Professor Sir T. W. Edgeworth David. 5 



and it lias become a large institution through which more than 

 two hundred students pass each year. Professor David was soon 

 recognized as a leading scientist in Australia. He was President of 

 the Geological Section of the Australasian Association for the 

 Advancement of Science in Hobart in 1892 and at Brisbane in 1895, 

 of the Linnean Society of New South Wales in 1894—5, and of the 

 Royal Society of New South Wales in 1896. In his addresses to 

 these bodies he gave valuable summaries of the knowledge of volcanic 

 action, the structural features, and evidence for glaciation throughout 

 Australia, and the Mesozoic history of Eastern Australia and New 

 Zealand. In 1897 he was appointed to the Committee of the Royal 

 Society of England for investigating the structure of coral reefs, 

 and was entrusted with the leadership of the second coral-boring 

 expedition to Funafuti, where, after overcoming many difficulties, 

 he succeeded in obtaining a complete core, from a bore sunk to the 

 depth of 1,118 feet. He also carried out a survey of the atoll and 

 investigations on the growth of corals.^ The examination of the 

 material thus obtained yielded most important infonnation. Quickly 

 following upon this work was the conclusion of his studies of the 

 immense development of Devonian radiolarian rocks in New South 

 Wales, in which the evidence is clear that these were formed 

 in comparatively shallow water, and not in abyssal depths, such as 

 many authorities believed to be essential to the deposition of 

 radiolarian sediment. The value of these researches was recognized 

 in the award to him of the Bigsby Medal of the Geological Society 

 of London (1899) and his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society 

 (1900). 



In 1904 Professor David presided over the Australasian 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, which met at Dunedin, 

 New Zealand, and gave ^.n inspiring address upon the aims and ideals 

 of Australasian Science. He continued to devote special attention 

 to the Australian evidence of past glaciation, Pleistocene, Permo- 

 Carboniferous and Cambrian (?), and in 1906 visited the glaciated 

 districts of Southern India on his way to the meeting of the 

 International Geological Congress in Mexico, before which he 

 presented a discussion of the evidence and explanatory hypotheses 

 for such climatic fluctuations. At this time also appeared the first 

 instalment of his researches on the Hunter River Coalfield, a large 

 quarto memoir with many maps and sections, devoted especially to 

 matters of economic importance. 



His interest in the problem of glaciation led him to accept 

 Lieut. Shackleton's invitation to him to join the British Antarctic 

 Expedition of 1907-09, and while in the Far South he investigated 

 the meteorological features, general geology, and the former greater 

 extent of ice in Antarctica, made the first ascent of Mount Erebus,, 

 and, in company with his former student, now Sir Douglas Mawson,, 



' The adventures of this Expedition are delightfully told in Mrs. David's 

 book, Funafuti, an Unscientific Account of a Scientific Expedition. 



