No very noteworthy events took place in the year 1885. The Outlines of Geology was finished, though it did not appear till after the New Year, and in autumn a visit was paid to Louisa, Lady Ashburton, who became a great friend of the family. The visit was to Lady Ashburton’s country house at Loch Luichart in Ross, and was very enjoyable, many drives being taken to surrounding places. On the homeward journey Prof. and Mrs Geikie stayed with their friends Mr and Mrs Horne at Inverness.
The party at Loch Luichart was evidently a very gay one, and Prof. Geikie, freed from strain and at leisure, seems to have been full of life. Letters from members of the party, written on receipt of Heine’s Songs and Lyrics, which saw the light in the autumn of 1887, are full of allusions to the visit and to the songs that had been sung during the drives, allusions which cast a pleasant light on the geologist’s human side.
In the early part of 1886 the Outlines of Geology appeared, and was so successful that a second edition was called for less than two years afterwards. During 1886 also Prof. Geikie’s fourth son was born.
As the year went on, signs of strain due to the process of adjustment to the conditions of town life began to make themselves apparent, one of the most distressing symptoms being insomnia. A sleeping-draught which gave five or six hours of sleep was welcomed with a fervour which tells a pitiful tale. Perhaps in some ways even more serious for one who was lecturing daily was loss of voice, which occurred at Christmas. The brief vacation failed to produce permanent improvement, and the early part of the year 1887 saw a losing struggle between ill-health and James Geikie’s strong sense of duty. As soon as the spring vacation freed him he went off to the Canary Islands to recuperate. A letter from Teneriffe, dated 18th April 1887, indicates a characteristically rapid rebound of spirits:—“This place is a paradise on earth!” The hotel (at Orotava) he describes as “simply fairy-like. It is bowered in trees, palms and others. Fountains and lakes are all round, lovely gardens one blaze of gorgeous colour, and rich green, cool colonnades with lounges where you can sit and dream and gaze on the sunlit sea. The mornings and evenings are simply heavenly.”
During his stay Prof. Geikie climbed the Peak on foot, an exhausting excursion in the heat, and one for which he was probably not fit. His account of the effect of rising above the mountains noontide cloud-cap is interesting:—“When we got above the clouds the sight was very grand. The upper surface is approximately level, and, rising above it, the higher ridges and mountains look so many islands in a tumbled and rolling sea. But such a sea! Imagine the sun blazing down from a perfectly clear and cloudless sky—the mountain tops rugged and serrated, and coloured red and yellow—and the cloud-sea shining with the most silvery brilliance. Now and again the wind would cause the clouds to rise up like billows and roll for some little distance up the hill-slopes above the general level of the cloud-sea, but the invading billows were soon torn to shreds and disappeared.” Of the top he says:—“What a weird scene it was. Here were numerous extinct volcanoes, craters looking raw and red just as if they had vomited forth yesterday. The ground was sprinkled all round with slags and cinders and volcanic sand and dust, and not a blade of grass was to be seen.”
Prof. Geikie did a certain amount of geologising during his stay in the Canaries, and said in his letters home that he was greatly the better for his trip:—“My voice is as strong as ever, and I feel braced up in every way.” Unfortunately the improvement did not last after his return home. He had a disappointing summer, and with winter the insomnia returned. He could do little save his class work, and this was a sore struggle. But the fact of his being cut off from his own special work had the effect of turning his attention again to the German poems, and the book, as stated, finally appeared in the autumn of 1887. A good many of the letters acknowledging receipt have been preserved, for the poems had always been very dear to him. A pathetic letter from Lady Ramsay records the pleasure which the book gave to Sir Andrew Ramsay, now an invalid and sadly changed from what he had been in his prime. She had read some of the verses to him as he sat in his bath-chair at Beaumaris, where the family were now living, and they had brought back some flashes of his old animation.
Prof. Geikie’s health continued to give cause for anxiety throughout the winter of 1887–1888, and in summer he and Mrs Geikie went to the Engadine, in the hope that the high altitude and bracing air would do him good. As the weather became colder they went down into Italy, coming home eventually by sea from Naples. Some charming letters to the boys, who were left at home, and to others of the family connection, have been preserved, but deal for the most part only with the usual incidents of travel in the Alps. “The boys” were by this time old enough to be keenly interested in butterflies, and their father gives some humorous descriptions of his attempts to increase their collections.
Among the minor incidents of the tour were a meeting with Huxley at the Maloja, and the delivery by Prof. Geikie of a lecture on the Ice Age at Pontresina to an audience of two to three hundred people. The latter part of the visit to the Engadine was marred by the cold, and the altitude did not seem to suit him so well as he had hoped. On the journey through Italy a stop was made on Lake Como, of which Prof. Geikie speaks with the same enthusiasm as of old. On the whole, the tour seems to have been very beneficial, and to have been an important factor in restoring him to health.