In this year of 1867 Mr (now Dr) John Horne joined the Survey, and very shortly afterwards made James Geikie’s acquaintance. There thus began a friendship which lasted to the end. Almost from the first Mr Horne shared Geikie’s enthusiasm for glacial work, and so early as 2nd April 1868 a letter from the latter to one of his sisters records the fact that “Young Horne has got me a lot of information, and I shall certainly get a lot more.” From this time, indeed, James Geikie constantly asked his colleagues for notes about the glacial phenomena in the areas they were respectively surveying, and for friendship’s sake was freely supplied with these. Thus in the course of time he acquired a large amount of detailed information about the different parts of Scotland, with answers to many questions which cropped up in the course of his own investigations. It was not till his early papers, and especially the publication of _The Great Ice Age_, had attracted the attention of a wider circle of geologists, that this correspondence was enlarged to include most parts of the civilised world. As we shall see later, his early foreign letters gave him great pleasure, even though, until he realised the value of a feeling for languages and a good stock of dictionaries, he had often to ask for help in their translation. A few lines from a letter to Mr Horne, written from Eaglesham on 8th May 1868, may help to show the kind of work he was doing, and reveal also those characteristics which made his colleagues willing to give him all the help they could:-- DEAR YOUNG MAN,--I hope you are still in the land of the living and the place of hope wherever that may be. These lines I write unto you not that your joy may be full but that you may know that I take (I won’t say a fatherly) interest in your welfare, but any other kind of interest you like but self-interest. What are you about, and how do you like the work? Is the Drift blinding your eyes and do you yet see as through a glass darkly? I suppose your Boulder-clay in the high grounds will give you no bother. If you get any gravel will you be so good as let me know whether it occurs in valleys whose watershed is over or under 1000 feet? Mr Horne was then working in the Nith valley, being stationed at Thornhill. James Geikie by this time had moved from Ayrshire into Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire.