476 Obituary — Wheelton Hind. 



OBITUARY. 



Wheelton Hind, M.D., B.S., F.R.C.S., F.G.S. 



Born 1860. Died June 21, 1920. 



Dr. Wheelton Hind was born ^ Roxeth, near Harrow, in 1860, 

 and died after a comparatively short illness at Ashley, near Stoke- 

 on-Trent, on June 21 of this year. He received his medical training 

 at Guy's Hospital and London University, where he graduated 

 M.D., and also gained the Fellowship of the Royal College of 

 Surgeons. In 1884 he began practice in Stoke-on-Trent, and during 

 the following thirty years established a reputation as one of the 

 foremost surgeons in the district, being at the time of his death 

 the senior member of the surgical staff of the North Staffordshire 

 Infirmary. 



So far as research work is concerned, Hind's interest in geology 

 practically dates from his arrival in Stoke, for very shortly thereafter 

 he made the first of a long series of contributions on local geology 

 to the Transactions of the North Staffordshire Naturalists' Field 

 Club. Amongst his earliest papers was one on the geology of Suffolk, 

 which was incorporated in his father's book on the flora of that 

 county. As might be expected from his location in a coal-mining 

 district, most of his work related to the stratigraphy and 

 palaeontology of the Carboniferous rocks, especially of the lower 

 members of that series. In an endeavour to find some key to the 

 succession of these strata he soon extended his investigations 

 to the corresponding rocks of Derbyshire, Lancashire, and York- 

 shire, where he collaborated with Mr. J. A. Howe in a detailed 

 examination of the Lower Carboniferous sequence of the Pendle 

 Hill area. As a result of this work the hitherto recognized 

 classification of this series underwent considerable modification 

 by the recognition of the " Pendleside Series " of shales and thin 

 limestones, with a characteristic fauna, as a group intermediate 

 between the Carboniferous Limestone and the Millstone Grit and. 

 differing essentially, both in lithology and fossils, from the Yoredale 

 Series. The development of this series in Derbyshire and Stafford- 

 shire was recognized, and it was also traced to the Isle of Man and 

 Ireland. 



The basis of Hind's stratigraphical work was the attempt to 

 discover a series of life-zones by means of which the Carboniferous 

 rocks could be subdivided and those in different districts correlated. 

 For several years he acted as secretary of the British Association 

 Committee on " Life-zones in the British Carboniferous Rocks ", 

 and not only collected assiduously himself but also identified much 

 of the material obtained by others. "The comparative lack of success 

 in this work, so far as the Carboniferous Limestone is concerned, 

 was possibly due to the fact that most of the collecting was done 

 in the North Midland area, where continuous sequences are con- 

 spicuously absent. Even the results of Vaughan's brilliant researches 



