William Lonsdale

William Lonsdale ( born September 9, 1794 in Bath, † November 11, 1871 in Bristol ) was an English geologist and palaeontologist who has rendered outstanding services to the exploration of fossil corals and the geology of southern England.

Life

Lonsdale was educated for a position in the British Army. In 1810 he was engaged as Ensign in the 4th regiment, the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment. He participated in the battles of Salamanca and Waterloo during the Napoleonic Wars in the Iberian Peninsula ( Peninsular War ). After two battles he won and quit the service with the rank of lieutenant.

After active duty, he lived for some years in Batheaston and began to engage in geology and paleontology, fossils collected and held about presentations at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution. Subsequently he was appointed curator of the natural history honorary section of the Museum of the institution. He worked there until 1829, before he took the job of the auxiliary secretary and curator of the Geological Society of London at Somerset House. There he remained until his retirement for health reasons in 1842.

Lonsdale was in addition to his research activities, a capable organizer. Roderick Murchison, the founding father of the Geological Society, described in the President's address in 1843 Lonsdale's assets, the company in even the most hidden and difficult to discuss facts, and put out his skills as an editor of the publications of the society. In 1846 he was awarded the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society.

His later years were spent Lonsdale retired, he died on 11 November 1871 in Bristol.

Work

1829 Lonsdale presented the Geological Society his work On the Oolitic District of Bath ( The oolitic district of Bath) before, a work which he had begun in 1827. He then extended at the request of the Geological Society from his studies on similar rocks in Gloucestershire, the results of which he presented in 1832. The boundaries of the mapped rock formations from him he drew a map on the usual English Format one- inch -to -a- mile and created by William Smith as the first detailed geological maps of England.

His special attention was paid to the study of coral, so that he became the leading authority on the subject in England. He described fossil corals from the Tertiary and Cretaceous of North America and from older strata of England and Russia. In 1837 he came to the conclusion that the limestones in which they occurred, were not in the carbon still in the Silurian, but occupying a mediating position between them due to the study of fossils from South Devon. This idea was taken up by Sedgwick and Murchison in 1839, and may have been the basis on which they founded their new system that Devon.

Lonsdale in this regard, in 1840 picked essay Notes on the Age of the Limestones of South Devonshire ( Remarks on the age of the limestones of South Devonshire ) was published in the same volume of the Transactions of the Geological Society, Sedgwick and Murchison On the Physical Structure of Devonshire ( contained about the physical nature of Devonshire ). In it the authors write that they had come to the conclusion to the Lonsdale, without hesitation, to the five sections of their geological profile of North Devon could apply, and also on the slate of Cornwall.