Archibald Geikie

Archibald Geikie was a Scottish geologist, director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and president of the Royal Society, who mapped the volcanic rocks of the Highlands and wrote the textbooks from which two generations learned the science. Geographical Evolution, a lecture of 1879, explains how the continents and seas came to be where they are, by the slow work of upheaval and erosion that Lyell had described, and shows what a geologist reads in a landscape. The Harvard Classics print it among the scientific papers, and it is the plainest introduction on the lists to the idea that the earth has a history.