HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF INSTITUTE. PIERS. 



lecting and studying our minerals, particularly those of the 

 trap district, of which he formed a large collection of choice 

 specimens which his widow presented to the Provincial 

 Museum. He was the discoverer of the interesting fossil 

 which Dawson named Dictyonema websteri in compliment to 

 him. He was member of Assembly for Kings County, and 

 is reported to have been a Fellow of the Geological Society, 

 but this I doubt.* 



RICHARD BROWN, geologist and mining engineer, was 

 born at Lowther, Westmorland, England, on 2nd May, 1805, 

 and died at London, 30th October, 1882. After experience 

 in the coal-mines of his native country, he came to Nova 

 Scotia in 1826 to report on and open up collieries in Cape 

 Breton for Messrs. Rundell, Bridge and Co., and the newly 

 organized General Mining Association, having been recom- 

 mended for the work by the then Earl of Lonsdale. He 

 began operating the Association's mines on 1st January, 1827. 

 Subsequently he went to England, and then was stationed at 

 Halifax till about 1839 when he returned to Cape Breton 

 and was agent and general manager of this Association at 

 Sydney Mines, with jurisdiction extending also to the Albion 

 Mines in Pictou County, till his final departure for England 

 on 1st July, 1864. He wrote much on the subject of the 

 geology of the Cape Breton coal formations, and his elabor- 

 ate work on the 'Coal Fields and Coal Trade of Cape 

 Breton' (1871) is still a standard authority, has been reprinted, 

 and the first edition sells for a large sum. In conjunction 

 with Mr. Smith he contributed in 1829 a chapter on the 

 geology of Nova Scotia (chiefly the eastern part) to Hali- 

 burton's 'Nova Scotia'. Many of his papers appeared in 

 the earlier volumes of the Journal of the Geological Society 



* Moses Henry Perley should be referred to here. He was a native of New Brunswick 

 and was born in 1804, and died in 1862. His writings mostly refer to his own province, 

 but in 1851 he published at Fredericton, N. B., a " Catalogue of the Fishes of New 

 Brunswick and Nova Scotia," which more directly connects him with natural history work 

 here. (See Diet. Nat. Biog., vol. 45, p. 9.) 



