The following year, 1866, found him still in Ayrshire. Little record of it is left, beyond the tale of work, and the publication of his first scientific paper. By this time he had moved to the north of Ayrshire, where he was also in the following year. This year, 1867, witnessed the appearance of his first glacial paper, this being “On the Buried Forests and Peat Mosses of Scotland, and the Changes of Climate which they indicate,” a subject which was to engage his attention more or less closely for the remainder of his life. His spare time was still occupied with the translations, many examples of which occur in his letters to his sisters. Occasionally his muse took less serious forms, as may be seen from the lines given on next page, which appear in a letter much of which is taken up with translations from “that lugubrious poet in whose stanzas the word weinen is rarely omitted—it may be sweetly rendered by the English whining.” The lines mentioned follow some criticisms of the habits of the inhabitants of an Ayrshire town, where the society, in James Geikie’s words, was “eminently peeous and drouthie.” The lines are as follows:—
Takin’ toddy a’ the week,
Comes the Sabbath day,
Then to Kirk three times they gang,
And sleep the fumes away.
In the same letter he complains that in this particular town the invariable question put to you by strangers whose acquaintance you make is, “What church do you attend?” He adds that he had not acquired the reputation of a regular church-goer, so that one suspects that something less than the three times a day had to suffice in his case. From this period probably dates an anecdote which he used to tell himself of a somewhat unfortunate visit to a place of worship where, tired out by his week’s work in the open air, and not perhaps greatly interested in the discourse, he fell asleep so soundly as ultimately to fall out of the pew—at the end of which he was sitting—headlong into the aisle. He had the presence of mind to remain there with his eyes closed, and was carried out by sympathetic acquaintances, who thought he had been suddenly overtaken by serious illness. But when the feet of the young men were already at the door, the apparently unconscious patient opened his eyes and winked at one of his friends to indicate that the fate of Eutychus had not overtaken him on this occasion. The bearer opposite, with an innocence which did credit to his piety, had not thought of the obvious explanation of the accident, and in his astonishment nearly dropped his burden. History does not, unfortunately, tell whether his loyalty enabled him to keep the matter to himself and so preserve his friend’s reputation. For these, it must be remembered, were days when a geologist invariably ran the risk of being suspected of “unsoundness,” by the mere fact of his occupation, and was, therefore, one for whom jesting on the threshold of a church was particularly dangerous.
In this year of 1867 Mr (now Dr) John Horne joined the Survey, and very shortly afterwards made James Geikie’s acquaintance. There thus began a friendship which lasted to the end. Almost from the first Mr Horne shared Geikie’s enthusiasm for glacial work, and so early as 2nd April 1868 a letter from the latter to one of his sisters records the fact that “Young Horne has got me a lot of information, and I shall certainly get a lot more.” From this time, indeed, James Geikie constantly asked his colleagues for notes about the glacial phenomena in the areas they were respectively surveying, and for friendship’s sake was freely supplied with these. Thus in the course of time he acquired a large amount of detailed information about the different parts of Scotland, with answers to many questions which cropped up in the course of his own investigations. It was not till his early papers, and especially the publication of The Great Ice Age, had attracted the attention of a wider circle of geologists, that this correspondence was enlarged to include most parts of the civilised world. As we shall see later, his early foreign letters gave him great pleasure, even though, until he realised the value of a feeling for languages and a good stock of dictionaries, he had often to ask for help in their translation.
A few lines from a letter to Mr Horne, written from Eaglesham on 8th May 1868, may help to show the kind of work he was doing, and reveal also those characteristics which made his colleagues willing to give him all the help they could:—
Dear Young Man,—I hope you are still in the land of the living and the place of hope wherever that may be. These lines I write unto you not that your joy may be full but that you may know that I take (I won’t say a fatherly) interest in your welfare, but any other kind of interest you like but self-interest. What are you about, and how do you like the work? Is the Drift blinding your eyes and do you yet see as through a glass darkly? I suppose your Boulder-clay in the high grounds will give you no bother. If you get any gravel will you be so good as let me know whether it occurs in valleys whose watershed is over or under 1000 feet?
Mr Horne was then working in the Nith valley, being stationed at Thornhill. James Geikie by this time had moved from Ayrshire into Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire.