By this time Prof. Geikie’s university work had considerably increased, for in 1891 he had been elected Convener of the Science Degrees Committee, and, after a Faculty of Science had been instituted by the Royal Universities Commission in 1894, he was elected Dean of the Faculty, a post which he held till a year before his retirement from the professorship. This brought him into contact with all the science students, and gave him much to do in the way of organising and arranging courses. As a result his feeling of strangeness to university life seems to have passed away entirely, and he became thoroughly absorbed in the life of the institution. The work of the Universities Commission also greatly improved the status of his subject, and his position as Dean gave him much influence in moulding the policy of the University in regard to scientific education. A series of verses, apparently never published, but written in support of an appeal for more funds for university purposes, adopts a very different note from the earlier verses which we have quoted, and show that too much stress should not be laid upon those as representing more than a passing mood.
In 1893, in addition to various papers, a volume of collected essays and addresses was published as Fragments of Earth Lore. But this must have been merely a piece of byplay, as it were, for during 1892 and 1893 the laborious task of bringing The Great Ice Age up to date was being carried on. Thus on 29th January 1893 he writes to Prof. Chamberlin of Chicago, saying:—
I have been busy of late in completing a new edition of my Great Ice Age. So long a time has passed since the publication of the last edition that I have found it necessary to rewrite the book. The labour of boiling down the evidence obtained by the geologists of Scandinavia, Russia, France, New Zealand, Italy, Spain, etc., has been very great, and has rather taken it out of me, so that for the present I am compelled to lay my MS. aside and do nothing!
But the interval of rest can only have been brief, for he writes again on 12th March, saying:—
I am again slowly working at my book, in hope that I may have it in the printer’s hands by the end of summer.... I have been truly astonished to find that the voluminous materials which have been collected during the last seventeen years in Europe, group themselves without the least difficulty into a coherent and intelligible whole. Until I had tabulated the results I was hardly prepared to find that the evidence from all parts of Europe tallied so closely. Each bit of the puzzle seems to drop into its place with ease.
The hope expressed in this letter was not fulfilled, for nearly a year later, on 20th January 1894, we find him writing again to Prof. Chamberlin, saying:—
In the course of week or two I hope to complete my new edition of The Great Ice Age. The revision has given me more trouble than I expected, chiefly on account of the large number of foreign papers which I have had to read and digest, for I was anxious to exhaust the evidence as far as I could....
I am hoping to put the manuscript in the printer’s hands by the end of March or middle of April. I give myself that additional time, for I wish to take another look at some of the deposits on the Baltic coast lands before finally parting with my MS. As soon as I get rid of my College duties I shall start on my flying visit to Denmark, etc. Some very remarkable evidence has turned up recently in Tasmania and Australia. Geologists will have to reconsider their notions as to glaciation of our Antipodes in the light of the newly discovered evidence. I much wish that I had a long purse, unlimited time at my disposal, and a younger earthly tabernacle, for under those happy conditions I should sail straight away for the South, to see what I could see.
Prof. Chamberlin was supplying a sketch of the glacial phenomena of North America, which forms Chapters XLI. and XLII. of the completed book, and the correspondence between the two went on during the greater part of this year, for the book was not published till autumn.
On 4th May he writes:—
I have just returned from a few weeks’ holiday in the Baltic coast lands of North Germany and Denmark, where I had another opportunity of studying the great moraines of the Baltic Glacier.... I am quite ready for press—all the maps are engraved—and am most anxious to have the book set up and corrected for press before the end of July. I shall probably go abroad then: and it would be impossible to revise proofs away from my library.