Yol. 54. J ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT, 1x1 



tirm. There he married a Spanish lady, but had the misfortune to 

 lose his wife within a year. On his return to England, after an 

 absence of 8 j^ears, he took a share in a business on Snow Hill, 

 and devoted all his spare time to scientific work. He had already 

 become an ardent geologist, and his first paper, published in the 

 Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society for the year 1860, 

 was on the discovery of some fossil remains near Eahia (vol. xvi, 

 p. 263). 



' But he was quick to perceive the importance of studying the 

 structure of rocks by the method which a few years before had 

 been initiated by Dr. Clifton Sorby. He prepared his own specimens, 

 and acquired such skill that, in the writer's opinion, though he may 

 have been equalled, he has never been surpassed in this craft by 

 any English worker. In course of time he formed a large 

 collection of both rock-specimens and microscopic slides, to the 

 study of which he devoted himself with great energy. The business 

 in which he was a partner, unfortunately, was not prosperous, and 

 had to be abandoned about 1880, when he was appointed librarian 

 to the Mason College. Though circumstances had compelled him 

 to sell his collection some little time before to the British Museum, 

 he set to work energetically to form another, and continued at his 

 favourite study. But now health began to fail ; any continuous 

 mental exertion brought on distressing attacks of vertigo, and in 

 1887 he was obliged to retire from his post at the Mason College. 

 After this, though he was still able to continue his geological reading, 

 and to work quietly with his microscope, he was unfit to bear the 

 strain of writing a paper. His last effort, a valuable report on 

 the effect of contact-metamorphism exhibited by the Silurian rocks 

 near the town of New Galloway (Proc. B-oy. Soe. vol. xlvi, p. 193), 

 could not have appeared without collaboration. 



'Increasing ill-health and grave anxieties unhappily cast a 

 shadow over AUport's later years, but all was endured with quiet 

 patience and gentle fortitude. Some 3 years ago he quitted 

 Birmingham for Cheltenham, where he died after a very short 

 illness on July 7th, his mind happily remaining unclouded till near 

 the end. Allport was not a voluminous writer. He published 

 rather less than twenty papers in all, most of which appeared in 

 this Magazine, or in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological 

 Society. In the former, those on the South Staffordshire Basalts 

 (1869), tlie Wolf Bock Phonolite (1871), and the Pitchstones of 

 Arran (1872), may be specially mentioned ; in the latter, the highly 



