The year 1870 finds him still busy on the coalfield, his diary for that year being full of notes of appointments with people connected with the pits, while he seems to have been constantly moving from place to place in Lanarkshire. Two letters from Prof. Ramsay in July of this year have an historical interest. The first suggests a joint tour on the Rhine to solve a geological problem, and is followed almost at once by another, saying, “Now I fear my Rhine journey is blown to the winds.... This most wicked and accursed war will upset half the Continent of Europe, and it is by no means impossible that we may be dragged into it”--upon which one feels disposed to make the comment that if we had been it is possible that infinite suffering might have been saved forty-four years later! A letter from James Geikie to Mr Horne, written later in the same year, says:--“My holidays, I think I told you, were all botched. I could not get abroad, and I had nowhere particular to go at home.” At this time he was stationed at Salsburgh by Holytown, where he made several friends, notably Dr Grossart, with whom afterwards he kept up a correspondence for many years. In the letter to Mr Horne quoted above he says:--“I have been doing a little at those German translations, and have now finished the volume, and am on the outlook for a publisher who won’t cheat me. I wish to have the thing published this winter”--a wish which was not, however, fulfilled for many winters. In the same letter he adds:--“I am still among coal ... but Xmas is coming, and then one will have an opportunity of washing the dirt away. I like this place very well. The house is clean, and the district is moory--just on the outskirts of the great coalfield. I mean to work out as much as I can from here so as to shorten my stay in Glasgow, of which (I) got tired. After all there is nothing like the free fresh air of the country.” The next year, 1871, saw the finishing up of the coalfield work, and simultaneously the beginnings of a gathering together of the accumulated mass of glacial material which was a year or two later to take shape in _The Great Ice Age_. Letters in the early part of the summer to Mr Horne contain detailed plans for a tour in the Hebrides “for the purpose of ascertaining the direction of ice-striæ, and quizzing the drifts.” It proved impossible for his friend to join him, and the tour was made in company with Mr William Galloway, one of many friends made in the west.