SIB WILLIAM EDMOND LOGAN. 357 



SIR WILLIAM EDMOND LOGAN. 



Sir William Edjiond Logan, Knight, was born in Montreal, 

 Canada, in 1798, and died at Castle Malgwyn, Llechryd, in South 

 Wales, June 22, 1875. Like so many others who have attained dis- 

 tinction in British North America, Logan was descended from a loy- 

 alist stock, one of those families who, adhering to the British crown, 

 left the revolted colonies a hundred years since. His grandfather 

 then removed from the neighborhood of Schenectady, N.Y,, to Mon- 

 treal, carrying with him two sons, one of whom was the father of our 

 late associate. They were of Scottish origin ; and when the ftither and 

 uncle of Mr. Logan had gained wealth in commercial j^ursuits, and 

 transferred their business as merchants and bankers to Great Britain, 

 the former purchased a small estate near Stirling in Scotland, a cir- 

 cumstance which has led one of his English biographers into the error 

 of speaking of Mr. Logan as a Scotchman. His education, begun in 

 Montreal, was continued at the High School and the University of 

 Edinburgh ; but we find him already at the age of twenty in the count- 

 ing-house of his uncle in London, where he remained for ten years, 

 devoting much of his leisure to the study of natural history, as well as 

 to music and painting, in both of which he was a successful amateur. 

 In 1829, his uncle having acquired an interest in a copper-smelting 

 establishment, with some coal lands at Swansea, in South Wales, 

 Logan removed there to assume their direction, where he remained for 

 nine years, becoming a successful copper-smelter and coal-miner. The 

 study of the coal-field of the neighborhood here engaged his attention 

 and he made of it a very careful and minute map, which was jaresented 

 by him to the British. Association in 1837. When, later, the geologi- 

 cal survey of Great Britain under De la Beche was extended to this 

 region, the work of Logan was placed at the disposal of the govern- 

 ment, and, its exactness having been verified, was adopted and pub- 

 lished by the survey. In the course of these labors, he made careful 

 studies as to the relations of the stigmariee constantly found in the 

 clays which immediately underlie the coal-beds, and in 1840 brought 

 this matter before the Geological Society of London, announcing the 

 conclusion that the stigmarige belonged to the plants which had fur- 

 nished at least a large part of the coal. It was afterwards shown that 

 other observers had already indicated a similar relation, and that 

 Mammatt, from his studies of the coal-field of Ashby-de-la-Zouche, 

 had in 1836 maintained that the coal was the product of a vegetation 

 in situ, rooted in the under-clay. To Logan is, however, due the 



