Landscape geology: a plea for the study of geology by landscape painters

Abstract

Since the occasion of Professor Alleyne Nicholson's address to this Society, 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 them—from 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 autobiography 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