Abstract
IN many respects Mr. Godwin-Austen stood out apart from his fellow-geologists in this country. He wrote comparatively little, but what he did write was always weighty and full of suggestiveness. Instead of loading the literature of science with a pile of little papers, each containing some trifling addition or supposed addition to the sum of knowledge, or some criticism well- or ill-founded of the work of others, he allowed his ideas to mature, and published them from time to time in luminous essays which many years afterwards may be read over again with profit as well as pleasure. He began to write about half a century ago, his earliest papers being devoted to the geological features of Devonshire, of which, at that time, very little was known. By degrees he extended the area of his observations eastwards into the south-eastern counties. His essays “On the Valley of the English Channel”(1850), and “On the Superficial Accumulations of the Coasts of the English Channel, and the changes which they indicate”(1851), were among the most thoughtful contributions that had ever been made to the elucidation of the existing outlines of sea and land. This department of inquiry was one that peculiarly fascinated him. Hence, when his friend Edward Forbes died and left his “Natural History of the European Seas” only half completed, he himself chivalrously finished it, and supplied some chapters which only an accomplished and far-sighted geologist could have written. His various papers on drift-gravels, on boulders in the Chalk, and other superficial phenomena, are all marked by the same grasp and breadth of treatment.
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Robert A. C. Godwin-austen, F.R.S. . Nature 31, 104 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/031104a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/031104a0