James Geikie

James Murdoch Geikie was a Scottish geologist, born in Edinburgh in 1839, the younger brother of Sir Archibald Geikie. He was apprenticed as a printer before studying geology at the University of Edinburgh, served on the Geological Survey from 1862 until 1882, and then succeeded his brother as Murchison professor of geology and mineralogy at Edinburgh, where he taught until 1914. He took as his special subject the origin of surface features and the part played in their formation by glacial action, and he became the leader of the school that stressed the action of land ice. His chief work is The Great Ice Age and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man, first published in 1874, and in Prehistoric Europe of 1881 he maintained that Great Britain had passed through five interglacial periods. His Outlines of Geology of 1886 became a standard textbook. He was a fellow of the Royal Society from 1875, won the Murchison Medal in 1889, and died in Edinburgh in 1915.