314 Bibliographical Notice. 



To the building of his new house (Darent-Hulme) on a lovely 

 hill in Kent, and the planning and planting its grounds, he had 

 devoted much of his scanty leisure time in 1868 ; its well- 

 remembered hospitable rooms bore inside and out typical charac- 

 teristics of French and English materials in the building-stones and 

 marbles, and the decorations were sculptured fossils and artistic 

 paintings of palaeontology. 



In 1874 Prestwich was invited to take the Professorship of 

 Geology at Oxford — an appointment honourable both to him and 

 the University. Everything combined to render Oxford, its society 

 and its surroundings, pleasant to the new-comers ; and the College 

 work was a pleasure to the geologist. The holidays led the Pro- 

 fessor and his wife to South Wales, Scotland, North and South 

 England, the Channel Islands, and elsewhere — to scenes both old 

 and new. 



All subserved, however, to the continuance of his geological 

 studies, and particularly to the writing of his grand text-book of 

 ' Geology, Chemical, Physical, and Stratigraphical,' vol. i. 1886, and 

 vol. ii. 1888. This consists for the most part of complete philo- 

 sophical essays on its several component parts or subjects, with clear 

 scientific explanation of the details required by teacher and 

 amateur. The University had made him M.A., and now conferred 

 the degree of D.C.L. He was Honorary Member and Correspondent 

 of at least nineteen scientific societies, British and foreign. 



As before mentioned. Professor Prestwich (knighted in 1895) had 

 warmly taken up the subject of early man and his implements of 

 stone. Some of the latest and most interesting of these he collected, 

 with the help of Mr. Benjamin Harrison, of Ightham, on the Chalk 

 plateau overlooking that village in Kent. Sir Joseph Prestwich has 

 left to the British Museum his collection of these old, brown, and, at 

 first sight, anomalous flint tools, dressed by chipping on the edges 

 into some seven or eight definite patterns — different from the leaf- 

 shaped and spear-head so-called palaeolithic kinds, produced by 

 general chipping on surface and edge. 



Another subject, his notes on which he had lately brought to 

 more mature consideration, was the submergence in Quaternary 

 times of South-western Europe and the Northern coasts of the 

 Mediterranean, succeeded by an emergence and producing diluvial 

 results, which may have originated the tradition of a great deluge. 



Lady Prestwich's complete and elegant biography is supplemented 

 by Sir A. Geikie's admirable summary of Sir Joseph's geological 

 work and opinions, and, indeed, comprises a lucid account of much 

 of the progress of Geology during the lifetime of our lamented 

 friend. We borrow Sir Archibald's well-considered words : — 

 " While his writings will perpetuate his scientific achievements, it 

 should be placed on record that it was not these achievements alone 

 which gave Joseph Prestwich his pre-eminence among his contem- 

 poraries, but that he owed this position in a large measure to the 

 integrity and charm of his character," 



