that he would be designated as his successor, but it was found that vigorous efforts were making to put in the office a man who had only a very slender acquaintance with geology. To avert this disaster, Professor Ramsay suggested to his associates that they unite in recommending Sir Roderick Murchison. The recommendation was heeded, and Murchison was appointed.
In the summer of 1857 Professor Ramsay came to America to attend the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Montreal. He was warmly received by our leading geologists, and visited the Great Lakes, examined the more remarkable geological features of the State of New York, and was entertained at New Haven and Boston. "The chief geological features of this expedition" Sir Archibald Geikie says, "were given partly in a discourse to the Royal Institution, but more fully in a paper read before the Geological Society. Ramsay had not yet realized the massiveness of the land ice of the Glacial period. Like most of the geologists of the day, he still regarded the 'drift' as the result of transport by icebergs, and to the same agency he attributed the striæ on the sides and summits of the hills. He recognized the remarkably ice-worn character of Canadian topography, but he did not yet associate that character with a former extensive glaciation by land ice. Nevertheless, he now beheld the effects of this glaciation in a far grander scale than he had ever before seen them, and unconsciously he was accumulating material that would enable him to get rid of the paralyzing idea that the land must have been submerged beneath the ocean as far as the highest striations or drift deposits could be traced. He was not, however, able entirely to divest himself of the old error until the summer of 1861." Four summer vacations after this were spent, till 1862, in excursions to the Alps and to points of geological interest in Germany, where "Ramsay could hardly find himself face to face with new scenes without being led to notice and reflect on the features in them which bore on any of the questions in geology and physical geography which had always been with him such favorite subjects." During these tours he was revolving a problem that had never been seriously attacked, and of which no tenable solution had yet been proposed—that of the origin of lake basins. His attention had been directed to the subject in America, although he formed no new opinions here. But the recognition to which he had now (1861) come, that the older and greater glaciation here was the work of stupendous sheets of land ice, "gave a new turn to his thoughts regarding the terrestrial contours of glaciated regions" and he came to the conclusion that "in a vast number of cases, where the lakes lie in rock basins, these basins have actually been scooped out by the grinding power of land ice." He
