DOCSLIB.ORG

Lyellcollection.Org/ by Guest on September 24, 2021

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Lyellcollection.Org/ by Guest on September 24, 2021 Downloaded from http://sp.lyellcollection.org/ by guest on September 24, 2021 Lyelh the man and his times LEONARD G. WILSON Department of History of Medicine, Medical School, Universi~' of Minnesota, Box 506 Mayo, 420 Delaware Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA Abstract: Born in Scotland at the end of the eighteenth century, Charles Lyell spent his early life in Hampshire in the midst of the kind of comfortable rural society described in Jane Austen's novels. Influenced by his father, who was a keen botanist, the young Lyell collected butterflies and studied natural hisory. As a student at Oxford, he attended the Revd William Buckland's lectures on geology and continued to pursue geology while studying for the bar at Lincoln's Inn. In 1824 Lyell wrote his first scientific paper on the freshwater limestones and marls of Scottish lakes, demonstrating their detailed similarity to ancient freshwater formations among the Tertiary strata of the Paris Basin. Throughout his life Lyell remained an active field geologist, travelling throughout Europe from Sicily to Scandinavia. He made repeated geological tours through the Swiss and Austrian Alps and studied intensely the Tertiary strata of France, Belgium and England. He examined the geology of North America from Nova Scotia to the Mississippi Delta, working in the field in all weather. In 1853-1854 he spent several months studying the volcanic geology of Madeira and the Canary Islands and in 1857 and 1858 revisited Sicily to spend arduous weeks studying Mount Etna. In his seventy-fifth year and nearly blind, he travelled to the south of France to examine the caves of Aurignac and the Dordogne. In 1830 in the Principles of Geology Lyell challenged the assumption of a cooling Earth and of the greater former intensity of volcanic action and other geological forces. He separated geology from cosmology, pointing out that the crust of the Earth told nothing of its origin. What geology did reveal was an unending cycle of changes such as were still going on. In his metamorphic theory developed in the Elements of Geology, Lyell showed how the various classes of igneous and metamorphic rocks were formed in the gradual elevation of mountains. Lyell's theories brought about a revolution in geology, changing the meaning of geological data. In successive editions of the Principles and the Elements, two books of American travel, and the Antiquity of Man, Lyell's stature as an author and as a scientist grew steadily throughout his lifetime, the sale of his books often exceeding the publisher's expectations. Liberal in his sympathies, Lyell worked effectively for the reform of English university education and during the American Civil War defended the Union against its British critics Charles Lyell was born at Kinnordy House in the kind of quiet comfortable society described by Forfarshire, Scotland on 14 November 1797, the Jane Austen- comfortable but anxious, menaced son of Charles Lyell, laird of Kinnordy. Although by the threat of invasion from France, by the he would live most of his life in the nineteenth possibility of social unrest, and by disease. century, becoming one of the eminent scientists of At the age of seven Lyell was sent with his the Victorian age, Lyell began his childhood in the younger brother Tom to a small private school at long eighteenth century which ended only with the Ringwood. There in November 1805 Lyell and his defeat of Napoleon in 1815- a century of wars, school fellows celebrated the battle of Trafalgar naval battles, and blockades, and of the industrial with bonfires on the hills and mourned the death of revolution, of the rising power and prosperity of Nelson. In 1807 the boys were transferred to Great Britain, and epidemic disease. At the age of another school at Salisbury. Dreamy and absent- two months the young Charles Lyell was inoculated minded, Charles did not do well at school. In with smallpox, which for two weeks made him December 1808 he fell severely ill with pneumonia quite ill, just a half year before Edward Jenner and his father had to bring him home. For the l 1- would announce his discovery of vaccination. year-old boy this seeming calamity proved a In June 1798 Lyell's father took his wife and formative influence. During the four months that he infant son to the south of England and that autumn remained at home convalescing, Charles pored over leased Bartley Lodge, a country house with 80 the coloured plates of Donovan's Natural History acres of land at Lyndhurst on the edge of the New of British Insects (Donovan 1793-1813), using Forest in Hampshire. There Lyell grew up amidst which he identified various species of butterflies WmSON, L. G. 1998. Lyell: the man and his times. In: BLUNDELL,D. J. 8,~ SCOTT, A. C. (eds) 21 Lyetl: the Past is the Key to the Present. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 143, 21-37. Downloaded from http://sp.lyellcollection.org/ by guest on September 24, 2021 22 L.G. WILSON accumulated in the recent past from the interactions of the river with the sea and the wind. In September Lyell visited the island of Staffa to see its famous basalt columns and Fingal's Cave. At Oxford in the spring of 1818 Lyell attended his second course of Buckland's lectures on mineralogy and geology. During the summer he accompanied his family on a tour on the Continent. At Paris, Lyell visited the Jardin des Plantes to see the bones of fossil animals described by Cuvier and to read Cuvier's books on fossil remains (Cuvier 1812) and on the geology of the Paris Basin (Cuvier & Brongniart 1811). At Chamonix in Switzerland he saw how the glacier of Bosson had recently advanced, treading down pine forests in front of it. While the Lyell family travelled along the roads in Switzerland, Lyell made parallel excursions in the Alps, often walking 35-40 miles a day. In the autumn he returned to Oxford for his final year and graduated there in the spring of 1819. In March 1819 Lyell was also elected a Member of the Geological Society of London. In 1820 Lyell began to study law at Lincoln's Inn, but his eyes, which had begun to trouble him the year before while he was studying for examin- Fig. 1. Sir Charles Lyell in 1853. Chalk drawing by ations at Oxford, again became so inflamed that he George Richmond. Courtesy of Lord Lyell of Kinnordy. had to suspend his studies temporarily while continuing to keep his terms. During the summer of 1820 he made a second tour on the Continent with his father, travelling through Belgium, up the Rhine and moths. As he recovered his strength he began to Valley and across the Alps into Italy as far as Rome. collect butterflies and to watch the metamorphosis While on vacation at Bartley Lodge in October of the caterpillar first into a pupa and then into the 1821 Lyell rode on horseback to Midhurst in adult butterfly. Throughout his life he would Sussex and from there rode across the South Downs delight in butterflies. Aquatic insects also fasci- to Lewes to make the acquaintance of the Lewes nated him and he spent mornings by a pond surgeon Gideon Mantell, who was actively watching them. collecting fossils of the Sussex strata. Lyell was In 1810 Charles and his brother Tom went to excited to learn of Mantell's discovery in the strata school at Midhurst in Sussex, but in 1813 Tom left of the Weald, beneath the Chalk, of the remains of Midhurst to enter the navy as a midshipman. land plants, the bones of land vertebrates, and Charles remained at Midhurst until 1815 and in his freshwater shells, such as might have lived in a final year there distinguished himself as a Latin river delta. The ancient delta in which the Weald scholar. In 1816 he entered Exeter College, Oxford, strata had accumulated had later sunk beneath the where he pursued the usual classical course of sea to be buried under the thick Chalk formation study. Nevertheless, he had already developed before being re-elevated and denuded. The Weald another interest. At Bartley Lodge in 1816 Lyell strata offered dramatic evidence for upward and had read Robert Bakewell's Introduction to downward movements of the land. They supported Geology (Bakewell 1815), from which he learned the views of the eighteenth-century Scottish of Dr James Hutton's theory that the Earth was geologist, Dr James Hutton of Edinburgh, who had indefinitely old. The succession of stratified rocks argued that sedimentary strata had been elevated showed no sign of a beginning because the oldest from beneath the sea by the internal heat of the rock strata represented sediments formed by the Earth. The German mineralogist Abraham Gottlob wearing down of pre-existing lands, long vanished. Werner had presented the opposite view that, At Oxford in 1817 Lyell attended William instead of the land's having risen, the sea had Buckland's lectures on mineralogy. During July, receded. According to Werner, a universal ocean while on a visit to Dawson Turner at Yarmouth, had formerly extended over the Earth, covering Lyell studied the delta of the Yare. He learned how even the highest mountains, and stratified rocks had the river channel had shifted and sand dunes been deposited from it. By providing clear evidence Downloaded from http://sp.lyellcollection.org/ by guest on September 24, 2021 THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 23 of downward and upward movements of the land, limestone also contained valves of the minute the Weald strata supported Huttonian geology aquatic crustacean Cypris ornata, Lamarck, which rather than the Wernerian view.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • I.—Eminent Living Geologists : William Thomas Blanford, C.I.E., Ll.T)., F.E.S., V.P
    THE GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. NEW SERIES. DECADE V. VOL. II. No. I —JANUARY, 1905. OBIGIITAL AETICLES. I.—EMINENT LIVING GEOLOGISTS : WILLIAM THOMAS BLANFORD, C.I.E., LL.T)., F.E.S., V.P. Zool. Soc, Treas. Geol. Soc. (WITH A PORTRAIT, PLATE I.) HAT India has been in the past 300 years to our Army as W a nursery in which our soldiers have obtained experience in their profession and earned their promotion, often to the highest rank, such in a lesser degree has it been to many of our geologists, who have, in the past much shorter period of 50 or 60 years, entered the service in this vast field of scientific enterprise, and, aided by a very few amateur geologists in the Army and of civilians attached to other branches of Government employ, have covered many thousand square miles of our Indian Empire with records of their untiring energy in the geological field. Among the amateurs may be recorded the names of Generals Sir Kichard Strachey and Sir Proby T. Cautley, Dr. Hugh Falconer, Lieut-Gen. C. A. McMahon; and as professional geologists, Dr. T. Oldham, H. B. Medlicott, J. G. Medlicott, Dr. Wm. King, Dr. Valentine Ball, the two Blanfords, W. Theobald, E. Bruce Foote, A. B. Wynne, C. L. Griesbach, E. D. Oldham, F. E. Mallet, C. S. Middlemiss, T. D. La Touche, Dr. F. Stoliczka, Professor W. Waagen, the present Director (T. H. Holland), and many others. Prominent among the earlier geological workers stand out the names of the brothers W. T. and H. F. Blanford, who joined the Indian Survey together in 1855.
    [Show full text]
  • Formal and Informal Networks of Knowledge and Etheldred Benett's
    Journal of Literature and Science Volume 8, No. 1 (2015) ISSN 1754-646X Susan Pickford, “Social Authorship, Networks of Knowledge”: 69-85 “I have no pleasure in collecting for myself alone”:1 Social Authorship, Networks of Knowledge and Etheldred Benett’s Catalogue of the Organic Remains of the County of Wiltshire (1831) Susan Pickford As with many other fields of scientific endeavour, the relationship between literature and geology has proved a fruitful arena for research in recent years. Much of this research has focused on the founding decades of the earth sciences in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, with recent articles by Gowan Dawson and Laurence Talairach-Vielmas joining works such as Noah Heringman’s Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (2003), Ralph O’Connor’s The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (2007), Virginia Zimmerman’s Excavating Victorians (2008) and Adelene Buckland’s Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (2013), to explore the rhetorical and narrative strategies of writings in the early earth sciences. It has long been noted that the most institutionally influential early geologists formed a cohort of eager young men who, having no tangible interests in the economic and practical applications of their chosen field, were in a position to develop a passionately Romantic engagement with nature, espousing an apocalyptic rhetoric of catastrophes past and borrowing epic imagery from Milton and Dante (Buckland 9, 14-15). However, as Buckland further notes, this argument – though persuasive as far as it goes – fails to take into account the broad social range of participants in the construction of early geological knowledge.
    [Show full text]
  • Laugier Vs Durand: Revisiting Primitive Hut in the Classical Architectural Discourse
    YEDİ: SANAT, TASARIM VE BİLİM DERGİSİ KIŞ 2016, SAYI 15: 111-120 WINTER 2016, ISSUE 15: 111-120 YEDİ: SANAT, TASARIM VE BİLİM DERGİSİ Laugier vs Durand: Revisiting Primitive Hut in the Classical Architectural Discourse Ece KÜRELİ * ........................................................................................................... Abstract Finding an origin of architecture describes a process of inquiry which embodies itself in the term of ‘primitive hut’. This inquiry starts with Marcus Pollio Vitruvius from the antiquity and evolves into skepticism and rationalism of the Enlightenment Age. Quatrémere de Quincy, Viollet-le-Duc, William Chambers, Jacques-François Blondel and Claude Nicolas Ledoux, who were the important figures of the era, discussed the question of architectural origin differently. However, Marc-Antoine Laugier and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, another two important figures of the Enlightenment, developed different aspects to the question with regard to their arguments on developmental process of the primitive hut. Their different viewpoints require a further investigation since these two 18th century French architectural theoreticians have fictionalize their objectives of ‘ideal architecture’ and ‘true beauty’ from the metaphor of the primitive hut. Keywords: Origin of Architecture, Primitive Hut, The Enlightenment, Laugier, Durand. Laugier Durand’a Karşı: Klasik Mimari Söylemde İlkel Kulübeyi Yeniden Ziyaret Özet Mimarlığın kökenini bulmak, antik dönemde Marcus Pollio Vitruvius ile başlayan ve kendini ‘ilkel kulübe’
    [Show full text]
  • Last Name, First Name ECOL 249. Quiz 5 Part I. Answer Twelve
    May not be posted online without written permission of W. M. Schaffer, Univ. AZ., Tucson, AZ. ___________________________ Last Name, First Name ECOL 249. Quiz 5 Part I. Answer twelve (12) of the following questions (5 points each). Only the first 12 answers will be graded. 1. By 1872, Vestiges had a. been banned for atheistic and seditious content. b. been embraced by the physicists who approved its endorsement of the nebula hypothesis. c. been outsold 5:1 by The Origin d. outsold The Origin by about 2:1 [Lecture V, 3] e. had so enraged the public that its formerly anonymous author was forced to flee the country with wife and children. 2. Which of the following scientific ideas was not endorsed by Vestiges? a. Nebular hypothesis. b. Progress in the fossil record. c. Quinerian classification. d. Spontaneous generation of mites e. wants and ... exercise... in the way suggested by Lamarck. [Lecture V, 9] 3. The ideas of _________ were eventually confirmed by the discovery of dorso-ventral patterning inversion in chordates and invertebrates. a. É. Geoffroy St. Hilaire [Lecture V, 62-63] b. Ernst Haeckel c. K. E. von Baer d. Robert Grant e. Richard Owen 4. According to Adrian Desmond (Designing the Dinosaur), Owen’s creation of the order Dinosauria and his mammal-like dinosaur reconstructions were motivated by antipa- thy to ___________ . a. Edward Forbes b. Louis Agassiz Megaloceros, a bipedal theropod dinosaur, as im- c. Robert Chambers. agined by Owen and restored by Waterhouse d. Robert Grant [Desmond, 1987, 224 ff] Hawkins for the Crystal Palace Exhibition.
    [Show full text]
  • Press Release
    Press Release Issued: Wednesday 12th August 2020 Darwin mentor and geology pioneer Charles Lyell’s archives reunited Fascinating writings of an influential scientist who shaped Charles Darwin’s thinking have become part of the University of Edinburgh’s collections. A rich assortment of letters, books, manuscripts, maps and sketches by Scottish geologist Sir Charles Lyell, have been reassembled at the University Library’s Centre for Research Collections, with the goal of making the collection more accessible to the public. Some 294 notebooks, purchased from the Lyell family following a £1 million fundraising campaign in 2019, form a key part of the collection. Although written in the Victorian era, the works shed light on current concerns, including climate change and threats to biodiversity. Now a second tranche of Lyell material has been allocated to the University by HM Government under the Acceptance in Lieu of Inheritance Tax scheme. These new acquisitions, from the estate of the 3rd Baron Lyell, will join other items that have been part of the University’s collections since 1927. The new archive includes more than 900 letters, with correspondence between Lyell and Darwin, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, the publisher John Murray and Lyell’s wife, Mary Horner Lyell, and many others. It also includes a draft manuscript and heavily annotated editions of Lyell’s landmark book The Principles of Geology and several manuscripts from his lectures. Lyell, who died in 1875, aged 77, mentored Sir Charles Darwin after the latter’s return from his five-year voyage on the Beagle in 1836. The Scot is also credited with providing the framework that helped Darwin develop his evolutionary theories.
    [Show full text]
  • Origin and Beyond
    EVOLUTION ORIGIN ANDBEYOND Gould, who alerted him to the fact the Galapagos finches ORIGIN AND BEYOND were distinct but closely related species. Darwin investigated ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE (1823–1913) the breeding and artificial selection of domesticated animals, and learned about species, time, and the fossil record from despite the inspiration and wealth of data he had gathered during his years aboard the Alfred Russel Wallace was a school teacher and naturalist who gave up teaching the anatomist Richard Owen, who had worked on many of to earn his living as a professional collector of exotic plants and animals from beagle, darwin took many years to formulate his theory and ready it for publication – Darwin’s vertebrate specimens and, in 1842, had “invented” the tropics. He collected extensively in South America, and from 1854 in the so long, in fact, that he was almost beaten to publication. nevertheless, when it dinosaurs as a separate category of reptiles. islands of the Malay archipelago. From these experiences, Wallace realized By 1842, Darwin’s evolutionary ideas were sufficiently emerged, darwin’s work had a profound effect. that species exist in variant advanced for him to produce a 35-page sketch and, by forms and that changes in 1844, a 250-page synthesis, a copy of which he sent in 1847 the environment could lead During a long life, Charles After his five-year round the world voyage, Darwin arrived Darwin saw himself largely as a geologist, and published to the botanist, Joseph Dalton Hooker. This trusted friend to the loss of any ill-adapted Darwin wrote numerous back at the family home in Shrewsbury on 5 October 1836.
    [Show full text]
  • Mary Anning of Lyme Regis: 19Th Century Pioneer in British Palaeontology
    Headwaters Volume 26 Article 14 2009 Mary Anning of Lyme Regis: 19th Century Pioneer in British Palaeontology Larry E. Davis College of St. Benedict / St. John's University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/headwaters Part of the Geology Commons, and the Paleontology Commons Recommended Citation Davis, Larry E. (2009) "Mary Anning of Lyme Regis: 19th Century Pioneer in British Palaeontology," Headwaters: Vol. 26, 96-126. Available at: https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/headwaters/vol26/iss1/14 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@CSB/SJU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Headwaters by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@CSB/SJU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LARRY E. DAVIS Mary Anning of Lyme Regis 19th Century Pioneer in British Palaeontology Ludwig Leichhardt, a 19th century German explorer noted in a letter, “… we had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the Princess of Palaeontology, Miss Anning. She is a strong, energetic spinster of about 28 years of age, tanned and masculine in expression …” (Aurousseau, 1968). Gideon Mantell, a 19th century British palaeontologist, made a less flattering remark when he wrote in his journal, “… sallied out in quest of Mary An- ning, the geological lioness … we found her in a little dirt shop with hundreds of specimens piled around her in the greatest disorder. She, the presiding Deity, a prim, pedantic vinegar looking female; shred, and rather satirical in her conversation” (Curwin, 1940). Who was Mary Anning, this Princess of Palaeontology and Geological Lioness (Fig.
    [Show full text]
  • French Geothermal Resources Survey BRGM Contribution to the Market Study in the LOW-BIN Project
    French geothermal resources survey BRGM contribution to the market study in the LOW-BIN project BRGM/RP - 57583 - FR August, 2009 French geothermal resources survey BRGM contribution to the market study in the LOW-BIN project (TREN/05/FP6EN/S07.53962/518277) BRGM/RP-57583-FR August, 2009 F. Jaudin With the collaboration of M. Le Brun, V.Bouchot, C. Dezaye IM 003 ANG – April 05 Keywords: French geothermal resources, geothermal heat, geothermal electricity generation schemes, geothermal Rankine Cycle, cogeneration, geothermal binary plants In bibliography, this report should be cited as follows: Jaudin F. , Le Brun M., Bouchot V., Dezaye C. (2009) - French geothermal resources survey, BRGM contribution to the market study in the LOW-BIN Project. BRGM/RP-57583 - FR © BRGM, 2009. No part of this document may be reproduced without the prior permission of BRGM French geothermal resources survey BRGM contribution to the market study in the LOW-BIN Project BRGM, July 2009 F.JAUDIN M. LE BRUN, V. BOUCHOT, C. DEZAYE 1 / 33 TABLE OF CONTENT 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................4 2. The sedimentary regions...................................................................................................5 2.1. The Paris Basin ........................................................................................................5 2.1.1. An overview of the exploitation of the low enthalpy Dogger reservoir ..............7 2.1.2. The geothermal potential
    [Show full text]
  • Archibald Geikie (1835–1924): a Pioneer Scottish Geologist, Teacher, and Writer
    ROCK STARS Archibald Geikie (1835–1924): A Pioneer Scottish Geologist, Teacher, and Writer Rasoul Sorkhabi, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84108, USA; [email protected] years later, but there he learned how to write reports. Meanwhile, he read every geology book he could find, including John Playfair’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory, Henry de la Beche’s Geological Manual, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, and Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone. BECOMING A GEOLOGIST In the summer of 1851, while the Great Exhibition in London was attracting so many people, Geikie decided instead to visit the Island of Arran in the Clyde estuary and study its geology, aided by a brief report by Andrew Ramsay of the British Geological Survey. Geikie came back with a report titled “Three weeks in Arran by a young geologist,” published that year in the Edinburgh News. This report impressed Hugh Miller so much that the renowned geologist invited its young author to discuss geology over a cup of tea. Miller became Geikie’s first mentor. In this period, Geikie became acquainted with local scientists and pri- vately studied chemistry, mineralogy, and geology under Scottish naturalists, such as George Wilson, Robert Chambers, John Fleming, James Forbes, and Andrew Ramsay—to whom he con- fessed his desire to join the Geological Survey. In 1853, Geikie visited the islands of Skye and Pabba off the coast Figure 1. Archibald Geikie as a young geolo- of Scotland and reported his observations of rich geology, including gist in Edinburgh. (Photo courtesy of the British Geological Survey, probably taken in finds of Liassic fossils.
    [Show full text]
  • In Retrospect: Leibniz's Protogaea
    NATURE|Vol 455|4 September 2008 OPINION In Retrospect: Leibniz’s Protogaea The first English translation of Gottfried Leibniz’s earth science treatise records the difficulties of understanding our planet before geologists appreciated deep time, Richard Fortey discovers. Protogaea When considering the origin of minerals, by Gottfreid Wilhelm Leibniz Leibniz has an intuitive sense that a kind Translated by Claudine Cohen and of natural cookery is involved: “One is thus Andre Wakefield inclined to suspect that nature, using volca- University of Chicago Press: 2008. noes as furnaces and mountains as alembics, 204 pp. $55. has accomplished in her mighty works what we play at with our little examples [in labo- It is something of a game among historians ratories].” That the furnaces of the ‘chymist’ to try and detect the earliest hints of a major might simulate Earth’s processes is a hope scientific breakthrough in a little-known work that still drives research into petrology and discovered through recondite scholarship. geochemistry today. Charles Darwin’s supposed debt to his grandfa- Why then did Leibniz’s shrewd obser- ther Erasmus is an example, or maybe geologist vations fail to move geology significantly Charles Lyell’s insufficient acknowledgement towards becoming a mature science? For all its of the early geological work of Nicolaus Steno. insights, Protogaea does not seem to a modern When the savant in question is Gottfried Wil- geologist like the natural ancestor of Lyell’s helm Leibniz (1646–1716) — the man who Principles of Geology. The missing ingredient developed calculus independently of Isaac is an awareness of geological time.
    [Show full text]
  • An Investigation Into the Graphic Innovations of Geologist Henry T
    Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2003 Uncovering strata: an investigation into the graphic innovations of geologist Henry T. De la Beche Renee M. Clary Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Clary, Renee M., "Uncovering strata: an investigation into the graphic innovations of geologist Henry T. De la Beche" (2003). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 127. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/127 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. UNCOVERING STRATA: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE GRAPHIC INNOVATIONS OF GEOLOGIST HENRY T. DE LA BECHE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Curriculum and Instruction by Renee M. Clary B.S., University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1983 M.S., University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1997 M.Ed., University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1998 May 2003 Copyright 2003 Renee M. Clary All rights reserved ii Acknowledgments Photographs of the archived documents held in the National Museum of Wales are provided by the museum, and are reproduced with permission. I send a sincere thank you to Mr. Tom Sharpe, Curator, who offered his time and assistance during the research trip to Wales.
    [Show full text]
  • Lyon Playfair: Chemist and Commissioner, 1818–1858
    Science Museum Group Journal Lyon Playfair: chemist and commissioner, 1818–1858 Journal ISSN number: 2054-5770 This article was written by Ian Blatchford 05-04-2021 Cite as 10.15180; 211504 Research Lyon Playfair: chemist and commissioner, 1818–1858 Published in Spring 2021, Issue 15 Article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15180/211504 Abstract Lyon Playfair was a multi-talented man: a scientist, administrator and politician whose life and influence deserve further research. This article concentrates on the period between 1818 and 1858, from Playfair’s birth to his appointment as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh. His biographer (Sir Thomas Wemyss Reid) described his life as a ‘story not of adventure, but work’ and yet his record was one of energetic enterprise that had considerable impact. He was a rising star in the then fashionable world of chemistry, a favoured student of the founder of organic chemistry, Justus Liebig, and a central figure in the promotion of new ideas in agricultural science.[1] A career in science and the state saw him connected to the leading figures of both, and he played a crucial role in the conceptual and financial success of the Great Exhibition, and its legacy. His brilliance has been overshadowed by the extrovert Henry Cole, and yet Playfair was essential to the major educational reforms of their time. Component DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15180/211504/001 Keywords Lyon Playfair, chemistry, politics, biography, University of Edinburgh, Justus Liebig, Great Exhibition Introduction [2] Playfair was a versatile man: scientist, administrator and politician. This article concentrates on the period between 1818 and 1858, from his birth to his appointment as Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh.
    [Show full text]