Chapter 153

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.)