692 
H. B. WOODWARD F.R.S. 
Y the death of Mr. Horace B. Woodward we 
have lost a geologist with an unrivalled ex- 
perience of the stratigraphy of the British Isles. 
His father, Dr. S, P. Woodward, was engaged in 
the British Museum; and Horace, who was born 
in 1848, began his geological career at the age of 
fifteen in the employment of the Geological 
Society of London, as assistant in the Library 
and Museum. In 1867 he obtained an 
appointment on the Geological Survey under 
Sir Roderick Murchison, and continued in 
that department until the end of 1908. 
During the last seven-and-a-half years of his 
service he occupied the post of assistant director, 
and was in charge of the work in England and 
Wales. 
In the course of this period of forty-one years 
Woodward did much towards developing the work 
of the Survey, in the direction of both precision 
and utility. The early surveying was carried out 
for the greater part of England and for all Wales 
on the Old Series 1-in. map. By no one were 
the difficulties of precise mapping on so small a 
scale and so obsolete a basis more successfully 
met than by Woodward, and it was not until his 
career as a member of the field-staff was drawing 
to a close that 6-in. ordnance maps became 
available. His duties lay at first in adding detail 
to the mapping of the Rhaetic and other secondary 
strata in the south-west, but later on he spent 
many years in Norfolk and the adjoining counties 
in mapping superficial deposits and the underlying 
Tertiary and Cretaceous strata. 
Woodward was. author of many valuable 
memoirs. The results of his early field-work 
are incorporated in the Geological Survey Memoirs 
on the East Somerset and Bristol Coalfields, on 
the Geology of Norwich, and the Geology of 
Fakenham. But the most important of his 
official publications were the three volumes on 
the Jurassic Rocks of Britain, which appeared in 
1892-5. This work was the outcome of a project 
to bring together all that is known of each 
British formation. Yorkshire was otherwise pro- 
vided for; but as regards the rest of the country, 
the heavy task of gathering all that was worth 
preserving from copious literature, of examining 
the principal sections throughout the country, and 
of presenting the whole in an intelligible form, 
was carried out single-handed by Woodward. 
At this period of his official career he was tem- 
porarily engaged in Scotland in applying his know- 
ledge of the Jurassic rocks of England to the 
elucidation of the occurrences in Raasay and Skye. 
The commercial development of the iron-ores of 
Raasay was due in the first place to his sug- 
gestion that there occurred ‘there iron-ores of 
economic value on the same horizon as the Cleve- 
land ores. 
His more statistical memoirs, such as those on 
the water-supply of Lincolnshire, and of Bedford- 
shire with Northamptonshire, are valued as works 
NO. 2312, VOL. 92] 
NATURE 
[FEBRUARY 19, 1914 
of reference; but he showed, too, a happy facility 
for putting geological information into a- form 
that was agreeable to the general reader in his 
account of Soils and Subsoils, and of the Geology 
of the London district. , 
Outside his official work his most important 
publication was the “Geology of England and 
Wales,” first published in 1876, but revised and 
enlarged in 1887. An untiring industry and a 
wide experience of the subjects on which he was 
writing enabled the author to produce a work that 
is indispensable both to the student of the science 
and to those who are interested in its practical 
applications. No less useful in their respective 
subjects are his ‘‘Geology of Water-Supply,” of 
“Soils, and Substrata,” and his contributions to 
the Victoria County Histories. 
In 1904, when the Geological Society was pre- 
paring for its centenary celebration in 1907, it 
was decided to prepare a volume in which the 
birth, development, and influence of the Society 
might be traced. It was felt that the writing of 
the historical part of such a volumé could be safely 
entrusted to one who claimed close connection 
with the Society and its work for half a century. 
Woodward was elected to the Geological Society 
in 1868, and was the recipient of the Murchison 
Fund in 1885, the Murchison Medal in 1897, and 
the Wollaston Medal in 1909. He was also one 
of the most active members of the Geologists’ 
Association, and served as president in 1893-4. 
He was elected to the Royal Society in 1896. 
His health had begun to fail at the time of his 
retirement from the Geological Survey, but he 
worked on with untiring industry until within a 
few hours of his death, on February 6, 1914. 
COL. A. R. CLARKE, C.B., F.R.S. 
iy is with more than usual regret that we record 
the death, on February 11, at eighty-five years 
of age, of Colonel Alexander Ross Clarke, one 
of the foremost geodesists of our time. Born in 
1828, he was commissioned second lieutenant in 
the Corps of Royal Engineers in 1847, and was 
appointed to the Ordnance Survey in 1850. From 
this, date onwards to his retirement in 1881 his 
energies were devoted to the work of the Survey 
with the exception of a three-year tour of service 
in Canada (1851-4). Throughout this period the 
work of the Ordnance Survey was in a most 
interesting stage, and it was fortunate that he 
was available to assist in the development of its — 
scientific labours. 
In 1856 Clarke took charge of the trigono- 
metrical and levelling departments. The work of 
the Principal Triangulation was complete in the 
field, and in 1858 Clarke published the final re- 
sults. The reduction of the observations by the 
method of least squares was in itself a laborious 
task, but in this volume is published in addition 
his first investigation into the figure of the earth. 
In 1861 appeared, in two volumes, the abstracts: 
