430 Ohituary — Mr. Samuel Allport. 



of learned societies. He has greatly enlarged the knowledge 

 of antiquities and their real relationships, not only by original 

 research, but by his willing advice and ready information to 

 inquirers, whether in London or the provinces. He has bequeathed 

 all his most valuable collections to the British Museum. He was 

 elected to the Eoyal Society in 1854. For many years an active and 

 valued Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, he was elected Director 

 of the Society in 1858 ; subsequently for some years he was Vice- 

 President, and eventually became President in 1892. T. R. J. 



SAMUEL ALLPORT, F.G.S. 



BoKN January 23, 1816. Died July 7, 1897. 



By the death of Mr. Samuel Allport we have lost one of the 

 pioneers in microscopic petrology. He was born at Birmingham on 

 January 23, 1816, being descended from an old Staffordshire family, 

 and was educated at King Edward's School in that town. For some 

 years he was in the office of Eabone Brothers, and then went to 

 Bahia in South America as business manager for another firm. 

 There he married a Spanish lady, but had the misfortune to lose 

 his wife within a year. On his return to England, after an absence 

 of eight years, he took a share in a business on Snow Hill, and 

 devoted all his spare time to scientific work. He had already 

 become an ardent geologist, and his first paper, published in the 

 Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society for the year 1860, was 

 on the discovery of some fossil remains near Bahia (vol. xvi, 

 p. 263). But he was quick to perceive the importance of studying 

 the structure of rocks by the method which a few years before had 

 been initiated by Dr. Clifton Sorby. He prepared his own specimens, 

 and acquired such skill that in the writer's opinion, though he may 

 have been equalled, he has never been surpassed in this craft by any 

 English worker. In course of time he formed a large collection 

 of both rock-specimens and microscoj^ic slides, to the study of which 

 be devoted himself with great energy. The business in which he 

 was a partner unfortunately was not prosperous, and had to be 

 abandoned about 1880, when he was appointed librarian to the 

 Mason College. Though circumstances had compelled him to sell 

 his collection some little time before to the British Museum, he set 

 to work energetically to form another, and continued at his favourite 

 study. But now health began to fail ; any continuous mental 

 exertion brought on distressing attacks of vertigo, and in 1887 he 

 was obliged to retire from his post at the Mason College. After 

 this, though he was still able to continue his geological reading, 

 and to w^ork quietly with his microscope, he was unfit to bear the 

 strain of writing a paper. His last effort, a valuable report on the 

 effect of Contact Metamorphism exhibited by the Silurian Kocks 

 near the town of New Galloway (Proo. Roy. Soc, xlvi, 193), could 

 not have appeared without collaboration. Increasing ill-health and 

 grave anxieties unhappily cast a shadow over Allport's later years, 

 but all was endured with quiet patience and gentle fortitude. Some 

 three years ago he quitted Birmingham for Cheltenham, where 



