lxxii PROCEEDINGS OP THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I904, 



was born in Dublin in 1822, was educated partly at Weymouth, and 

 took his degree of B.A. at Trinity College, Dublin, in 184G, and M.A. 

 in 1867. At the age of six-and-twenty he was ordained as a clergy- 

 man of the Church of England, and from 1849 to 1 857 was Rector 

 of Shangton, in the south of Leicestershire. Having conscientious 

 scruples as to retaining an office which he had obtained under 

 the system of lay-patronage, he resigned the living, and then 

 became Curate of Waltham-on-the- Wolds, a village on the Jurassic 

 scarp between Melton Mowbray and Grantham — a position which 

 he continued to hold until, in 1861, soon after the death of his 

 father, he returned to Dublin, which capital thenceforth became 

 his permanent home. 



He had already begun to study the geology of his native country. 

 As far back as the year 1863 he read to the Geological Society of 

 Dublin a paper in which he discussed the nature and origin of 

 slickensides. But it was the glaciation of the country that, from 

 the beginning of his career, especially fascinated him. In pursuit 

 of the trail of the old ice-sheets, he travelled far and wide over 

 Ireland, and gained such a knowledge of the subject as enabled him 

 to present, for the first time, a luminous account of the evidence that 

 the island had once been cased in land-ice which moved off in all 

 directions to the sea. In the year 1864 he began his series of 

 glacial memoirs with one on the phenomena displayed in the district 

 around Dublin, which was read before the Geological Society there. 

 It will be remembered that, at that time, although a few British 

 pioneers had come to the conclusion that the phenomena of the 

 striated rock-surfaces all over these islands, and the origin and 

 distribution of the Boulder-Clay, could only be accounted for by the 

 action of sheets of land-ice, the great majority of the leaders as well 

 as the rank and file of our geological army still stoutly held to the 

 theory of submergence and floating ice. Maxwell Close, however, 

 from the evidence which he obtained among the Wicklow Hills, soon 

 became convinced that the facts could only be explained on the 

 land-ice theory ; and he stated clearly and cogently [the grounds 

 upon which this conviction rested. He inferred, from the striated 

 surfaces around Bray, that the ice in that district must have been 

 more than 1120 feet thick ; while, from the occurrence of transporred 

 and striated stones, he concluded that it was probably much thicker, 

 reaching at least to a depth of 1760 feet, if indeed it did not sweep 

 over the summit of Lugnaquilla itself, which is 3039 feet above the 

 sea. As a proof of his alertness and sagacity as an observer, it may 



