furniture, and the like—wearying the eye with its multiplicity; but among the few good landscapes there (and miserably few they are), you will not discover one that suffers from excess of detail in geological structure. Nature's greatness, in fact, belittles all knowledge: but the antiquary, as we all know, may forget the man; and the costumier, may remember only his clothes.

In concluding this too long preface — suggested by a correspondence in the Scotsman' which ensued on the reading of my address-I must express my regret that what I had to say was not altogether free from the personal element. It could scarcely have been otherwise. There seemed to be no alternative but to select examples from the present school of landscape-painters, and from the ranks of the foremost members of the profession. I am glad to think that there is not one of the distinguished artists to whom I referred whose reputation could suffer from anything that I could say.

LANDSCAPE GEOLOGY.

SINCE

INCE the occasion of Professor Alleyne Nicholson's address to this Society,1 early last winter, one of the most interesting of the public events that have taken place in Edinburgh has undoubtedly been the meeting of the Art Congress. I believe I am right in saying that Art has hitherto been the most reticent of the professions. As a class, artists are fully engrossed by studies which engage the hand and the eye, but not the tongue or the pen— studies which demand nothing less than entire and lifelong devotion. Except for their amiable habit of dining together from time to time, and of occasionally making presidential and other speeches, we should have heard almost nothing about themfrom themselves. Until Mr Frith published his amusing Reminiscences,' I believe there was scarcely such a thing as the autobiography of an artist, if you except the strange memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, and that quaint and charming autobio

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1 The Geological Society of Edinburgh.

graphy of Bewick, and, in our own day, the autobiography of Holman Hunt. It was therefore of unusual interest, if only as a revelation of personality, to hear or read papers from the hands of such men as Watts and Briton Riviere. But this is by no means all, even from the popular point of view. The proceedings of the Congress presented us with teaching of a most pleasing kind-that kind in which the teachers are competent men who simply talk together and discuss and debate, while the taught have nothing to do but to listen. A wise old essayist, in an essay "On Regimen of Health,” recommends all such as would study what he quaintly terms the principles of long lasting-i.e., of health and long life—to be sure to entertain "variety of delights, wonder and admiration, and studies that fill the mind with splendid objects." Many of us sooner or later begin to discover-generally, I think, towards middle age—that there is nothing that fills the mind with a variety of delights so measureless, so truly recreative, as the study and love of the beautiful, whether it be in Nature or in daily life.

"Its loveliness increases; it . . . still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing."

There is perhaps a time coming when, as a matter of mere "regimen" and ordinary education, there may be more cultivation, not only of the pleasures of taste, but of what I may call the artistic understanding, the art of conceiving of things artistically, or in their artistic completeness. And it may come all the sooner because of this annual Art Congress.

For my own part, I read the pages of the Scotsman,' during the days of the Congress in Edinburgh, with unusual interest. There was one subject, however, of which I saw no mention whatever—a subject which a body of artists meeting in this country of uplands and highlands, in a city owing so much of its beauty to the rocks and heights among which it is set, might perhaps have been expected not altogether to forget. I refer to the relation which may be held to subsist between the study of landscapepainting and the study of the rocks,-using that word in its wide geological sense, as including everything from granite to gravel,-that form the basis of landscape. I observe that at the recent meeting in Birmingham, again, there were papers read on almost all the relations of art to modern life—art in relation to industry, art in relation to technical education, art as applied to jewellery, advertisement as a field for design, &c.; but of geology still not one word, and of science of any kind only the merest mention.1 This subject, which I have described as Landscape Geology, is one that has of late years been much, and, I believe, unjustly neglected; and I have ventured to select it as the subject of the annual address to this Society.

But it may be asked, What business have I, a mere working geologist, to take up a subject that demands so much culture, so much refinement of taste, so much special study, such wide knowledge? I have to confess at once that I am not, in any sense, an expert in art. I cannot pretend to be 1 See Appendix II., Mr Briton Riviere on Science in relation to Painting.