Abstract
SIR ARCHIBALD GEIKIE has done a further service to British science in reviving the memory of John Michell, and in directing attention to his work in various fields. Geologists are familiar with Michell's name in connection with Jurassic strata, and especially with the “Lyas” that he traced from Somerset to Lincolnshire. It is unfortunate that this ancient quarryman's term should suggest, in its modern form, a pseudo-classical origin. Michell, after his retirement from the rectory of St. Botolph's, Cambridge, and from his brief tenure of the Woodwardian professorship of geology, continued, as rector of Thornhill, “those important investigations in physics and astronomy with which his name will always be associated.” He died in 1793, before the experiment that he had designed for determining the earth's density could be carried out; but his apparatus came, through Wollaston, into the hands of his friend and correspondent Cavendish, who improved it in detail, and ungrudgingly acknowledged Michell as its originator. A long and interesting letter from Michell to Cavendish on the strata near Grantham is here published for the first time. In his frequent journeys from Thornhill to London he made observations at his halting-places, such as Greetham on the old North Road, and one feels that he would have hailed the work of his successor, William Smith, as confirming much that he had seen. In 1760, while still at Cambridge, he contributed a paper on earthquakes to the Royal Society, in which he urged that the initial shock is propagated by wave-motion through the earth.
Memoir of John Michell, M.A., B.D., F.R.S.
By Sir Archibald Geikie. Pp. 107. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1918.)
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C., G. Memoir of John Michell, MA, BD, FRS . Nature 102, 3 (1918). https://doi.org/10.1038/102003b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/102003b0