From Andrew Crombie Ramsay   10 July 1864

Edward Stanford was the publisher of the first and second editions of Ramsay’s The physical geology and geography of Great Britain (Ramsay 1863 and 1864b).

Ramsay’s book was based on a series of lectures to working men delivered at the Royal School of Mines in 1863. In the preface to the second edition (Ramsay 1864b), Ramsay stated that the work was thoroughly revised and corrected. A copy of the first edition is in the Darwin Library–CUL. The second edition, however, is not in the Darwin Library–CUL or the Darwin Library–Down.

In the second edition, Ramsay greatly expanded his discussion of the denudation of the Weald, a district between the North and South Downs in Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, and Kent. He departed from the prevailing view of marine denudation, and proposed instead that the terrain had been eroded mainly by rivers (Ramsay 1864b, pp. 75–85). CD had consulted Ramsay in 1857 and 1858 on the depth of various geological deposits of the Weald in order to estimate the length of time required for their formation and denudation (see Correspondence vol. 7, letter from A. C. Ramsay, 29 December 1858; CD’s notes and calculations are in DAR 205.9: 341 and 346). In Origin, pp. 285–7, CD estimated the denudation of the Weald from marine processes to have taken approximately 300 million years. As a result of sharp criticism, CD halved this figure in the second edition of Origin (see Correspondence vol. 8, letter to J. D. Hooker, 3 January [1860] and n. 16). He eliminated the discussion entirely in the third edition (see Correspondence vol. 8, letter to Asa Gray, 3 April [1860] and nn. 9 and 10).

Ramsay was the director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain for England and Wales (DNB).

In the third edition of The physical geology and geography of Great Britain, Ramsay devoted a chapter to the origin of escarpments, arguing that such inland cliffs were denuded by rivers and rain (see Ramsay 1872, pp. 108–25).