Henry Hicks. 109 



house. These Hicks described, and wrote also on the discovery of two 

 skeletons of the Mammoth at the base of the gravel in Endsleigh 

 Street, and on the excavations of the Ffynnon Beuno and Cae Gwyn 

 Caves in North Wales, the contents of which he maintained to be pre- 

 glacial. 



(6) The latest, and smallest group of his papers, relates to North 

 Devon. On a visit to Ilfracombe in 1890, he succeeded in finding one 

 or two fossils in the Morte Slates, which he identified as Silurian, main- 

 taining this group to be, not in its place as a member of a sequence, 

 but an older mass, thrust through the broken Devonian series. Here 

 again, as the Silurian age depended upon the identification of a Lingula, 

 it was generally felt that the wiser course would have been to wait for 

 more evidence. So Hicks continued to visit the district annually, and in 

 1896 and the following year laid the new evidence before the Geolo- 

 gical Society. Even then the damaged condition of the fossils made 

 precise identification difficult, and the Silurian age of the Morte Slates 

 was held by some to be still unproved ; but that they contain beds of 

 different ages, and that thrust faulting on a considerable scale has 

 occurred along this zone of North Devon is now generally admitted. 

 We believe that he was still working on the question at the time of 

 his death. 



As a geologist, Hicks was singularly acute. His eye was so keen, 

 nis diagnosis, as it might be called, so shrewd, that he seemed almost to 

 scent out fossils, and he carried on to non-sedimentary rocks the same 

 power of noticing similarities and differences. The more difficult a 

 problem, the greater was its charm for him. In drawing conclusions 

 he was very quick too quick perhaps, at any rate in publishing them ; 

 for while his main idea usually proved to be right, important details 

 had afterwards to be corrected. But his work, like himself, was 

 always stimulative. As may be inferred from this sketch of it, he was 

 often involved in controversy, but he fought as if he rather enjoyed an 

 intellectual battle, the stress of which never ruffled the course of 

 friendship for more than a moment. A man in some respects unique, 

 his unexpected death was a loss to geology, and a heavy blow to many 

 sincerely attached friends. 



T. G. B. 



