The best illustration I can offer of the timely advantage of this reversed treatment is (with due apology for necessary egotism) to state my own case. In 1841, when the “glacial hypothesis,” as it was then called, was in its infancy, Professor Jamieson, although very old and nearly at the end of his career, took up the subject with great enthusiasm, and devoted to it a rather disproportionate number of lectures during his course on Natural History. Like many of his pupils, I became infected by his enthusiasm, and went from Edinburgh to Switzerland, where I had the good fortune to find Agassiz and his merry men at the “Hotel des Neufchatelois”—two tents raised upon a magnificent boulder floating on the upper part of the Aar glacier. After a short but very active sojourn there I “did,” not without physical danger, many other glaciers in Switzerland and the Tyrol, and afterwards practically studied the subject in Norway, North Wales, and wherever else an opportunity offered, reading in the meantime much of its special literature; but, like many others, confining my reading chiefly to authors who start with living glaciers and describe their doings most prominently. When, however, I read the first edition of Mr. Geikie’s “Great Ice Age,” immediately after its publication, his mode of presenting the phenomena, bottom upwards, suggested a number of reflections that had never occurred before, leading to other than the usual explanations of many glacial phenomena, and correcting some errors into which I had fallen in searching for the vestiges of ancient glaciers. As these suggestions and corrections may be interesting to others, as they have been to myself, I will here state them in outline. The most prominent and puzzling reflection or conclusion suggested by reading Mr. Geikie’s description of the glacial deposits of Scotland was, that the great bulk of them are quite different from the deposits of existing glaciers. This reminded me of a previous puzzle and disappointment that I had met in Norway, where I had observed such abundance of striation, such universality of polished rocks and rounded mountains, and so many striking examples of perched blocks, with scarcely any decent vestiges of moraines. This was especially the case in Arctic Norway. Coasting from Trondhjem to Hammerfest, winding round glaciated islands, in and out of fjords banked with glaciated rock-slopes, along more than a thousand miles of shore line, displaying the outlets of a thousand ancient glacier valleys, scanning eagerly throughout from sea to summit, landing at several stations, and climbing the most commanding hills, I _saw only one ancient moraine_—that at the Oxfjord station described in “Through Norway with Ladies.”[16]