Glasgow 12 Oct 1864
My dear Tyndall
When you wrote me1 that you had been touched by the same wire I did not know what you meant. But now I do, for this morning in my brothers house I have found the Phil. Mag. and I am this moment engaged in reading your paper2 which is most excellently reasoned, & comes besides in the very nick of time. It is curious that we should both have come out in the same number,3 & it will be sure to have a good effect. But to me the curious part of the business is that it should at this time of day be necessary to write both papers at all. For as regards watery erosion there is not a word that we have written almost, that has not been expressed 50 & 70 years ago by Playfair4 & Hutton.5 They knew everything except the great extension of the glaciers, and considering how little of geological detail was known in his day, Hutton’s book6 reads like a piece of special inspiration.
I am glad you have given some calculations with regard to the possible width of cracks. The Weald7 has always been considered a cracked area & Hopkins has a paper8 on it which I have always thought a very poor affair, though many people think it a very great paper. For 12 years in my lectures I have constantly shown that any crack or cracks due to the bending of the Wealden Strata & chalk could only have been a few yards wide. I forget the number, but it is calculated. Hopkins too has another curiously erroneous paper on Cumberland,9 which he treats as if it were a dome thrust up from below. The valleys & the lakes according to him are the result!! You will find in Mallets paper10 on Earthquakes in the transactions of the Irish Academy some precise statements of the extension which different rocks can bear (if bent) without fracture, and if you look up Jukes paper11 on river valleys in Ireland (Geol: Journal 2 years ago or so) you will find that he gives a beautiful explanation of the bend of the Rhone at Martigny, which I fancy he never in reality saw. It is in the postscript.
Between ourselves I had Ball12 in my eye when I perused that paragraph about men without exact knowledge having no right to have any opinion in the subject.
I am glad you have written that passage about the front of a glacier, for people have always assumed when one spoke of a glacier ploughing out drift, that the glacier was said as it were to drive all the material on in front of it.
Did I tell you about Loch Doune.13 Such a lovely rock basin, some 7 miles long. There is no need for any inference there, for you see the rock all moutonnée14 and striated right across its mouth, and forming very decent hills. The river runs out through a glorious gorge, at the end of which is another lake, dammed up by moraine rubbish, I saw half turned into peat & marsh. The Galloway hills15 formed a grand glacier centre, even for the smaller glaciers that followed the emergence of the land after the great glacial epoch was in the decline.
I left Carrick Moore16 yesterday. It is a jolly place to stay at. He has a Kaim17 in his grounds, & the country near Stranraer is full of them. Kaim is Scotch for an Irish Eskir or a Swedish Ösar, & they have a great deal to do with the end of the glacial period, but what none of us yet know. They often enclose lakes. They are not Moraines, that is certain, & I am almost sure that they are of marine origin. We are mapping them everywhere.
Ever sinc[ere]ly | Andrew Ramsay
RI MS JT/1/R/5
RI MS JT/1/TYP3/1007–8
When you wrote me: letter missing; this would probably have been Tyndall’s reply to Ramsay’s previous letter (2146).
your paper: see letter 2100, n. 4.
both have come out in the same number: for Ramsay’s paper, see letter 2146, n. 2.
Playfair: John Playfair (1748–1819), a Scottish clergyman, geologist, and mathematician. He was professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and popularized Hutton’s work with his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802) (ODNB).
Hutton: James Hutton (1726–97), a highly influential Scottish geologist known primarily for his work on uniformitarianism (ODNB). The author of Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe (1788), Hutton is often considered as the father of modern geology (ODNB).
Hutton’s book: Ramsay could be referring to the work mentioned in n. 5, or J. Hutton, An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge and of the Progress of Reason, from Sense to Science and Philosophy, 3 vols (Edinburgh: A Strahan, 1794).
The Weald: an area of south east England between the parallel chalk of the North and the South Downs.
Hopkins has a paper: W. Hopkins, ‘On the Geological Structure of the Wealden District and of the Bas Boulonnais’, Transactions of the Geological Society , 7 (1845), p. 1–51.
paper on Cumberland: W. Hopkins, ‘On the Elevation and Denudation of the District of the Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland’, Phil. Mag., 3 (1842), pp. 468–77.
Mallets paper: Robert Mallet (1810–81), An Irish geophysicist known for founding the science of seismology. R. Mallet, ‘On the Dynamics of Earthquakes: Being an Attempt to Reduce their Observed Phenomena to the Known Laws of Wave Motion in Solids and Fluids’, Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, 21 (1846), pp. 51–106.
Jukes paper: Joseph Jukes (1811–69), a British geologist known primarily for his expeditions aboard the HMS Fly. J. Jukes, ‘On the Mode of Formatio of Some of the River Valleys in the South of Ireland’, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 18 (1862), pp. 378–403.
Ball: John Ball.
Loch Doune: Doune is a small town in the district of Stirling, Scotland. The lake is at the end of the Teith River, which flows near Doune.
moutonnée: designating or resembling a bare rock outcrop or rocky hillock that has the surface or form of a roche moutonnée as a result of glacial action (OED).
Galloway hills: part of the Southern Uplands of Scotland north of Galloway.
Carrick Moore: John Carrick Moore.
Kaim: one of the elongated mounds of post-glacial gravel, found at the lower end of the great valleys in Scotland and elsewhere throughout the world; an esker or osar (OED).
Please cite as “Tyndall2152,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on