Archibald Geikie on the Last Elevation of Scotland

Archibald Geikie announced in 1861 that Scotland had risen twenty-five feet since Roman times, basing his assertion on supposed Roman pottery in stratified beds near the sea at Leith. Canoes and other artefacts found buried in the twenty-five-foot terrace around Scottish firths showed that humans had lived in Scotland before the last elevation. If that event had occurred since Roman times, the artefacts from coastal terraces would not imply human presence much before the historical period and would be compatible with religious opinion about the recent creation of man. When other geologists examined the Leith beds in 1861, they saw immediately that they were not sedimentary, but made ground, and that the pottery was not Roman. Despite the failure of his Leith evidence, Geikie continued to insist on the elevation of Scotland since Roman times, basing his argument on the relation of the ends of the Antonine Wall to present sea level. In 1871 David Milne Home showed that if Scotland were twenty-five feet lower in Roman times, Roman roads and buildings on the Forth River would have been under water. Additionally Milne Home showed that the Antonine Wall was built in relation to present sea level. In Antiquity of Man in 1863, Sir Charles Lyell accepted Geikie's view on the recent elevation of Scotland, but in the fourth edition in 1873, he presented Milne Home's disproofs of Geikie's theory. Geikie never forgave Lyell. Although a brilliant writer, Geikie was peculiarly prone to error in geology, in this instance because of religious presuppositions.