget whether you go as far as to support Ramsay about lakes as large as the Italian ones: if so, I would myself modify the passage a little, for these great lakes have always made me tremble for Ramsay, yet some of the American geologists support him about the still larger N. American lakes. I have always believed in the main in Ramsay's views from the date of publication, and argued the point with Lyell, and am convinced that it is a very interesting step in Geology, and that you were quite right to allude to it. (515/3. "Glacial Origin of Lakes in Switzerland, Black Forest, etc." ("Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc." Volume XVIII., pages 185-204, 1862). Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury) gives a brief statement of Ramsay's views concerning the origin of lakes (Presidential Address, Brit. Assoc. 1881, page 22): "Prof. Ramsay divides lakes into three classes: (1) Those which are due to irregular accumulations of drift, and which are generally quite shallow; (2) those which are formed by moraines; and (3) those which occupy true basins scooped by glaciers out of the solid rocks. To the latter class belong, in his opinion, most of the great Swiss and Italian lakes...Professor Ramsay's theory seems, therefore, to account for a large number of interesting facts." Sir Archibald Geikie has given a good summary of Ramsay's theory in his "Memoir of Sir Andrew Crombie Ramsay," page 361, London, 1895.)
LETTER 516. TO D. MACKINTOSH. Down, February 28th, 1882.
I have read professor Geikie's essay, and it certainly appears to me that he underrated the importance of floating ice. (516/1. "The Intercrossing of Erratics in Glacial Deposits," by James Geikie, "Scottish Naturalist," 1881.) Memory extending back for half a century is worth a little, but I can remember nothing in Shropshire like till or ground moraine, yet I can distinctly remember the appearance of many sand and gravel beds--in some of which I found marine shells. I think it would be well worth your while to insist (but perhaps you have done so) on the absence of till, if absent in the Western Counties, where you find many erratic boulders.
I was pleased to read the last sentence in Geikie's essay about the value of your work. (516/2. The concluding paragraph reads as follows: "I cannot conclude this paper without expressing my admiration for the long- continued and successful labours of the well-known geologist whose views I have been controverting. Although I entered my protest against his iceberg hypothesis, and have freely criticised his theoretical opinions, I most willingly admit that the results of his unwearied devotion to the study of those interesting phenomena with which he is so familiar have laid all his fellow-workers under a debt of gratitude." Mr. Darwin used to speak with admiration of Mackintosh's work, carried on as it was under considerable difficulties.)
With respect to the main purport of your note, I hardly know what to say. Though no evidence worth anything has as yet, in my opinion, been advanced in favour of a living being, being developed from inorganic matter, yet I cannot avoid believing the possibility of this will be proved some day in accordance with the law of continuity.