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Henry Dyke Acland (1850-1936)
English amateur geologist. Published on volcanic rocks of the Malvern district and on caves in Gibraltar. His letters and a sketchbook are lodged at the Oxford University Museum.
Louis Jean Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873)
Swiss vertebrate and invertebrate palaeontologist, Agassiz the first (his son was Alexander) was also a noted geomorphologist and Quaternary geologist, credited with being the first to recognise the effects of glaciation in the British Isles. In 1846 he emigrated to the USA, where after a stint at the Lowell Institute (Boston, Mass.) he became Professor of Zoology and Geology at Harvard. There, unlike his successor Stephen Jay Gould Hon FGS, he espoused strong opposition to Darwinian thinking.
William Barlow (1845 - 1934)
English crystallographer and served as President of the Mineralogical Society from 1915-18. His speciality was in theory of crystal structure and homogeneous space partitioning.
Joachim Barrande (1799 – 1833)
French engineer, invertebrate palaeontologist and stratigrapher, Barrande left his native France for Bohemia in 1830, there to undertake his monumental studies of the Lower Palaeozoic – especially Silurian rocks – working out their structure by the methods of classical stratigraphical palaeontology, and mustering a huge team of helpers in his massive, and largely privately financed publishing of the results in his colossal Système Silurien de la Bohème (22 volumes by the time he died). The Society awarded him the Wollaston Medal (its highest honour) in 1855.
Elkanah Billings (1820-1876)
Legendary palaeontologist with the Geological Survey of Canada, Billings studied cystoids, blastoids, crinoids, asteroids, brachiopods and trilobites. He founded The Canadian Naturalist.
Waldemar Christofer Brøgger (1851-1940)
Norwegian mineralogist, petrologist, structural geologist, stratigrapher and palaeontologist. Based at the University of Stockholm and later President of the University of Oslo, he worked on the correlation of the Lower Palaeozoic and Permian igneous rocks of S. Norway. Did important work on magmatic differentiation.
Charles Jules Edme Brongniart (1859-1899)
Charles was the grandson of Adolphe Brongniart (palaeonbotanist and physician) who was in turn the son of Alexandre, chemist, mineralogist and palaeontologist. At the end of this long dynasty, he became an expert in the field of the fossil insecta but died when he was only 40. He worked at the Museum d’histoire naturelle in Paris. His main work was published in 1893, including the 3rd volume of Studies on the Coal Measures of Commentry, devoted to the insect fauna.
John Buchan
This hitherto unknown picture of John Buchan was discovered in the archive by Ted Nield. Buchan, author of The Thirtynine Steps, had studied Natural Philosophy under Lord Kelvin in Glasgow, but otherwise had no geological training. The picture was taken about 1900, shortly after he had come down from Oxford and had yet to find his role in life. Buchan was a dedicated mountaineer and a man of wide-ranging interests, to which we can now add geology. The Society has sent a copy of the picture to The John Buchan Society, who reproduced it in their journal.Interestingly, although the picture is marked "J.Buchan FGS", it appears that Buchan never actually took up his fellowship. Shortly after this picture was taken, he embarked for South Africa on the first phase of his official career.
Sidney Savory Buckman (1860-1929)
S.S. Buckman was an expert on the Jurassic ammonites of England and an infamous taxonomic "splitter", who invented the "hemera" (the time during which a particular species reaches its maximum abundance). Prey to some fanciful notions, he once wrote that ammonites suffering from indigestion as a result of "nervous apprehension of danger" found that the buoyancy from the extra gas helped them escape their enemies.
William Benjamin Carpenter (1813-1885)
A pioneer in the use of the microscope, and author of a thick manual of its use, W.B. Carpenter was a physician, invertebrate palaeontologist and micropalaeontologist. He studied foraminifera, molluscs and echinoids. His death, reported in the Annual Address of the President (1886), as the result of "a lamentable accident" was particularly gruesome. While taking a spirit bath he upset a naked light which ignited the vapours, incinerating him. He was for many years Registrar of the University of London.
Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin (1843-1928)
US stratigrapher and quaternary geologist chiefly remembered for his work on the glacial geology of North America. Also served as President of the University of Wisconsin, the State where he began his geological career as a member of its Geological Survey. He founded the Journal of Geology (1893) and propounded the granular theory of glacial movement. Opposed the La Place nebular hypothesis of the Earth?s formation, replacing it with the planetesimal hypothesis (with FR Moulton, the mathematician).
Grenville Arthur James Cole (1859-1924)
Stratigrapher, petrologist, structural geologist. From 1890 he was at the Royal College of Science of Ireland and wrote about the rhyolites of Antrim and stratigraphy in and around Londonderry.P.N. Wyse Jackson, 1989. On Rocks and Bicycles: a biobibliography of Grenville Arthur James Cole (1859-1924) fifth Director of the Geological Survey of Ireland, Geological Survey of Ireland Bulletin, 4, 151-163.
P.N. Wyse Jackson, 1991. The cycling geologist, Cycle Touring and Campaigning, June-July 1991 (1991), 26-27.
P.N. Wyse Jackson, 2006. Grenville Arthur James Cole (1859-1924) the cycling geologist. In Patrick N. Wyse Jackson (ed.) On foot, bicycle, sledge or camel: the search for geological knowledge. Pober Publications, Staten Island, New York.
William Willoughby Cole, 3rd Earl of Enniskillen (1807-1886)
The Earl of Enniskillen was born in the year the Geological Society of London was founded and was elected to Fellowship 21 years later. He was a vertebrate palaeontologist and fossil collector. His collections were presented to the British Museum of Natural History and the sale of his extensive library recently was a great event in the antiquarian book trade.
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947)
Coomaraswamy was a stratigrapher, mineralogist, educationalist, geological photographer and art historian from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He was Director of the Ceylon Mineralogical Survey (1903-1906), but also worked on the geology of SE England, the Hebrides, Brittany. The Society Archive contains several photographs by him, mostly from Scotland.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Charles Darwin was elected to Fellowship of the Society in 1836 and soon rose to the position of Publications Secretary. Darwin’s first professional publication was geological, concerning the origin of coral reefs and atolls in the Pacific Ocean resulting from his research while on the 'Voyage of the Beagle' from 1831-36. He also performed important early work on the glacial landforms of North Wales, and in the Galapagos, did significant early theoretical work on crystal settling as a mechanism for magmatic differentiation. During Darwin's bicentenary year the Society is making his papers published in its Transactions and Quarterly journal freely available online.
William Erasmus Darwin (1839-1914)
Eldest son of Charles Darwin, William Erasmus inherited his father’s looks but not, to his father’s disappointment, his commitment to Natural History despite early promise. He was a man of wide-ranging interests; though he appears never settled on any, apart from geology in which he maintained a lifelong amateur interest. (Darwin biographies are full of references to William’s boyhood fads, including butterfly collecting and photography, which latter cost his father a lot of money). Elected Fellow in 1881, William spent most of his life as a banker in Southampton, where he was influential in local affairs and especially in those of the fledgling University College. He retired to London in 1902 and attended many of the Society’s meetings until his sudden death, at Sedbergh, on September 8.
Arthur Morley Davies (1869-1959)
Welsh invertebrate palaeontologist, micropalaeontologist, stratigrapher and writer of textbooks, Arthur Morley Davies is chiefly remembered for his book Introduction to Palaeontology (1920) and the two volumes on Tertiary Faunas (1934-35).
Sir William Boyd Dawkins (1837-1929)
Dawkins was a geologist and palaeontologist, whose main interest was in Quaternary mammals. He was also involved in studies of early human remains and wrote a famous text entitled Early Man in Britain (1880).
George Mercer Dawson (1841-1901)
Canadian stratigrapher, structural and economic geologist, and son of geologist father Sir John William Dawson, Principal of McGill University, Montreal from 1855-93. Dawson the younger was a geologist with the US Boundary Commission from 1873, and Director of the Geological Survey of Canada from 1895, working principally in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan ? the opposite end of the country from his father, who worked principally in the Maritimes.
Jean Baptiste Armand Louis Léonce Elie De Beaumont (1798-1874)
French structural geologist, igneous petrologist and stratigrapher. Responsible with Dufrenoy for the first geological map of France (from 1825, published 1843). At the Ecole des Mines, Paris, worked on the geology of the Vosges, Ardennes and Provence. He propounded the cooling-contraction theory of mountain-building. He was also responsible for formulating the Réseau Pentagonal, a geometric theory that sought to explain the apparently pentagonal disposition of European mountain ranges.
Laurent Guillaume De Koninck (1809-1887)
Belgian chemist and invertebrate palaeontologist, de Koninck’s geological work centred on the Carboniferous Limestone faunas of his native country. The Society awarded him the Wollaston medal, its highest honour, in 1875. Although given in honour of his palaeontological work, it was only in the year after that he actually became a professor of the subject. His main work, Description des animaux fossiles qui se trouvent dans le Terrain Carbonifère de la Belgique was published in two volumes between 1842 and 1851.
Charles Eugene De Rance
French stratigrapher who came to England to work in 1848. From 1868 he worked at the Geological Survey in Lancashire and Cheshire. Hydrogeologist, Quaternary geologist and coastal geomorphologist.
Lewis Llewellyn Dillwyn MP (1814-1892)
Dillwyn was the son of Lewis Weston Dillwyn, a pottery manufacturer and naturalist whose works in Swansea produced the famous Swansea Pottery. He (the father) settled in Sketty Hall, near what is now the University, in 1801, and was responsible for some original work on the fossil invertebrates of the London Clay. The Hall itself, now a campus for Swansea College of Further Education, received Society founder William Buckland on his trips to Swansea. Buckland visited Paviland Cave, Gower, where the so-called "Red Lady" (actually the skeleton of a young stone-age man, now at the Oxford Museum) was discovered. Buckland was hard pressed to reconcile the presence of human remains in what he regarded as deposits that pre-dated Noah’s Flood. Eventually (having misidentified the remains as female by virtue of the necklace found with them) he concluded that they were those of a woman of dubious virtue who plied her trade (from the cave) to the inhabitants of the Iron Age hill fort on the headland above.Lewis Lewellyn (pictured) was the son-in-law of Sir Henry T. de la Beche, founder of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and MP for Swansea (1855-1892) - which perhaps explains why two streets in that city are named after de la Beche.
Ted Nield writes - I am obliged to Tom Sharpe, Curator for palaeontology and archives at the National Museum of Wales (Cardiff) for additional information on LWD (below).
Tom Sharpe writes: Lewis Llewellyn joined his father in the management of the Cambrian Pottery in 1831, straight from boarding school in Bath. He married De la Beche's daughter in 1838, and although he and De la Beche carried out a series of experiments on china clays and granites with a view to improving the production of earthenware, he seems to have had no great interest in science (even though he was FLS and FGS). He wasn't much interested in business either, from what I can gather, although he was a director of the GWR, Chairman of the Glamorganshire Banking Co, and Landore Siemens Steel Co. He was, though, more of a politician, being Mayor of Swansea in 1847 and MP from 1855 to 1892.
In addition to De la Beche Street in the centre of Swansea and De la Beche Road in Sketty, there is also a De la Beche Terrace in Morriston. I'm not sure how much of this is due to Lewis Llewellyn, but he may well have had a hand in it. The streets in the centre of Swansea were named for the first time at the instigation of George Grant Francis of the Royal Institution of South Wales when the BA visited the city in 1848. I have yet to establish whether De la Beche Street and Dillwyn Street were among those named at that time.
