1878.1 
( 143 ) 
OBITUARY. 
THOMAS BELT, F.G.S, 
I N the obituary of the year, and amongst the list of scientific men who have 
loved science for itself, and sought truth fur truth’s sake, few will leave a 
brighter or happier memory with their friends than Thomas Belt. 
Born in Newcastle in 1832, he was an early member of the Tyneside Natural- 
ists’ Club, and there began that love of nature and nature’s ways that ever 
remained fresh with him throughout his life. 
In 1852 his adventurous nature took him to the Australian Gold Diggings, 
and there (the leading spirit of a family of four brothers located in the colony), 
from 1853 to i860 he successively visited, as a miner, the districts of Friars 
and Forest Creeks, Maryborough, Mount Molingul, Kingower, Korong, Mount 
Egerton. 
In this rough “ School of Mines” he acquired that practical knowledge which 
not only served him so well in after life in his profession, but gave him that 
insight into the building-up of the earth’s crust which enabled him, not seldom , 
to put forth novel theories in geology and natural phenomena. Unorthodox as 
they were when first promulgated, yet, silently and solidly, they commended 
themselves to those who studed the facts and the inferences he drew from 
them. Amid real hard work in Australia, he found time to speculate on the 
flight of birds, and to show that the mechanical adtion of the bird’s win^s is 
not always the prime mover, but that the force of the wind, particularly in the 
Albatross, is the real agent that carries them sweeping over the ocean with 
the rapidity of the wind itself. Further, that this force is utilised by the 
faculty the bird has of balancing itself against the power of the wind. It is 
the equivalent of the string of the boy’s kite, and almost overwhelming proof 
of this theory is afforded by the fadt that the albatross is helpless in a calm, and 
cannot — from a level surface, as the deck of a ship — raise itself or fly so well 
as a domestic goose. 
His theory of whirlwinds, viz., that the upper strata of air, pressed upon 
the lower rarefied and lighter strata, till a casual opening or thinning out in 
the upper layer leaves the lower strata free to fly upwards, and to form the 
circular whirlwinds common even in this country, was an outcome of his 
adtual experience acquired in the dreadful dust storms of Australia. It is a 
curious fadt that the paper on this subjedt, sent to a Melbourne scientific 
society, and put aside as unworthy of notice, was sent by Mr. Belt to the 
present Astronomer Royal, and then, as communicated by the Astronomer 
Royal to the Philosophical Institute of Victoria, was accepted and read in 
Melbourne, in December, 1857. The paper itself will be found in the *• London, 
Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine” for January, 1859. 
The boldest of his speculations, and one of the soundest, as after events 
proved, was his plan for crossing the Australian continent. He proposed, at 
the time the Government Expedition was mooted to replace the costly plans 
of the Government by the following scheme: — That he and his brother 
Anthony (who was unfortunately lost in the Royal Charter ), should be conveyed 
to the Gulf of Carpentaria, with about twenty pack-horses loaded with pro- 
visions and water ; that an escort should protedt them for some twenty miles 
from the coast, and that then the two voyagers only, with their pack-horses 
should make their way to Cooper’s Creek, the farthest known accessibl 
point from the Vidtorian settled distridls. Belt argued justly: ‘‘If we fail, 
only two lives will be lost, but all the chances are in our favour ; we are pro- 
vided with water and food more than ample to cover the distance we have to 
travel. Every step of our road carries us homewards and to safety. If we 
