With Murchison some of his earliest work was done on the complicated regions of the schists of the Scottish Highlands; 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", in "Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow", in which the effects of ice action in that country were for the first time clearly and connectedly delineated.