June, 1924. The Irish Naturalist. 57 



GRENVILLE ARTHUR JAMES COLE, F.R.S. 



Professor Grenville A. J. Cole, one of the most brilliant 

 and versatile of the school of geologists which sprang up 

 towards the end of the last century under the inspiring 

 influence of Professor Judd, passed away at his residence 

 at Carrickmines, Co. Dublin, on April 20th. He had long 

 been a prominent figure in scientific circles in Dublin, and 

 his place \\'ill be hard to fill. He held the Professorship of 

 Geolog3^ in the Royal College of Science for Ireland from 

 1890 until his death and was Dean of the College for two 

 years. In 1905 he became Director of the Geological Survey 

 of Irel2.nd, then for the first time brought under the control 

 of an Irish Department. 



Cole was born in London in 1859, ^^^ educated at the 

 City of London School and the Royal School of Mines. 

 A year after his appointment to the chair in Dublin he 

 published his " Aids in Practical Geology," which had an 

 immediate and striking success, running to seven editions. 

 Few works have been so popular with all classes of geologists. 

 Gifted with a fluent pen and a brilliant sense of literary 

 values he produced from this on a series of books which 

 showed, by their ready sale, their attractiveness to the 

 general reader and their value as popular introductions to 

 the science of geology. 



Among his more serious contributions to science are to 

 be reckoned papers on the metamorphic rocks of Tyrone 

 and Donegal in which he applied and developed the theory 

 of lit-par-lit injection of the French Schools. His studies 

 of the tachylitic selvedges of basic igneous rocks, begun 

 in association with Judd, and extended later to other 

 varieties of glassy rocks and their devitrification products, 

 are well known. His description of the riebeckite-rock of 

 Mynydd Maur was an important contribution to both 

 petrological and glacial science, in that he clearly 

 discriminated between that rock and the riebeckite-eurite 

 so \\ddely distributed as erratics along the shores of the 

 Irish Sea, and now known to be derived from Ailsa Craig 

 in the Firth of Clvde. 



