Sn BWemoriam. 
ALEXANDER HENRY GREEN. 
Apart from his general reputation as a geologist, the late Professor 
Green’s eight years’ connection with the Yorkshire College and his 
Presidency (in 1891) of the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union had made 
for him a wide circle of acquaintance in the North of England, and 
to all who knew him his death last August must have been a matter 
of sincere regret. 
Born in 1832, he received his early education at Ashby-de-la- 
Zouch Grammar School under his father, the Rev. T. S. Green. 
Proceeding to Cambridge, he studied mathematics, and graduated 
as Sixth Wrangler in 1855, being elected in the same year to 
a Fellowship at his College (Caius). The effect of his mathematical 
training is very clearly to be traced in his subsequent work, giving 
a stamp of thoroughness to his methods and precision to his results. 
Geologists, as he remarked at Leeds when presiding over Section C 
of the British Association, are in continual danger of becoming 
loose reasoners, grasping at general ideas without submitting them 
to quantitative tests; and, although he modestly pleaded guilty to 
the same tendency, his own writings are noticeably free from the 
weakness which he deprecated. The same clearness of view and 
desire to face the exact conditions of every debatable question are 
found in his ‘ Physical Geology.” His lectures and writings were 
remarkable for lucidity, the language being chosen to reflect 
accurately the image in his own mind. His lecture-notes were 
marvels of neatness. 
Green’s active career divides into three periods: his connection 
with the Geological Survey from 1861 to 1874, his residence at Leeds, 
and his tenure of the Professorship of Geology at Oxford, where 
he succeeded the late Sir Joseph Prestwich in 1888. In the course 
of his work for the Geological Survey he mapped considerable tracts 
of the Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks of the Midland counties, and 
especially of the Carboniferous rocks of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, etc. 
Of the numerous official memoirs of which he was author or joint- 
author, the most important was ‘The Geology of the Yorkshire 
Coal-field,’ published in 1878. It was as an authority on the 
Carboniferous formations and an expert in matters connected with 
coal-mining that he was best known; and in 1882 the Cape Govern- 
ment selected him to examine and report on the coal-formation of 
that colony. 
Green’s residence in Yorkshire could only be regarded by his 
friends with mixed feelings. He did much excellent work there, 
April 1897. 
