On 17th September he writes to Mr Horne:--“I have just returned from Iceland, where I have had some very hard but very interesting work. What a country! Fancy me riding eleven hours over lava-beds, mountains, etc., devil a road or even path! However, all was fresh and new.” By this time the question of changes in the Survey was becoming acute, and James Geikie was beginning to debate with himself as to whether he ought to try for the Chair in Geology at Edinburgh for his children’s sake. The indecision he found very unsettling. “I can settle to nothing--reading and writing are alike out of the question.” More than a month later he writes:--“I am pulled two ways--my own desire and wish is to remain in the Survey.” “My repugnance to that Chair,” he says a few days later, “increases as the days go past.” Perhaps nothing, however, shows better his fundamental repugnance to all the weighing of questions of worldly advantage, to the scheming and plotting and wire-pulling which go to the making of appointments, than a letter written to Mr Horne in the thick of the conflict. This begins with an account of information which had reached him in regard to the position of affairs as to the Edinburgh Chair, and glides off insensibly into an account of letters just received from Prof. Penck and Prof. Gandry, the one a German and the other a French geologist. Both letters contained much of great interest to him, and the letter becomes a full discussion of the points raised, the question of his own future meantime sinking entirely out of mind. Obviously he wanted to be let alone and allowed to do his work in peace, to have reasonable security for his children. In one letter he laments his own lack of worldly wisdom, and his willingness to take advice from his various friends; and the rather pathetic balancing of the advantages of one apparently possible position against another, merely meant that his mind was set on other things altogether, and that in consequence he allowed himself to be swayed by the different influences brought to bear upon him. His own candour and frankness made him singularly willing to accept advice offered under the guise of friendship, without stopping to investigate the question whether his advisers were or were not wholly disinterested. But his unwillingness to be separated from his old colleagues remains the dominant note, even when he yielded to what seemed sound arguments brought to bear upon him. His instant response to kindliness is shown by the following quotation:--“Isn’t old Ramsay a trump. He wrote me a short, but such an affectionate letter that I declare I could not read it without wet eyes.”