210 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
Northamptonshire, where he lived till early manhood. His birth- 
place being on the outskirts of the Bedford purlieus, one of the 
great English forests, he became passionately addicted to field 
sports, and there can be no doubt that the keen powers of 
observation developed in the pursuit of sport stood him in good 
stead when in after years his mind was directed to the more noble 
pursuit of science. Having joined the coastguard service while 
still a young man, he was stationed at various places on the east 
and south coasts of England. Those were the palmy days of 
smuggling, and Mr. Peach, who was always an indefatigable 
officer, had inany hand-to-hand encounters with some of the most 
desperate characters engaged in the lawless traffic. It was 
while stationed at Cromer, in Norfolk, that his attention was 
first attracted to the objects cast up on the beach. The living 
marine animals and alge, on the one hand, led him to study 
marine zoology and algology; while, on the other hand, the 
remains of the extinct mammalia exposed by the sea from the 
Cromer Forest bed naturally aroused him to the study of 
paleontology. To all these branches of science he afterwards 
made many valuable contributions. These studies brought him 
into contact with other workers in the same fields—in zoology, 
Darwin, Milne-Edwards, Edward Forbes, Allman, Owen, Huxley, 
Wyville Thomson, Bowerbank, Alder, Hincks; in algology, 
Harvey and Mrs. Greville; in geology and paleontology, Buckland, 
De la Beche, Murchison, Lyell, Hugh Miller, Nicol, Geikie, all of 
whom were more or less indebted to him for direct help in their 
researches, as reference to their works will fully bear out. Many of 
his discoveries, especially his earlier ones, were first announced by 
him before the British Association. 
It was while stationed as Riding Officer of the Customs at 
Gorran Haven and Fowey, in Cornwall, that Mr. Peach did the 
admirable work that led to his election as one of our correspond- 
ing members. He was the first man to find fossils in the quartzite 
of Gorran, and thus to settle the age of the Lower Silurian rocks 
of Cornwall. Numerous communications were made by him to 
the Royal Cornwall Geological Society, the Polytechnic, the 
Royal Institution of Cornwall, and our Society ; and our museum 
is still enriched with some of his presentations. His great 
Cornish collection is, however, in the museum of the Geological 
Society at Penzance. 
