Archibald Geikie

Geikie was born in Edinburgh in 1835, the eldest son of Isabella Thom and her husband James Stuart Geikie, a musician and music critic. The elder brother of James Geikie, he was educated at Edinburgh High School and University of Edinburgh.

In 1855 Geikie was appointed an assistant with the British Geological Survey. Among his early publications for a popular audience was The Story of a Boulder; or, Gleanings from the Note-Book of a Geologist (1858). His ability at once attracted the notice of his chief, Sir Roderick Murchison, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship, and whose biographer he subsequently became. Geikie completed some early geological mapping with Murchison on complicated regions of schists in the Scottish Highlands; and they jointly published a new geological map of Scotland in 1862. Geikie completed a larger map in 1892. In 1863 he published an important essay "On the Phenomena of the Glacial Drift of Scotland", in Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, in which the effects of ice action in that country were for the first time clearly and connectedly delineated. In 1865 Geikie's Scenery of Scotland (3rd edition, 1901) was published, which was, he claimed, the first attempt to elucidate in some detail the history of the topography of a country. In the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. At this time the Edinburgh school of geologists, prominent among them Sir Andrew Ramsay, with his Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain were maintaining the supreme importance of denudation in the configuration of land surfaces, and particularly the erosion of valleys by the action of running water. Geikie's book, based on extensive personal knowledge of the country, was an able contribution to the doctrines of the Edinburgh school, of which he himself soon began to rank as one of the leaders. In 1880, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.

In 1867, when a separate branch of the Geological Survey was established for Scotland, he was appointed director. On the foundation of the Murchison professorship of geology and mineralogy at the University of Edinburgh in 1871, he became the first occupant of the chair. He continued to hold these two appointments until 1881. In that year, he was awarded the Murchison Medal of the Geological Society of London and he succeeded Sir Andrew Ramsay in the joint offices of Director-General of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom and Director of the Museum of Practical Geology, London, from which he retired in February 1901. A feature of his tenure of office was the impetus given to microscopic petrography, a branch of geology to which he had devoted special study, by a splendid collection of thin sections of British rocks. Later he wrote two Survey Memoirs, The Geology of Central and Western Fife and Kinross (1900), and The Geology of Eastern Fife (1902). From the outset of his career, when he started to investigate the geology of Skye and other of the Western Isles, he took a keen interest in volcanic geology, and in 1871 he brought before the Geological Society of London an outline of the Tertiary volcanic history of Britain. Many difficult problems, however, remained to be solved. Here he was greatly aided by his extensive travels not only throughout Europe, but in western America. While the canyons of the Colorado River confirmed his long-standing views on erosion, the volcanic regions of Wyoming, Montana and Utah supplied him with valuable data in explanation of volcanic phenomena. The results of his further research were given in an essay entitled "The History of Volcanic Action during the Tertiary Period in the British Isles," in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1888). His views on volcanic geology were delivered in his presidential addresses to the Geological Society of London in 1891 and 1892 and afterward embodied in his book The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain (1897). Other results of his travels are collected in Geological Sketches at Home and Abroad (1882).

In 1871, Geikie married Alice Gabrielle Anne Marie Pignatel, daughter of Eugene Pignatel of Lyons. They had a son Roderick (killed in early life) and three daughters, Lucie, Elsie and Gabrielle.