Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/268

254 power all that it upheld soon falls. It has not yet been given to any people to change their ideas without being at once forced to transform all the elements of their civilization.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.



IR JOSEPH PRESTWICH was, at the time of his death, the oldest of British geologists. While his scientific honors were numerous, the formal recognition by his Government of the value of his work, much of which had redounded greatly to the material advantage of England was tardy. It came to him in the form of a complimentary knighthood only on the New Year's day before his death in the following June, when he was not able, on account of feeble health, to accept it in person from her Majesty. Till 1872 Dr. Prestwich curiously combined the two occupations of wine merchant and geologist. His business took him frequently to France, and while there he sought and improved the opportunities he found to make geological studies of the districts he visited; and it is told of him that his friends used to like to go geologizing with him on the other side of the Channel, "as his walks generally ended in the pleasant chateau of some vine-grower."

was born in Clapham, England, March 12, 1812, and died in Shoreham, Kent, June 23, 1896. He was taught at London and Paris, and in Dr. Valpy's Grammar School in Reading, and afterward studied at University College, Gower Street, London, where he gave special attention to chemistry and natural philosophy under Prof. Edward Turner and Dr. Dionysius Lardner. There also his attention was first drawn to geology and mineralogy, which were among the subjects in Turner's course. After he went into business he continued to devote all the leisure he could command to the study of geology, first as a means of relaxation and afterward on account of the scientific interest he took in it.

He began publishing scientific papers in 1835, when he was about twenty-three years old, his first, on the Ichthyolites of Gamrie, Banffshire, Scotland, having been printed in the Transactions of the Geological Society of that year, and some of his earlier papers on the Coalbrookdale Coal Field being of the same period. Other papers followed in the Quarterly Journal of the Geographical Society on Structure and Organic Remains of the Tertiary Beds of the London and Hampshire Basin, in which many now fully accepted facts of geological sequence and relations were first established. In these