issued in 1903. His writings are marked in a high degree by charm of style and power of vivid description. His literary ability has given him peculiar qualifications as a writer of scientific biography, and the Memoir of Edward Forbes (with G. Wilson), and those of his old chiefs, Sir R. I. Murchison (2 vols., 1875) and Sir Andrew Crombie Ramsay (1895), are models of what such works should be. His Founders of Geology consists of the inaugural course of Lectures (founded by Mrs G. H. Williams) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, delivered in 1897. In 1897 he issued an admirable Geological Map of England and Wales, with Descriptive Notes. In 1898 he delivered the Romanes Lectures, and his address was published under the title of Types of Scenery and their Influence on Literature. The study of geography owes its improved position in Great Britain largely to his efforts. Among his works on this subject is The Teaching of Geography (1887). His Scottish Reminiscences (1904) and Landscape in History and other Essays (1905) are charmingly written and full of instruction. He was foreign secretary of the Royal Society from 1890 to 1894, joint secretary from 1903 to 1908, president in 1909, president of the Geological Society in 1891 and 1892, and president of the British Association, 1892. He received the honour of knighthood in 1891.
GEIKIE, JAMES (1839–), Scottish geologist, younger
brother of Sir Archibald Geikie, was born at Edinburgh on the
23rd of August 1839. He was educated at the high school and
university of Edinburgh. He served on the Geological Survey
from 1861 until 1882, when he succeeded his brother as Murchison
professor of geology and mineralogy at the university of
Edinburgh. He took as his special subject of investigation the
origin of surface-features, and the part played in their formation
by glacial action. His views are embodied in his chief work, The
Great Ice Age and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man (1874;
3rd ed., 1894). He was elected F.R.S. in 1875. James
Geikie became the leader of the school that upholds the all-important
action of land-ice, as against those geologists who
assign chief importance to the work of pack-ice and icebergs.
Continuing this line of investigation in his Prehistoric Europe
(1881), he maintained the hypothesis of five inter-Glacial periods
in Great Britain, and argued that the palaeolithic deposits of
the Pleistocene period were not post- but inter- or pre-Glacial.
His Fragments of Earth Lore: Sketches and Addresses, Geological
and Geographical (1893) and Earth Sculpture (1898) are mainly
concerned with the same subject. His Outlines of Geology (1886),
a standard text-book of its subject, reached its third edition
in 1896; and in 1905 he published an important manual on
Structural and Field Geology. In 1887 he displayed another side
of his activity in a volume of Songs and Lyrics by H. Heine and
other German Poets, done into English Verse. From 1888 he was
honorary editor of the Scottish Geographical Magazine.
GEIKIE, WALTER (1795–1837), Scottish painter, was born at
Edinburgh on the 9th of November 1795. In his second year
he was attacked by a nervous fever by which he permanently lost
the faculty of hearing, but through the careful attention of his
father he was enabled to obtain a good education. Before he had
the advantage of the instruction of a master he had attained considerable
proficiency in sketching both figures and landscapes from
nature, and in 1812 he was admitted into the drawing academy
of the board of Scottish manufactures. He first exhibited
in 1815, and was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish
Academy in 1831, and a fellow in 1834. He died on the 1st of
August 1837, and was interred in the Greyfriars churchyard,
Edinburgh. Owing to his want of feeling for colour, Geikie was
not a successful painter in oils, but he sketched in India ink with
great truth and humour the scenes and characters of Scottish
lower-class life in his native city. A series of etchings which
exhibit very high excellence were published by him in 1829–1831,
and a collection of eighty-one of these was republished posthumously
in 1841, with a biographical introduction by Sir Thomas
Dick Lauder, Bart.
GEILER (or Geyler) VON KAISERSBERG, JOHANN (1445–1510), “the German Savonarola,” one of the greatest of the
popular preachers of the 15th century, was born at Schaffhausen
on the 16th of March 1445, but from 1448 passed his childhood
and youth at Kaisersberg in Upper Alsace, from which place his
current designation is derived. In 1460 he entered the university
of Freiburg in Baden, where, after graduation, he lectured for
some time on the Sententiae of Peter Lombard, the commentaries
of Alexander of Hales, and several of the works of Aristotle. A
living interest in theological subjects, awakened by the study of
John Gerson, led him in 1471 to the university of Basel, a centre
of attraction to some of the most earnest spirits of the time.
Made a doctor of theology in 1475, he received a professorship
at Freiburg in the following year; but his tastes, no less than the
spirit of the age, began to incline him more strongly to the vocation
of a preacher, while his fervour and eloquence soon led to his
receiving numerous invitations to the larger towns. Ultimately
he accepted in 1478 a call to the cathedral of Strassburg, where
he continued to work with few interruptions until within a short
time of his death on the 10th of March 1510. The beautiful
pulpit erected for him in 1481 in the nave of the cathedral, when
the chapel of St Lawrence had proved too small, still bears
witness to the popularity he enjoyed as a preacher in the immediate
sphere of his labours, and the testimonies of Sebastian
Brant, Beatus Rhenanus, Johann Reuchlin, Melanchthon and
others show how great had been the influence of his personal
character. His sermons—bold, incisive, denunciatory, abounding
in quaint illustrations and based on texts by no means confined
to the Bible,—taken down as he spoke them, and circulated
(sometimes without his knowledge or consent) by his friends,
told perceptibly on the German thought as well as on the German
speech of his time.
Among the many volumes published under his name only two appear to have had the benefit of his revision, namely, Der Seelen Paradies von waren und volkomnen Tugenden, and that entitled Das irrig Schaf. Of the rest, probably the best-known is a series of lectures on his friend Seb. Brant’s work, Das Narrenschiff or the Navicula or Speculum fatuorum, of which an edition was published at Strassburg in 1511 under the following title:—Navicula sive speculum fatuorum praestantissimi sacrarum literarum doctoris Joannis Geiler Keysersbergii.
See F. W. von Ammon, Geyler’s Leben, Lehren und Predigten (1826); L. Dacheux, Un Réformateur catholique à la fin du XV e siècle, J. G. de K. (Paris, 1876); R. Cruel, Gesch. der deutschen Predigt, pp. 538-576 (1879); P. de Lorenzi, Geiler’s ausgewählte Schriften (4 vols., 1881); T. M. Lindsay, History of the Reformation, i. 118 (1906); and G. Kawerau in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie, vi. 427.
GEINITZ, HANS BRUNO (1814–1900), German geologist, was
born at Altenburg, the capital of the duchy of Saxe-Altenburg,
on the 16th of October 1814. He was educated at the universities
of Berlin and Jena, and gained the foundations of his
geological knowledge under F. A. Quenstedt. In 1837 he took
the degree of Ph.D. with a thesis on the Muschelkalk of Thuringia.
In 1850 he became professor of geology and mineralogy in the
Royal Polytechnic School at Dresden, and in 1857 he was made
director of the Royal Mineralogical and Geological Museum;
he held these posts until 1894. He was distinguished for his
researches on the Carboniferous and Cretaceous rocks and fossils
of Saxony, and in particular for those relating to the fauna and
flora of the Permian or Dyas formation. He described also the
graptolites of the local Silurian strata; and the flora of the
Coal-formation of Altai and Nebraska. From 1863 to 1878 he
was one of the editors of the Neues Jahrbuch. He was awarded
the Murchison medal by the Geological Society of London in 1878.
He died at Dresden on the 28th of January 1900. His son
Franz Eugen Geinitz (b. 1854), professor of geology in the
university of Rostock, became distinguished for researches on
the geology of Saxony, Mecklenburg, &c.
H. B. Geinitz’s publications were Das Quadersandsteingebirge oder Kreidegebirge in Deutschland (1849–1850); Die Versteinerungen der Steinkohlenformation in Sachsen (1855); Dyas, oder die Zechsteinformation und das Rothliegende (1861–1862); Das Elbthalgebirge in Sachsen (1871–1875).
GEISHA (a Chino-Japanese word meaning “person of pleasing
accomplishments”), strictly the name of the professional dancing
and singing girls of Japan. The word is, however, often loosely
used for the girls and women inhabiting Shin Yoshiwara, the
prostitutes’ quarter of Tokyo. The training of the true Geisha
