and a famous lineage can bestow. Or was it that he was a Scotchman and thus unsympathetic to the English people? But the past and the present have seen Scottish prime ministers. Or may there be said of politics what Plato said of virtue, that it owns no master, and did the duke give something to science when he should have given all to statesmanship? Yet there have been cases where literary and theological pursuits have not barred the way. Was it that his lot was cast like that of Fox, for instance, in an age averse to his ideas, and that this excluded him and his friends from office? Precisely the reverse; the year before he entered politics the conservative party was broken up for nearly a generation, and the liberals with brief interludes were to hold office until 1874. Did he prove inelastic to new ideas, and was he too much rooted in 1846 to feel the enthusiasms of 1848? Not so; as his utterances on the minor nationalities of the Balkan States, of the Transvaal, of Armenia, of Afghanistan, and even of Ireland, testify. If it was none of these things, was it the predominance of Gladstone? That was undoubtedly the obvious and efficient cause: there was one more deep. Emerson said of the British elector that he makes his greatest men of business prime ministers. The duke's Celtic blood, his youthful training, or want of it, his seclusion from the busy press of affairs at Ardencaple Castle during his youth and during his maturity in the House of Lords, set his intellect on another plane. His best memorial will be the lines which Tennyson addressed to him, beginning: 'O patriot statesman, be thou wise to know The limits of resistance,' and ending with the description of 'thy will, a power to make This ever-changing world of circumstance, in changing chime with never-changing law.'
From boyhood to the end of his life the Duke of Argyll spent much of his time among the islands, firths, and sea-lochs of the west of Scotland, where his instinctive love of nature had ample scope for its development. He became fond of the study of birds, and grew familiar with their forms and habits. Into the domain of geology he was first led by the discovery which one of his tenants made in the island of Mull, of a bed full of well-preserved leaves, intercalated among the basalt-lavas of that region. He at once perceived the importance of this discovery, and announced it to the meeting of the British Association in 1850. The leaves and other vegetable remains were subsequently studied by Edward Forbes [q. v.], who pronounced them to be of older tertiary age. The deposit in which they occur, and its relations to the volcanic rocks, were described by the duke to the Geological Society in 1851 in a paper of great interest and importance, which paved the way for all that has since been done in the investigation of the remarkable history of tertiary volcanic action in the British Isles. This memoir was by far the most valuable contribution ever made by its author to the literature of science. Unlike the controversial writings of his later years, its purport was not argumentative but descriptive, and it raised the hope, unhappily not realised, that the duke, in the midst of his numerous avocations, might find time to enrich geology with a series of similar original observations among his own Scottish territories, regarding which so much still remained to be discovered. He continued, indeed, up to the end of his life to take a keen interest in the progress of the science, and to contribute from time to time essays on some of its disputed problems. These papers, however, became more and more polemical as years went on, and though always acute and forcible, often failed to grasp the true bearing of the facts, and to realise the weight of the evidence against the views which he had espoused.
Having grown up as a follower of the cataclysmal school in geology, he could find no language too strong to express his dissent from the younger evolutional school. There were more particularly three directions in which he pursued this antagonism. He saw in the present topography of the land, more particularly of its mountainous portions, records of primeval convulsions by which the hills had been upheaved and the glens had been split open. In vain did the younger generation appeal to the proofs, everywhere obtainable, of the reality and rapidity of the decay of the surface of the land, and show that even at the present rate of denudation all trace of any primeval topography must ages ago have disappeared. He continued to inveigh against what he contemptuously nicknamed the 'gutter theory.' Again, he threw himself with characteristic confidence and persistence into the discussion of the problems presented by the records of the ice age. The geologists of Britain, after vainly endeavouring to account for these records by the supposition of local valley-glaciers and of floating ice during a time of submergence, were at last reluctantly forced to admit and adopt the views of Agassiz, who, as far back as 1840, had pointed out the irresistible proofs that the mountainous tracts of these
