Many of Robert Chambers’s earliest essays in his _Journal_ had been upon geology, and to this branch of science he became more and more addicted, and as a geologist and antiquarian he turned to good account a somewhat extensive course of foreign travel. In 1848 he visited Switzerland; in 1849 Sweden and Norway; and in later years Iceland and the Faroe Isles, Canada, and the United States. One of the results of these travels was a volume on “Ancient Sea Margins”--containing a new theory, that had previously been propounded by him in a paper read before the “British Association,” and had attracted no little attention. To supplement what their _Journal_ could not supply to the reading public, he and his brother also wrote, with not very much assistance, and, of course published, “Information for the People,” “Papers for the People,” and a series of miscellaneous tracts: 200,000 of the first named are said to have been sold. During all this hard work Robert Chambers helped to conduct one of the largest printing and publishing concerns in Scotland. One of the chiefest triumphs of the brothers was “Chambers’s Educational Course,” an educational project so complete that few men could have ever hoped to realize it. This series begins with a three-halfpenny infant primer, and goes onward through a whole library of grammars, dictionaries, histories, scientific, and all primary class books, and cheap editions of standard foreign and classical authors, till it culminates in a popular “Encyclopædia” in ten thick volumes. This “Encyclopædia” was originally founded on the “German Conversations’ Lexicon,” but the articles were in all cases either re-written or thoroughly revised. It admirably supplies the wants of those readers for whom the “Penny Encyclopædia” was in the first instance devised, before its expansion into the present more expensive form. Literary honours fell fast upon Robert Chambers. He enjoyed the rare distinction of being nominated into the Athenæum Club by its committee of management, and was elected a member of many scientific societies; and finally the University of St. Andrews conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws.