It was not, as already seen, without reluctance that James Geikie decided to leave the Geological Survey. The earnest scientific spirit in which its work was conducted, the intimate fellowship with scientific men of kindred spirit, and the free open-air life had great attractions for him. The academic life was new to him, and must have seemed at first a cabined and cribbed existence compared with that of a field-geologist. Yet there is no doubt the choice was a wise one. In the higher departments of Survey work his duties would have been mostly of an administrative nature, and much of his time would have been taken up by routine business, very largely of a non-geological character, which would certainly have proved uncongenial. His opportunities of visiting the field would also have been much curtailed. Residing in Edinburgh, he could keep in intimate touch with his former colleagues of the Survey, and glean the most valuable results of their work when they returned to the office each year. They were now beginning the survey of the North and West Highlands, and were to undertake investigations of a kind with which he was quite unacquainted. A good deal of new information on glacial geology was being collected by them year by year, and of course communicated to him regularly. But the main work in hand was the unravelling of the intricate history of the Highlands and the palæontology and petrology of the older rocks of Scotland. This was destined to yield most brilliant results, and the Scottish Survey was to become more famous even than it had been in the days of Sir Andrew Ramsay; but these fields of investigation were not those which he had chosen for his own especial study, and there can be no doubt that as a university professor, with ample time for research in any branch of his subject which appealed to him, he was able to follow out his own line of work far more untrammelled than he would have been as an officer of the Geological Survey.