THE 
GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. 
NEW SERIES. DECADE Ill. VOL: X; 
No. VI.—JUNE, 1893. 
ORLGEEN Ash AR TEicliEs. 
T.—Eminent Living Geotoaists. No. 8. 
Professor JosepH Presrwicu, D.C.L., F.R.S., F.G.S., F.C.S., 
Assoc. Inst. C.H., Corr. Inst. France, etc., etc. 
(With a Portrait.) 
UR venerable friend Professor Prestwich, who has now attained 
his 82nd year, may serve as an admirable illustration of the law 
of “the survival of the fittest,” for years have failed to dim either 
the brightness of his eyes, or the clearness of his intellect; the only 
sign of advanced longevity being the inability to undertake those 
long walks over the Chalk Hills around Shoreham, in which he, till 
lately, delighted to indulge. 
Mr. Prestwich is one of the few survivors of the second generation 
of great British Geologists, who were led by Buckland, Sedgwick, 
Conybeare, Fitton, De la Beche, Murchison, Scrope, and Lyell; and 
who had for his contemporaries Agassiz, Phillips, Owen, Darwin, 
Godwin-Austen, Forbes, Morris, Ramsay, W. Smyth, S. V. Wood, 
Wetherell and Edwards, all of whom have, alas, passed away, whilst 
his older surviving geological friends Sir John Evans, Rev. O. Fisher, 
T. Rupert Jones, R. Etheridge, and others, are all his juniors. 
During his long life Professor Prestwich has witnessed great 
changes of views and vast increase of knowledge in his favorite 
science of geology. In his boyhood, when Buckland began to 
lecture at Oxford, on the “new and curious sciences of Geology 
and Mineralogy,” geologists had only begun to suspect the import- 
ance of cave-remains, and of the discovery of bones of recently- 
extinct mammalia. Although his earliest triumph was won by his 
memoir on “The Geology of Coalbrookdale,” and his later studies 
led him to become the first authority on the water-bearing-strata 
around London, yet he was destined to be the investigator who first 
demonstrated to English men of science that the flint implements, 
found in the valley of the Somme, in contiguity with fossil mam- 
malia, were genuine works of man, contemporaneous with extinct 
animals, a conclusion which might readily have been reached long 
before, but for the absolute prepossession in favor of the views of 
man’s limited existence upon the earth which were then current. 
The descendant of an old Lancashire family, Joseph Prestwich 
was born at Pensbury, Clapham, near London, March 12th, 1812. 
He received his early education near London, passed two years at 
Paris in a school attached to the College Bourbon, thence he was 
DECADE III.—VYOL X.—NO, YI. 16 
