THE SCOTTISH Mountaineering Club Journal. Vol. IV. JANUARY 1896. No. 19. RISE AND PROGRESS OF MOUNTAINEERING IN SCOTLAND.-VI. BY PROFESSOR G. G. RAMSAY. I HAVE been advertised to give in this number an account of Scottish mountaineering as practised by the members of the S.M.C., together with the story of the formation of our Club. I shall do so with the greatest pleasure; and, in common with all my brother members, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the writers of the series of articles in this Journal, which have thrown so much light upon the manner in which mountains, and the climbing of them, have been regarded by generations previous to our own. I am sure these articles have helped many of us to feel more than we did before what need there was for our Club-how little understood, and how very little spread, is that sense of the glory and delight of the hills which sends us careering over every part of them, by every route, and in every kind of weather -and what great need there is that the gospel of the mountains should be still further preached. They have shown us how comparatively recent is a love of the hills, in our sense; how recently, even after admiration for mountain scenery in the abstract was firmly established, man began to explore them in their inner structure, and make friends of them. But full and interesting as these papers have been, the territory has scarcely yet been exhausted; and as each man may claim the right to compose his own preface, I would crave leave, in this article, to say a few further words upon previous ways of looking at mountains, and of writing about mountains-especially the mountains of Scotland-that I may be the better able to point the contrast between the old way and the new, and to indicate what are those characteristic features of our Club which will in time, we all hope, win for it the gratitude of the everlasting hills. To us it seems.very strange, and scarcely credible, that such glorious opportunities for enjoyment, for health and happiness, and for the cultivation of some of our finest sensibilities, should have been unused so long. And especially is this strange in this Britain of ours, where love of country and of country life have maintained a stronger hold than in any country of Europe, and where our whole social system has hitherto accorded a superiority and prestige to country pursuits over city pursuits scarcely known elsewhere. In spite of this, it is but the day before yesterday that our people began to delight in the beauty of wild scenery, or to look on mountains as anything but barriers or deformities; it is but yesterday that they began to explore them at close quarters; to substitute accurate observation and knowledge of detail for vague and blended impressions of general effect; to exchange admiration for the distant splendour of a fair face, gazed at in passive ecstasy across some great theatre, for the rapturous personal companionship of love or friendship. The Lake poets did much to open the eyes and hearts of their fellow-countrymen to the beauties of natural scenery; but even with them it was rather the soft, more domestic phases of hill scenery-the lake, the cascade, the wood, the "lawns," and upper pastures-that stirred their muse and provoked their musings. The stern majesty of the hilltops, with their attendant cloud and sky effects, was brought in to close the scene as a splendidly shifting background to the panorama, or as a highly mercurial material for supplying sentiment and imagery to the sensitive soul, rather than as a thing of joy in itself, to be loved and revelled in and wandered over with delight, like Naxos of old, by its band of Bacchanals. Walter Scott had the true spirit of the hills coursing through his blood; and though he too has painted them to us from below rather than from above, though what he loves most to dwell upon is the copse and the den, the heather and the moss, the peatdyed river and the birken knowes, and the other picturesque beauties of the lower uplands, it is true nevertheless that the run of that noble deer from Glenartney to Loch Katrine has done more to create a sense of the joy of scouring freely over the hill-tops than all the guide-books that were ever written since the creation of the world. Guide-books, indeed! The poor hills of Scotland have received but sorry treatment at their hands. It is a distressing task to run through all the recognised guide-books for Scotland, down to the most recent and most pretentious, in which "Mountain, Moor, and Loch" are enlisted as advertising agents to induce the traveller-or rather the ticket-taking tourist-to book by the West Highland line. In simplicity, no doubt, and in common-sense, our modern guide-books have improved upon their predecessors. They give information with a Bradshaw-like precision unknown to our grandfathers. They neither abuse the mountains as "deformed masses," nor go into long-winded poetic raptures over them. They neither have the smug insensibility to mountain beauty which marked Johnson and his Boswell, nor indulge in the language of vague and tawdry rhodomontade in which the panegyrics of later travellers are couched. But they have vices all their own; and by a course of progressive improvement in the art of catering for the British tourist, by the continual addition of new matter, and a continual remastication of the old, they have succeeded at last in developing, on what should be the most fascinating of all subjects, a kind of style beside which that of Murray's Railway Guide is endurable, that of an ordinary auction catalogue a positive delight. But before expatiating on the dulnesses, the deficiencies, and superfluities of the modern guide-book writer, let us make a few more references to two or three of the earlier authors from whom it is his boast to have delivered us. In his journey to the Western Islands, Dr Johnson reached Glenmollison (sic). "We were now," he says, " in the bosom of the Highlands, with full leisure to contemplate the appearance and properties of mountainous regions.. Mountainous countries are not passed but with difficulty, |