lxviii PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I904. 



Survey days. His gentle, kindly, modest nature made him a great 

 favourite among his colleagues and friends. 



When in 1S67 the organization of the staff of the Geological 

 Survey was enlarged and re-arranged, Aveline became what was 

 called ' District Surveyor,' and was entrusted with the charge of the 

 mapping of the Lake District. For the next fifteen years he con- 

 tinued to reside in that region, until on reaching the age of 60 he 

 claimed his retirement. Quitting the Survey in 1882, he retired to 

 his paternal property at Wrington, in Somerset, and lived there as a 

 country-squire, looking after his farm and attending to his family. 

 As he always wrote with difficulty and hardly ever save under official 

 compulsion, he made no contributions to science except his share in 

 the Survey Memoirs, and now and then a letter to the ' Geological 

 Magazine,' when some published statement stirred him into un- 

 willing effort. Elected into this Society as far back as 1848, he 

 seemed almost to have already passed away from us when the 

 Council in 1894 awarded to him its Murchison Medal. This appro- 

 priate recognition of his long years of arduous toil in the service of 

 geology gave him the keenest pleasure. 



He had found his Somerset home increasingly inconvenient, on 

 account of its distance from any centre of life, so that in the end 

 he gave it up and settled finally in London, where he spent his 

 last years and where he died on the 12th of May, 1903, at the age 

 of 81. 



The value of the geological work achieved by Aveline is not to be 

 estimated from the number or importance of the memoirs and 

 papers which he contributed to the literature of the science. As 

 terse descriptions of the local facts which he had observed, these 

 publications will always deserve attention. Most of them are to 

 be found among the Sheet-Memoirs of the Geological Survey. He 

 was an admirable field-geologist, with a keen eye for geological 

 structure and a rare capacity for accurate mapping. It is by his 

 maps that the nature and importance of his scientific work must be 

 judged. Xo one who, with these maps in hand, has followed in his 

 footsteps among the crags of North Wales, can fail to recognize his 

 geological prowess. In the bede-roll of the Geological Survey few 

 names will stand out more prominently than that of William Talbot 

 Aveline. 



Kobert Etheridge was born at Ross, in Herefordshire, on 

 December 3rd, 1819. Having come in his youth to Bristol, he was 



