The Building of the British Isles

Abstract

IT is now thirty-three years since Godwin-Austen, in a paper which glows with the instinctive perception that is one of the marks of genius, suggested to geologists an application of their science which lifts it out of the region of technicalities, gives it a human interest, and attracts all those who care to follow the long chain of events of which the present state of things is the outcome. It was an attempt to go back to Mesozoic and Palæozoic days, and mark out the main outlines of the physical geography of Great Britain and the adjoining parts of Europe during those epochs. To enable its conclusions to be more easily grasped, the paper was accompanied by a map, almost bewildering in its complexity and somewhat hazy in its outlines, but full of the masterly generalization that marshals into one compact body a crowd of isolated facts, and of the intuition that foresees the complete meaning of imperfectly ascertained data.

The Building of the British Isles: a Study in Geographical Evolution.

By A. J. Jukes-Browne (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888.)