194 Eminent Living Geologists — G. Poulett Scrope. 



of this stupendous example of volcanic energy, and of its effects, 

 impressed Mr. Poulett Scrope with those opinions on the true 

 character and mode of action of volcanic force which distinguish his 

 views on this subject from those of the greater number of writers who 

 have treated upon the same matters, but who possessed a less fortimate 

 combination of opportunities for the direct personal observation of 

 the phenomena, and the formation of a sound judgment as to their 

 real nature. 



Mr. Scrope contributed to Brande's Journal of Science a short 

 account of the great eruption of 1822, with a drawing of the crater 

 as it appeared immediately after.^ 



In the summer of 1823 he spent some time in the examination of 

 the volcanic region of the Upper and Lower Eifel, the Siebergebirge, 

 &c., and subsequently sent a detailed description of them to the 

 Edinburgh Journal of Science.^ Eetuming to England, he naturally 

 sought the society of fellow-labourers in the field of Geology, became 

 a member of the Geological Society (1824), and in the next year 

 was elected one of its Secretaries, having for colleague the then Mr. 

 now Sir Charles Lyell, with whom a community of ideas on the 

 expediency of taking the existing agencies of change on the earth's 

 present surface as the only sure guide to its past history formed a 

 bond of intimacy and mutual regard. The drawings which Mr. 

 Scrope had brought with him from Central France, and which were 

 freely shown to his Geological associates, and the explanation they 

 afforded, obvious to the eye, of the true character of volcanic pheno- 

 mena, up to that time more or less hotly disputed, naturally attracted 

 much attention. In 1824-5 Mr. Scrope published the first edition of 

 his work " On Volcanos, the Character and Probable Causes of their 

 Phenomena, and their Connection with the Present State and Past 

 History of the Earth," &c. This work, of which a second and much 

 improved edition was published by Longmans in 1852, was not at 

 first very favourably received among geologists — owing, no doubt, 

 to a faulty arrangement of the subject, the theoretical, and in many 

 respects novel, views of the author being put forward in somewhat 

 too dogmatic a form, without being preceded, or even sufficiently 

 illustrated, by a statement of the facts and observations on which 

 they were based, and which had been collected by the author's close 

 and long-continued study of volcanic regions, made, as we have 

 briefly stated, in the preceding years. It must be remembered, too, 

 that at that period geologists were not yet even agreed upon such 

 elementary ideas as the volcanic origin of Basalt. No wonder, then, 

 that a work which professed to teach that not merely all Basalts, but 

 the Trachytes and Porphyries, Syenites, and even Granite itself, were 

 varieties of Lava, and at the time of their protrusion at an intense 

 temperature contained a certain quantity of water, interstitially 

 combined with their mineral elements, was met by many with 

 distrust, by some even with ridicule. A few years later, how- 

 ever, the justness of Mr. Poulett Scrope's ideas on these and other 



1 Journal Royal Inst., vol. iv., p. 175. 



2 Edin. Journal of Science for June, 1826. 



