4 6 



It was the same courage which enabled him to deduce to tne 

 full the logical consequences of his discoveries, and to use these 

 again as weapons for attacking the next problem and making the 

 next, advance. But he never allowed this quality to tempt him 

 into premature speculation ; and it has been found that many 

 things either offered by him as hypotheses in his own work or 

 suggested to his students or co-workers, were in reality already 

 based on a deep substratum of fact stored up in his own memory, 

 though not necessarily stated or published. 



It seems needless to refer to Lap worth's intense joy in the 

 open air and the love of beautiful scenery which not only led him 

 into the open but to some extent directed his choice to the Ordo- 

 vician rocks and to those more ancient still. Combined with this 

 was a genuine delight in the work of mapping in which he was 

 willing to spend every hour of leisure he could snatch from his 

 professional duties. 



Lapworth was richly endowed with the mental faculties 

 which are most needed by a successful geologist. First and fore- 

 most comes the faculty of observation, a keen eye for a country, 

 a power to see through the surface by means of the surface, a genius 

 for spotting where a fossil may be found, a skilled hand in the 

 extraction of it, and sufficient industry and interest to search, 

 exhaustively. Then conies the exact and retentive memory 

 which was always ready for service and very rarely played him 

 false ; a memory for lithological types or palaeontological characters, 

 for crucial places and minute features observed or half-observed 

 in exposures. This was combined with a critical power of dis- 

 crimination which showed itself in his judgment of things as well 

 as of men. 



He was a remarkably good geometrician with the faculty 

 of ' seeing solid ' whether into a map or into the ground it portrayed. 

 In working over his own field maps he was never satisfied until he 

 had obtained a workable geometrical solution in accordance with 

 all the facts. The same faculty was of great use to him in judging 

 the value of the work of others when expressed on maps. 



The hand of a skilled draughtsman was no small part of his 

 equipment, as must be admitted by all who have examined his maps. 

 His lines are never ' wooden ' or awkward, or unnatural, but 

 always artistic and beautiful, as they must be in nature. It is 

 almost impossible to imagine any workmanship more perfect than 

 his drawings of graptolites, or the sections and drawings with 

 which he illustrated his Upland work, particularly in the Moffat 

 paper. The faithfulness and delicacy of his line would have done 

 credit to Du Maurier himself. 



