41 6 Presidentship of Sir Joseph D. Hooker 1876 



Sea (1872) and The Voyage of the Challenger (1877), he did 

 not live to see the final distribution and working out of 

 the material he had so laboriously collected. He died at 

 Edinburgh in the spring of 1882. 



Joseph Prestwich belonged to the early company of 

 geologists by which the stratigraphical branch of the science 

 was put on a sound basis of observation. Immersed in the 

 business of a wine-merchant in the city of London, he 

 nevertheless found time to devote to geological work in 

 the field either at home or abroad. His papers on the 

 Tertiary deposits of England, France, and Belgium remain 

 as a monument of his patient observation and facility in 

 correlation. Better known, however, to the general public 

 was the share he had in the middle of last century in showing 

 that man must have lived contemporaneously with many 

 long-extinct animals, and that the evidence collected by 

 the laborious but scantily recognised French explorer, 

 Boucher de Perthes, was trustworthy, and pointed unmistak- 

 ably to the great antiquity of the human race. After forty 

 years of city life and Mark Lane associations, Prestwich at 

 the age of sixty retired from London to the pleasant retreat 

 which he had built for himself on the chalk down overlooking 

 the valley of the Darent above the village of Shoreham, 

 where he was now able to give his whole time to his beloved 

 science. But in a short while a new incentive was given 

 to his zeal and a radical change was wrought in his life by 

 the offer of the Professorship of Geology at Oxford, vacant 

 by the much regretted death of John Phillips. With all 

 his ardour, even at his advanced years, Prestwich threw 

 himself into the work of this new sphere and became a useful 

 and popular member of the academic community. His 

 writings and his example of personal devotion to geological 

 investigation will preserve his name to future generations. 

 But it was not only this scientific eminence that gave him 

 consequence among his contemporaries. His simplicity of 

 nature, unaffected modesty, and genuine goodness won the 

 hearts of all who came into contact with him. He had a 

 noble head, and in his old age was one of the most picturesque 



