June, 1923. The Irish Naturalist, 53 



JOSEPH WRIGHT. 



Joseph Wright was born in Cork on 7 January, 1834, 

 and died in Belfast on 7 April, 1923, in his ninetieth year. 

 He was the youngest of a family of seventeen, his parents 

 being Thomas Wright, a well-known merchant of Cork, 

 and Mary Dudley, both members of the Society of Friends. 

 Family tradition asserted that the Wrights, a Yorkshire 

 family, came from Saffron Walden to Co. Wexford in the 

 time of Cromwell. He received his education at the Friends' 

 School, Newtown, Co. Waterford, and early developed an 

 interest in geology, being first attracted thereto by the 

 conspicuous fossils of the Carboniferous Limestone, which 

 occupies the trough in which the city of Cork is situated ; 

 it was largely through his subsequent work on these rocks 

 that Little Island became famous as a hunting-ground for 

 the fossils of this formation. His first published contribution 

 to science was a brief paper, " Description of a new Palae- 

 chinus," ^ read before the Royal Geological Society of Ireland, 

 on 9 March, 1864. During his residence in Cork, though 

 closely engaged in business, he devoted most of his leisure 

 time to the search for Carboniferous Limestone fossils, and 

 amassed a very valuable collection, used in subsequent 

 monographs by other workers ; the collection itself now 

 forms part of the extensive and valuable material preserved 

 in the British Museum. 



In 1859-60 Joseph Wright was resident in Trinity College, 

 Dublin, assisting the Professor of Geology ; but if he had 

 any schemes for adopting science as a profession, they did 

 not mature. In 1867 he came from Cork to Belfast, where 

 he joined Mr. Malcolmson in estabHshing the " Overland 

 Tea House." A year later he married Mary Ann Banks, of 

 Cork, by whom he had four daughters. In Belfast he spent 

 the rest of his long fife. This neighbourhood offers a re- 

 markably varied field for the geologist, and Joseph Wright 

 soon found fresh palaeontological interests. The Chalk of 

 northern Ireland is so hard that it is impossible to separate 

 out the shells of the minute organisms which form a large 



1 Jouro. R. Geol. Soc. of Ireland, I., pp. 62-63 



