xxvi Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased, 



tarian as opposed to a catastrophic point of view, it deserves far more 

 attention than it has received. 



There can be no question of his strong uniformitarianism. One of his 

 objections to some of his colleagues' work was against the use of faults to 

 explain abrupt boundaries. It was, however, characteristic of his love of truth 

 that when Mr. E. Oldham found that the typical Nahun-Siwalik section, to 

 which Henry Medlicott had so long referred as an example of deposition 

 against a pre-existing cliff, might after all be a simple fault, he revisited the 

 section and in the simplest manner admitted that he had misunderstood it. 

 Only those who remember the whole controversy about faults can have an idea 

 of how great a blow to his theories this must have been, and from some 

 experience of Directors of Surveys, there are few of whom it could be said, 

 that an error of so much importance was so frankly acknowledged. On 

 the larger question, whether, for instance, the great lines terminating the 

 Gondwana basins of Bengal, Orissa, and the Central Provinces are simple 

 faults, or whether they represent the boundaries of the old river valleys in 

 which the Gondwanas were formed, and to which they were limited, these 

 boundaries having subsequently been slightly crushed and dislocated, but 

 not greatly faulted, no complete answer has yet been given. In some cases 

 at least, for instance, in the Mopani field of the Satpuras, strong evidence 

 was brought forward by Henry Medlicott in favour of his view of original 

 limit, and even in the case of Eaniganj, where unquestionably consider- 

 able faulting exists, the absence of outliers of the coal-bearing rocks south 

 of the field is a difficulty in supposing that a simple great upthrow alone 

 terminates the Gondwana area. Between the two authors of the Manual 

 of Indian Geology there was a difference of opinion on this point, and it 

 cannot be said that the question is completely settled. 



The above may serve to recall a few of the services of Henry Medlicott to 

 the Geological Survey and to India, and some of the discoveries which he 

 made in science. It cannot do more than suggest the amount of labour that 

 he devoted to his work. His memory should remain as a striking example 

 of the thoroughly honest and capable geologist and as a worthy head of a 

 scientific branch of the Indian Government. 



W. T. B.* 



* [A melancholy interest attaches to this Notice by Dr. W. T. Blanford. It was written 

 by him at the request of the Council, and the proofs were duly sent to him, but they 

 arrived when he was already too ill to look at them, and he died before they could be 

 printed off and published. His genial sketch of his old friend and colleague was thus the 

 last task he accomplished in his own life.— Sec. K.S.] 



