The only comment which it is necessary to make upon the above is to repeat that it was apparently written when the boy was about seventeen, and thus, as we shall see, at a period when he was engaged in uncongenial work, and when his future was uncertain: these facts help to explain what the James Geikie of a later day would have contemptuously denounced as the “high-falutin” style. In addition to the visits of Captain Thom to Edinburgh, family intercourse was kept up by return visits of the children to Dunbar, where the ships appealed strongly to the imagination of James. He was fond of saying in later years that he used to watch them dipping below the horizon and longed to follow them to see what lay beyond; and the _Wanderlust_, so early developed, lasted till the end of life. In a letter to one of his sons, written to Egypt in 1901, he says:--“Old man tho’ I am, I’m just as keen to knock about the world as ever I was. It is like renewing my youth even to think about it!” In connection with the seafarer’s blood which he inherited from his mother’s side, it is also of interest to note that James was an excellent traveller both by sea and land; the sea had no terrors for him, and his voyages were a source of continuous pleasure, both at the time and in recollection. As to his immediate intellectual heritage, it seems probable that James took the majority of his qualities from his father’s side. But his mother, of whom he was very fond, was a woman of great ability and much ambition for her clever sons, whom she spurred on in their careers. Her extraordinary skill as a needlewoman, and her capacity for hard work, are enshrined in the family traditions, and it is probable that James took from her his remarkable perseverance and his manual dexterity. The father was full of _bonhomie_, probably as deeply impregnated as his son with the _joie de vivre_, and like him more desirous of a full life than given to the narrow concentration which achieves a particular purpose at the expense of so much. From his father James seems to have inherited his imagination and the touch of constructive genius which enabled him to do such noteworthy work; but one can well believe that the instinct which led the son to interleave his scientific observations in his geological note-books with verses, prevented the father from devoting himself as whole-heartedly to the pursuit of worldly prosperity as his wife may have thought desirable in view of the large and growing family.