Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/45

 tivator, and the Society a Member of great accomplishments and very versatile abilities. Continued illness prevented him from publishing the results of his labours ; but his fossils, collected with the utmost care and accompanied by valuable notes, have enabled Dr. Falconer and Professor Heer to give an adequate account of the animals which lived upon the preglacial continent and of the vegetation which clothed its surface*.

Samuel William King, born September 20, 1821, was the eldest son of the late Rev. William Hutchinson King, formerly Vicar of Nuneaton. At an early age he showed a taste for scientific studies. While a mere boy, from fourteen to sixteen years old, he kept a journal in which astronomical observations and dissections of insects were noted down. Some of his papers were published at the time in the ' Zoologist.' As he grew older he turned his attention also to Archaeology and Architecture. He entered at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, and took the degree of B.A. in 1844, and that of M.A. in 1847. In 1849 he married Emma, daughter of the late John Fort, Esq., M.P., and in 1851 was presented to the Rectory of Saxlingham, Norfolk, where he devoted himself with unflagging energy to his parochial work, and to the study of the antiquities and natural history of the county.

He travelled much, note- and sketch-book in hand. In 1849 and 1850 he visited Switzerland, Italy, Sicily, the Grecian Archipelago, Constantinople, and Asia Minor. In 1855 he explored the little- known valleys between Monte Rosa and Mont Blanc ; and subsequently published ' The Italian Valleys of the Pennine Alps,' a work that is of very high value, from the rare combination of literary ability with great powers of observation and artistic skill which it manifests. Subsequently he became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Eoyal Geographical Society. In 1855 he communicated to the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society a paper on the " Examination of an Ancient Cemetery at Hempnall," and in 1859 a second on a "Roman Kiln and Urns found at Hedenham."

On his return, in 1859, from his favourite Pennine valleys and the battle-fields of Solferino and Magenta, his attention was especially directed to the Norfolk Forest-bed by a visit to Cromer with Sir Charles Lyell, Dr. Hooker, and the Rev. John Gunn. From that time he devoted himself to the study of the preglacial beds of Norfolk, and to the accumulation of the fossils that now form the King Collection, which derives a peculiar value from the careful notes of the stratigraphical position of each specimen.

In 1860 he became a Fellow of the Geological Society. In 1864 he was so seriously affected by overwork that he was sent abroad by his medical advisers to seek the rest of mind which he could not obtain in England ; but he merely exchanged one field of mental activity for another. On his return through France, after visiting Spain and Majorca, he reopened the famous Cave of Aurignac, and disco-


 * See Lyell, ' Antiquity of Man,' pp. 214-217.

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