He was educated at the university of Upsala, where in 1803 he carried off the Swedish Academy’s great prize for his Äreminne öfver Sten Sture den äldre. He graduated in 1806, and in 1810 returned from a year’s residence in England to become docent in his university. Soon afterwards he accepted a post in the public record office at Stockholm, where, with some friends, he founded the “Gothic Society,” to whose organ Iduna he contributed a number of prose essays and the songs Manhem, Vikingen, Den siste kämpen, Den siste skalden, Odalbonden, Kolargossen, which he set to music. About the same time he issued a volume of hymns, of which several are inserted in the Swedish Psalter.
Geijer’s lyric muse was soon after silenced by his call to be assistant to Erik Michael Fant, professor of history at Upsala, whom he succeeded in 1817. In 1824 he was elected a member of the Swedish Academy. A single volume of a great projected work, Svea Rikes Häfder, itself a masterly critical examination of the sources of Sweden’s legendary history, appeared in 1825. Geijer’s researches in its preparation had severely strained his health, and he went the same year on a tour through Denmark and part of Germany, his impressions from which are recorded in his Minnen. In 1832–1836 he published three volumes of his Svenska folkets historia (Eng. trans. by J. H. Turner, 1845), a clear view of the political and social development of Sweden down to 1654. The acute critical insight, just thought, and finished historical art of these incomplete works of Geijer entitle him to the first place among Swedish historians. His chief other historical and political writings are his Teckning af Sveriges tillsånd 1718–1772 (Stockholm, 1838), and Feodalism och republikanism, ett bidrag till Samhällsförfattningens historia (1844), which led to a controversy with the historian Anders Fryxell regarding the part played in history by the Swedish aristocracy. Geijer also edited, with the aid of J. H. Schröder, a continuation of Fant’s Scriptores rerum svecicarum medii aevi (1818–1828), and, by himself, Thomas Thorild’s Samlade skrifter (1819–1825), and Konung Gustaf III.’s efterlemnade Papper (4 vols., 1843–1846). Geijer’s academic lectures, of which the last three, published in 1845 under the title Om vår tids inre samhällsforhållanden, i synnerhet med afseende på Fäderneslandet, involved him in another controversy with Fryxell, but exercised a great influence over his students, who especially testified to their attachment after the failure of a prosecution against him for heresy. A number of his extempore lectures, recovered from notes, were published in 1856. He also wrote a life of Charles XIV. (Stockholm, 1844). Failing health forced Geijer to resign his chair in 1846, after which he removed to Stockholm for the purpose of completing his Svenska folkets historia, and died there on the 23rd of April 1847. His Samlade skrifter (13 vols., 1840–1855; new ed., 1873–1877) include a large number of philosophical and political essays contributed to reviews, particularly to Litteraturbladet (1838–1839), a periodical edited by himself, which attracted great attention in its day by its pronounced liberal views on public questions, a striking contrast to those he had defended in 1828–1830, when, as again in 1840–1841, he represented Upsala University in the Swedish diet. His poems were collected and published as Skaldestycken (Upsala, 1835 and 1878).
Geijer’s style is strong and manly. His genius bursts out in sudden flashes that light up the dark corners of history. A few strokes, and a personality stands before us instinct with life. His language is at once the scholar’s and the poet’s; with his profoundest thought there beats in unison the warmest, the noblest, the most patriotic heart. Geijer came to the writing of history fresh from researches in the whole field of Scandinavian antiquity, researches whose first-fruits are garnered in numerous articles in Iduna, and his masterly treatise Om den gamla nordiska folkvisan, prefixed to the collection of Svenska folkvisor which he edited with A. A. Afzelius (3 vols., 1814–1816). The development of freedom is the idea that gives unity to all his historical writings.
For Geijer’s biography, see his own Minnen (1834), which contains copious extracts from his letters and diaries; B. E. Malmström, Minnestal öfver E. G. Geijer, addressed to the Upsala students (June 6, 1848), and printed among his Tal och esthetiska afhandlingar (1868), and Grunddragen af Svenska vitterhetens häfder (1866–1868); and S. A. Hollander, Minne af E. G. Geijer (Örebro, 1869). See also lives of Geijer by J. Hellstenius (Stockholm, 1876) and J. Niekson (Odense, 1902).
GEIKIE, SIR ARCHIBALD (1835– ), Scottish geologist,
was born at Edinburgh on the 28th of December 1835. He was
educated at the high school and university of Edinburgh, and
in 1855 was appointed an assistant on the Geological Survey.
Wielding the pen with no less facility than the hammer, he
inaugurated his long list of works with The Story of a Boulder;
or, Gleanings from the Note-Book of a Geologist (1858). His ability
at once attracted the notice of his chief, Sir Roderick Murchison,
with whom he formed a lifelong friendship, and whose biographer
he subsequently became. With Murchison some of his earliest
work was done on the complicated regions of the Highland
schists; and the small geological map of Scotland published in
1862 was their joint work: a larger map was issued by Geikie in
1892. In 1863 he published an important essay “On the Phenomena
of the Glacial Drift of Scotland,” Trans. Geol. Soc. Glasgow,
in which the effects of ice action in that country were for the first
time clearly and connectedly delineated. In 1865 appeared
Geikie’s Scenery of Scotland (3rd edition, 1901), which was, he
claimed, “the first attempt to elucidate in some detail the history
of the topography of a country.” In the same year he was
elected F.R.S. At this time the Edinburgh school of geologists—prominent
among them Sir Andrew Ramsay, with his Physical
Geology and Geography of Great Britain—were maintaining the
supreme importance of denudation in the configuration of land-surfaces,
and particularly the erosion of valleys by the action of
running water. Geikie’s book, based on extensive personal
knowledge of the country, was an able contribution to the
doctrines of the Edinburgh school, of which he himself soon
began to rank as one of the leaders.
In 1867, when a separate branch of the Geological Survey was established for Scotland, he was appointed director. On the foundation of the Murchison professorship of geology and mineralogy at the university of Edinburgh in 1871, he became the first occupant of the chair. These two appointments he continued to hold till 1881, when he succeeded Sir Andrew Ramsay in the joint offices of director-general of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom and director of the museum of practical geology, London, from which he retired in February 1901. A feature of his tenure of office was the impetus given to microscopic petrography, a branch of geology to which he had devoted special study, by a splendid collection of sections of British rocks. Later he wrote two important and interesting Survey Memoirs, The Geology of Central and Western Fife and Kinross (1900), and The Geology of Eastern Fife (1902).
From the outset of his career, when he started to investigate the geology of Skye and other of the Western Isles, he took a keen interest in volcanic geology, and in 1871 he brought before the Geological Society of London an outline of the Tertiary volcanic history of Britain. Many difficult problems, however, remained to be solved. Here he was greatly aided by his extensive travels, not only throughout Europe, but in western America. While the canyons of the Colorado confirmed his long-standing views on erosion, the eruptive regions of Wyoming, Montana and Utah supplied him with valuable data in explanation of volcanic phenomena. The results of his further researches were given in an elaborate and charmingly written essay on “The History of Volcanic Action during the Tertiary Period in the British Isles,” Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin., (1888). His mature views on volcanic geology were given to the world in his presidential addresses to the Geological Society in 1891 and 1892, and afterwards embodied in his great work on The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain (1897). Other results of his travels are collected in his Geological Sketches at Home and Abroad (1882).
His experience as a field geologist resulted in an admirable text-book, Outlines of Field Geology (5th edition, 1900). After editing and practically re-writing Jukes’s Student’s Manual of Geology in 1872, he published in 1882 a Text-Book and in 1886 a Class-Book of geology, which have taken rank as standard works of their kind. A fourth edition of his Text-Book, in two vols., was
