254 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



power all that it upheld soon falls. It has not yet been given to 

 any people to change their ideas without being at once forced to 

 transform all the elements of their civilization. — Translated for the 

 Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientiftque. 



SKETCH OF JOSEPH PKESTWICH. 



SIR JOSEPH PRESTWICH was, at the time of his death, the 

 oldest of British geologists. While his scientific honors were 

 numerous, the formal recognition by his Government of the value 

 of his work, much of which had redounded greatly to the material 

 advantage of England was tardy. It came to him in the form of a 

 complimentary knighthood only on the New Year's day before his 

 death in the following June, when he was not able, on account of 

 feeble health, to accept it in person from her Majesty. Till 1872 

 Dr. Prestwich curiously combined the two occupations of wine mer- 

 chant and geologist. His business took him frequently to France, 

 and while there he sought and improved the opportunities he found 

 to make geological studies of the districts he visited ; and it is told of 

 him that his friends used to like to go geologizing with him on the 

 other side of the Channel, " as his walks generally ended in the 

 pleasant chateau of some vine-grower." 



Joseph Pkestwich was born in Clapham, England, March 12, 

 1812, and died in Shoreham, Kent, June 23, 1896. He was taught 

 at London and Paris, and in Dr. Yalpy's Grammar School in Read- 

 ing, and afterward studied at University College, Gower Street, 

 London, where he gave special attention to chemistry and natural 

 philosophy under Prof. Edward Turner and Dr. Dionysius Lardner. 

 There also his attention was first drawn to geology and mineralogy, 

 which were among the subjects in Turner's course. After he went 

 into business he continued to devote all the leisure he could command 

 to the study of geology, first as a means of relaxation and afterward 

 on account of the scientific interest he took in it. 



He began publishing scientific papers in 1835, when he was about 

 twenty-three years old, his first, on the Ichthyolites of Gamrie, Banff- 

 shire, Scotland, having been printed in the Transactions of the 

 Geological Society of that year, and some of his earlier papers on 

 the Coalbrookdale Coal Field being of the same period. Other pa- 

 pers followed in the Quarterly Journal of the Geographical Society 

 on Structure and Organic Remains of the Tertiary Beds of the Lon- 

 don and Hampshire Basin, in which many now fully accepted facts 

 of geological sequence and relations were first established. In these 



