Senior Scholarship. He took his Degree of Bachelor of Arts in 

 1799. 



Although originally intended for the Church, Mr. Fitton chose a 

 medical career, and with that view pursued his studies in the Uni- 

 versity of Edinburgh, where he also attended the Lectures of Professor 

 Jameson on Natural History, and made the acquaintance of various 

 young men, zealous in study, who afterwards attained to distinction 

 in science and literature. After taking his Doctor's degree, he passed 

 some time in London, studying medicine and chemistry, and in 1812 

 removed with his widowed mother arid his three sisters to North- 

 ampton, where he began practice as a physician. 



After eight years' stay in Northampton, he married a lady who 

 brought him the means of living independently of his profession, and 

 he accordingly withdrew from practice, and took up his abode in 

 London, where he dwelt for the rest of his life, occupied chiefly with 

 his favourite pursuit of geology, and contributing, by his personal 

 qualities and accomplishments, and by his open hospitality, to pro- 

 mote useful and agreeable social intercourse among the scientific men 

 of the metropolis. 



From his youth up Fitton was devoted to geology. Before he left 

 Ireland he collected fossils, determined barometrically the height of 

 the chief mountains, and made excursions into Wales to study its 

 mineral structure. His first publication on the science was a memoir 

 " On the Geological Structure of the Vicinity of Dublin," communi- 

 cated to the Geological Society in 1811, and printed in the first 

 volume of its ' Transactions.' From 1817 to 1841 he contributed to 

 the ' Edinburgh Review ' a series of articles which present a just and 

 enlightened commentary on the progress of geological science for the 

 eventful thirty years of which they treat. But the researches on 

 which the reputation of Dr. Fitton as a geologist will most de- 

 servedly and most enduringly rest, "are those by which, during 

 twelve active years of his life (from 1824 to 1836), he laboriously 

 developed the true descending order of succession from the Chalk 

 downwards into the Oolitic Formations, as exhibited in the south-east 

 of England and in the adjoining parts of France. Before these labours 

 commenced geologists had only confused notions as to the order of the 

 strata beneath the Chalk, as well as of the imbedded fossil remains of 

 each stratum. It was Fitton who made the Greensand Formations his 



