Ixxiv 



eal, and ecclesiastical interests of his time, and giving frequent indications 

 of that humble faith in God which was the foundation of his character, and 

 which brightened his declining years and the closing scenes of his earthly- 

 life. His many personal friends will retain his memory in their warm 

 affection. Posterity will know him mainly for having opened up new 

 regions in our knowledge of optical phenomena, and for having given 

 a mighty impulse to science during two-thirds of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury.— J. H. G. 



Charles Giles Bridle Daubeny* was born February 11, 1795, at 

 Stratton in Gloucestershire, third son of the Rev. James Daubeny, entered 

 Winchester School in 1808, and was elected to a demyship in Magdalen 

 College, Oxford, in 1810. In 1814, at the age of 19, he took the 

 degree of B.A. in the second class, according to the old style of the 

 Oxford Examinations. In 1815 he won the Chancellor's Prize for the 

 Latin Essay, the prize for the English Essay in the same year being gained 

 by Arnold. 



Destined for the profession of medicine, he proceeded to London and 

 Edinburgh as a medical student (1815-18). The lectures of Professor 

 Jameson in Edinburgh on Geology and Mineralogy attracted his earnest 

 attention, and strengthened the desire to cultivate natural science which 

 had been awakened by the teaching of Dr. Kidd at Oxford. In Dr. Kidd's 

 class-room the future historian of volcanoes had frequently met Buckland 

 and the Conybeares, Whateley and the Duncans — men of vigorous minds 

 and various knowledge. The change from thoughtful Oxford to active 

 Edinburgh was the crisis in Daubeny's career. The fight was then raging 

 in the modern Athens between Plutonists and Neptunists, Huttonians and 

 Wernerians, and the possession of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Craig was 

 sternly debated by the rival worshippers of fire and water. Daubeny 

 entered keenly into this discussion, and, after quitting the University of 

 Edinburgh, proceeded, in 18 J 9, on a leisurely tour through Prance, every- 

 where collecting evidence on the geological and chemical history of the 

 globe, and sent to Professor Jameson from Auvergne the earliest notices 

 which had appeared in England of that remarkable volcanic region f. 

 Some of the views afterwards advanced by the young physicist touching 

 the elevation of the hills and the geological age of the valleys of Auvergne £ 

 have been reexamined and discussed by later eminent writers, such as 

 Scrope, Murchison, Lyell — not always in agreement with him, or, indeed, 

 with one another ; while the prehistoric antiquity of the volcanoes them- 



* Extracted from a more extended Obituary Notice of Dr. Daubeny, read to tbe Ash- 

 molean Society of Oxford, by Professor John Phillips, F.R.S., February 17, 1868. 

 f Letters on the Volcanoes of Auvergne, in Jameson's Edinburgh Journal, 1820-21. 

 t Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1831. 



