The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864-1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer

The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer

The Geological Society of London Books Editorial Committee Chief Editor

Bob Pankhurst (UK) Society Books Editors

John Gregory (UK) Jim Griffiths (UK) John Howe (UK) Rick Law (USA) Phil Leat (UK) Nick Robins (UK) Randell Stephenson (UK) Society Books Advisors

Mike Brown (USA) Eric Buffetaut (France) Jonathan Craig (Italy) Reto Giere´ (Germany) Tom McCann (Germany) Doug Stead (Canada) Gonzalo Veiga (Argentina) Maarten de Wit (South Africa)

Geological Society books refereeing procedures The Society makes every effort to ensure that the scientific and production quality of its books matches that of its journals. Since 1997, all book proposals have been refereed by specialist reviewers as well as by the Society’s Books Editorial Committee. If the referees identify weaknesses in the proposal, these must be addressed before the proposal is accepted. Once the book is accepted, the Society Book Editors ensure that the volume editors follow strict guidelines on refereeing and quality control. We insist that individual papers can only be accepted after satisfactory review by two independent referees. The questions on the review forms are similar to those for Journal of the Geological Society. The referees’ forms and comments must be available to the Society’s Book Editors on request. Although many of the books result from meetings, the editors are expected to commission papers that were not presented at the meeting to ensure that the book provides a balanced coverage of the subject. Being accepted for presentation at the meeting does not guarantee inclusion in the book. More information about submitting a proposal and producing a book for the Society can be found on its web site: www.geolsoc.org.uk.

It is recommended that reference to all or part of this book should be made in the following way: From: Leake, B. E. 2011. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864– 1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34.

GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY MEMOIR NO. 34

The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864– 1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer BY

BERNARD ELGEY LEAKE PhD (Liverpool), DSc (Bristol), DSc (Glasgow), FRSE, FGS Emeritus Professor of Geology, University of Glasgow Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University, Wales

2011 Published by The Geological Society London

THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY The Geological Society of London (GSL) was founded in 1807. It is the oldest national geological society in the world and the largest in Europe. It was incorporated under Royal Charter in 1825 and is Registered Charity 210161. The Society is the UK national learned and professional society for geology with a worldwide Fellowship (FGS) of over 9000. The Society has the power to confer Chartered status on suitably qualified Fellows, and about 2000 of the Fellowship carry the title (CGeol). Chartered Geologists may also obtain the equivalent European title, European Geologist (EurGeol). One fifth of the Society’s fellowship resides outside the UK. To find out more about the Society, log on to www.geolsoc.org.uk. The Geological Society Publishing House (Bath, UK) produces the Society’s international journals and books, and acts as European distributor for selected publications of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), the Indonesian Petroleum Association (IPA), the Geological Society of America (GSA), the Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM) and the Geologists’ Association (GA). Joint marketing agreements ensure that GSL Fellows may purchase these societies’ publications at a discount. The Society’s online bookshop (accessible from www.geolsoc.org.uk) offers secure book purchasing with your credit or debit card. To find out about joining the Society and benefiting from substantial discounts on publications of GSL and other societies worldwide, consult www.geolsoc.org.uk, or contact the Fellowship Department at: The Geological Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BG: Tel. þ44 (0)20 7434 9944; Fax þ44 (0)20 7439 8975; E-mail: [email protected]. For information about the Society’s meetings, consult Events on www.geolsoc.org.uk. To find out more about the Society’s Corporate Affiliates Scheme, write to [email protected] Published by The Geological Society from: The Geological Society Publishing House, Unit 7, Brassmill Enterprise Centre, Brassmill Lane, Bath BA1 3JN, UK (Orders: Tel. þ44 (0)1225 445046, Fax þ44 (0)1225 442836) Online bookshop: www.geolsoc.org.uk/bookshop The publishers make no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. # The Geological Society of London 2011. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the provisions of the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS UK. Users registered with the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA: the item-fee code for this publication is 0305-8719/11/$15.00. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-86239-323-3 Typeset by Techset Composition Ltd., Salisbury, UK Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK Distributors North America For trade and institutional orders: The Geological Society, c/o AIDC, 82 Winter Sport Lane, Williston, VT 05495, USA Orders: Tel. þ1 800-972-9892 Fax þ1 802-864-7626 E-mail [email protected] For individual and corporate orders: AAPG Bookstore, PO Box 979, Tulsa, OK 74101-0979, USA Orders: Tel. þ1 918-584-2555 Fax þ1 918-560-2652 E-mail [email protected] Website http://bookstore.aapg.org India Affiliated East-West Press Private Ltd, Marketing Division, G-1/16 Ansari Road, Darya Ganj, New Delhi 110 002, India Orders: Tel. þ91 11 2327-9113/2326-4180 Fax þ91 11 2326-0538 E-mail [email protected]

Contents Frontispiece

vii

Chapter 10

The move to Melbourne University

61

Summary of major events in the life of J. W. Gregory

viii

Chapter 11 The National Antarctic Expedition of 1901: a fiasco avoided Background Gregory’s involvement Gregory’s resignation

65

Chapter 12 The ultimate accolade: election to FRS Election to FRS Assessment of research achieved before Australian input

73 73 73

Chapter 13 The Australian years: Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at Melbourne 1900 –1904 Settling into the university Appointment as Director of the Geological Survey of Victoria Life in Victoria Gregory’s work in Melbourne including visits to Tasmania and New Zealand Major publications ‘The Foundation of British East Africa’ The Lake Eyre expedition of 1901–2: ‘The Dead Heart of Australia’ The start of geography textbook writing ‘The Mount Lyell Mining Field, Tasmania’ ‘The Ballarat East Gold-Field’ Gregory’s resignation and departure from Melbourne Assessment

77

Preface Chapter 1 influences

ix Early life; family background and

Chapter 2 Becoming a geologist; burning the candle at both ends

65 65 68

1

5

Chapter 3 Assistant at the British Museum (Natural History) from 1887; early years Publications Echinoids Eozoon Corals Petrology Excursions abroad and first recognition Social and other life Continued publication

11

Chapter 4 The abortive 1892– 3 Villiers ‘Great Lake Rudolf Expedition’ to East Africa

19

Chapter 5 Gregory’s 1893 Lake Baringo & Mount Kenya Expedition: ‘The Great Rift Valley’

23

Chapter 6 Home after the African expedition East African-related publications and activities Publications on bryozoa, corals and Barbados and other activities Geological Society Council membership and BA activities West Indian corals and more on Barbados General

29 29 31

Chapter 7 Marriage, Bryozoa & journalism Marriage Bryozoa and echinoids Other activities Journalism

37 37 39 39 40

Chapter 8 The 1896 Conway Spitzbergen (Svalbard) Expedition and related polar work Spitzbergen Polar geology

43

Chapter 9 1896– 9: Frustrations, further travel and publications Disappointments and continued major echinoid and coral outputs, including the early use of statistics The arrangement of the continents and oceans Visit to the Caribbean Islands, March –May 1899 Numerous 1899 publications; Palaeozoic starfishes, corals, echinoids and bryozoa and Africa Anthropology

49

11 12 13 13 13 14 15 16

32 33 34

43 48

49 51 56 57 58

Chapter 14 Appointment as Professor of Geology at the University of Glasgow Appointment Background to the institution of the new Chair of Geology Settling in Departmental matters First year and subsidiary geology course Second, third and fourth year courses in geology Mining degrees University museum matters University matters Chapter 15 Early publications (1905 – 10) and research activity while in Glasgow Summary of the activities of the first five years Early BA activity while in Glasgow, including visits to Zimbabwe and the Witwatersrand Mines Mining geology Bryozoa Geographical contributions and publications Australian geography; insights into Gregory’s appreciation of Australia General geography Climate variations in the past The level of the sea Contributions to the Glasgow Geological Society Other activities Historical studies

77 80 82 84 87 87 88 91 94 94 94 96 99 99 100 102 102 104 106 107 108 109 111 111 113 114 116 117 117 121 122 122 123 124 124

vi

CONTENTS

Legal matters, including Gregory as an expert witness Expedition to Cyrenaica (Libya) Third visit to Australia (1909) Book reviews Dent’s scientific primer ‘Geology’

125 125 127 128 128

Chapter 16 Domestic, family and social activities and a social history intrusion Gregory’s Glasgow home Home life

133

Chapter 17 Activities between 1910 and 1917 Summary of activities The 1910 International Geological Congress and the iron ore resources of the world More on ‘Australia’ Visit to Dalmatia in 1911 Continued contributions to the Geological Society of Glasgow and Scottish geology ‘The Making of the Earth’ Visit to Benguella, Angola The classification of coast types, the nature and origin of fjords and lochs South Georgia The educational value of the cinema The Carlisle –Solway Basin BA involvement and Gregory’s fourth visit to Australia Other activities ‘The First Inhabitants of the World’ and ‘Geology of Today’ The Danbury Gravels The Fly River Eocene corals The Corrieyairack Road, Scotland Preglacial valleys Henry Darwin Rogers

139 139 139

133 135

139 140 140 142 143 144 146 146 146 147 149 150 150 150 151 151 151

Scottish glacial deposits Geological Society of Glasgow Visit to Burma in 1921 Expedition to Eastern Chinese Tibet, 1922 Christopher Gregory’s progress Further awards Return to the Essex rivers and the Lower Thames; also North Sea –Thames –Rhine history BA, IGC and International Geographical Congress activities 1920– 1929 Racial matters Other activities Geography textbook revision General lectures Yachting on the Corsair Book reviews Renewed taxonomic work on echinoids and corals Denudation and tectonism Economic mineral studies, IMM involvement & ‘The Elements of Economic Geology’ Human migration Water divining Journalism and BBC broadcasts President of the Geological Society, 1928–30, excluding Presidential addresses

166 166 167 167 171 171 172

Chapter 20 Opposition to continental drift and the origin of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans

187

Chapter 21 ‘Retirement’ with continued output Journal articles and lecturing Books published ‘Earthquakes and Volcanoes’ ‘General Stratigraphy’ ‘The Story of the Road’ ‘Dalradian Geology’

193 194 197 197 198 198 198

Chapter 22

The final fatal expedition to Peru

201

Chapter 23

Some of Gregory’s students

209

Chapter 24

Overall assessment and summary

211

Published works of J. W. Gregory

217

173 175 176 176 176 177 177 179 179 179 180 180 181 181

Chapter 18 1916–1919: work for the Government Wartime work in the War Office 1917 The Calcutta University Commission, 1917– 19 Awards Return to British East Africa (Kenya) in 1919 and the following related studies

155 155 156 158 159

Chapter 19 1919–29: return to Glasgow and subsequent activities Energy studies Glacial studies Irish eskers English eskers

163

Appendix 1

163 164 164 165

Appendix 2 List of books published by Professor J. W. Gregory

225

Index

227

John Walter Gregory at about the time of his 1914 visit to Australia when he was 50 years old. With acknowledgements to the University of Glasgow.

viii

SUMMARY OF MAJOR EVENTS

Summary of major events in the life of J. W. Gregory 1864. 1870. 1874. 1878. 1880. 1883. 1885. 1886. 1887. 1888. 1889. 1890. 1891.

1892. 1893.

1894. 1895. 1896. 1897. 1898. 1899. 1900.

1901.

1902. 1903.

John Walter Gregory born in London. Goes to Pestalozzian School. Goes to Stepney Grammar School. Leaves school; works on farm in Cheshire for two years. Returns to London. Becomes a wool sales clerk & starts night school. Joins the Geologists’ Association. Is probably studying at Birkbeck College. First identified published geological paper. Matriculates in London University; aiming for degree via Birkbeck & RSM. Elected FGS; appointed Assistant at British Museum (Natural History) (NHM). Elected FZS; first published paper after NHM appointment; start of the flood. First echinoid publication on NHM work. Goes with G. Cole to Cottian Alps. Goes to Bavaria for petrological work & continental museums for NHM work. Goes to International Geological Congress (IGC) in Washington, D. C. & travels extensively across USA. Gains First Class BSc in Geology. Published opus on Maltese echinoids that will gain him a London DSc in 1893. Summer mapping in Cottian Alps. Awarded moiety of Lyell Fund by GSL. Leaves for East Africa on Villiers Great Lake Rudolf Expedition. Severe attack of malaria; expedition collapses. Organises his own 5 month expedition to the Rift Valley, Lake Baringo & Mt. Kenya. Returns to London. First publication on Bryozoa. Elected to GSL Council. Marriage with honeymoon in Switzerland. First publication on coral taxonomy; journalism. On Conway expedition to Spitzbergen; interest in polar matters aroused; first child born. Rift Valley book appears with Gregory’s first anthropological output. Fails to secure Oxford Chair; frustration at lack of promotion prospects. On short NHM cruise in N. Atlantic; first propounds Tetrahedral Theory. Visit to Caribbean Islands; publication of massive study of the Jurassic corals of the Cutch (India) with early statistical methods. Accepts Chair in Melbourne. Starts work as Prof. on the geology & mining geology of Victoria. Appointed Leader of the British National Antarctic Expedition; second child born in England. Returns to the UK to resolve organisation of expedition. Short visit to see US mining schools; returns to Melbourne to wife & family; resigns as Antarctic expedition Leader; is elected FRS. Appointed Director of the Geological Survey of Victoria concurrent with Chair of Geology & Mineralogy. Start of the Lake Eyre expedition, Central Australia. Starts extramural lectures in Geography. First publications on Australian mining Geology. Starts re-organisation of Geological Survey of Victoria. Starts work in Tasmania; taken seriously ill; recovers. Start of Geography textbook publication. Visits New Zealand.

1904. President of Section E (Geography) of Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in New Zealand; visits W. Australia, resigns Melbourne chair & is appointed Professor of Geology, University of Glasgow. 1905. Award of GSL Bigsby Medal; elected FRSE, visits mines in Zimbabwe & S. Africa & BA meeting in S. Africa. Start of work on Scottish geology. 1906. ‘Dead Heart of Australia’ book published. Appoints G. W. Tyrrell. 1907. Visits France, Norway & Sweden. President of BA Section C (Geology). First publication of political views on Australia. 1908. Expedition to Cyrenaica (Libya). President of the Glasgow Geological Society. 1909. Visits W. Australia, Queensland, Pacific Ocean islands, W. & Central Canada. Publication of NHM Catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa. 1910. Attends IGC in Stockholm, field work in Sweden. 1911. Visit to Croatia & Bosnia. Start of Earthquake studies. 1912. Expedition to Benquella, Angola. 1913. Publication of ‘The nature and origin of Fjords’. 1914. Visit to W. Australia; return via China, Mongolia, USSR & Finland under wartime conditions. Elected President of the Geological Society of Glasgow. 1915. Fieldwork in the UK & Ireland. 1916. Elected to the Council of the Royal Society. Appointed to Committee on Mineral Resources of the Empire. 1917. Wartime work at the War Office and the Air Board in London. Appointed to the Calcutta University Commission. Leaves for India after field work in Ireland. 1918. In India on the Commission’s work. 1919. Commission completed. Fieldwork in Kenya & Rift Valley. Return to Glasgow. Awarded Victoria Medal by RGS. Elected to the Council of the Royal Society. 1920. Buys yacht. First of a series of disastrous papers on glacial geology. 1921. Visit to Burma regarding oil geology. Second Rift Valley book published. 1922. Expedition to SE Tibet with son. Award of Gold medals by Royal Scottish Geographical Society and by the Geographical Society of Paris. 1923. First published opposition to Wegener’s continental drift. 1924. Elected President of BA Section E (Geography) for Toronto Meeting. Visits the southern states of the US in connection with racial matters and geology. 1926. Attends IGC in Spain & visits many mines. 1928. Two visits to Switzerland. Awarded Honorary LL.D Liverpool; ‘Elements of Economic Geology’ published; major input to BA meeting in Glasgow & the International Geographical Congress in Cambridge. Elected President of the GSL. 1929. ‘Structure of Asia’ published & origin of the Atlantic Ocean. First BBC broadcast. Gregory retires from Chair to concentrate on books and papers. 1930. Honorary LL.D Glasgow awarded. Origin of Pacific Ocean published; Visits mines in Bavaria and Saxony. Moves to Essex to join wife. 1931. Elected President of the BA Section C (Geology) for Centennial year. Three books published. 1932. Expedition to Peru; traverse of Andes completed; drowned in river headwaters of the Amazon.

Preface When I first went to Glasgow as the Professor of Geology in 1974 I heard about some of the astonishing exploits of John Walter Gregory FRS, the first named Professor of Geology (1904 – 1929), of whom I had previously only known because of his association with the Rift Valley in Kenya and his two monumental presidential addresses to the Geological Society of London, on the history of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. I thought little about this until in 1977 I unexpectedly received two copies of a 22-page booklet about Gregory’s life, written largely by his son, Christopher John Gregory. His widow, Mrs Marion Gregory, had kindly sent me the copies following his death on 24 February 1977. I was intrigued by the account and made more inquiries of my older colleagues about Gregory’s work, but very little was known as to what he had worked on, despite the booklet recording that Gregory’s ‘never-ceasing activity produced twenty books and over three hundred papers’. This ignorance was only confirmed by further inquiries. Many had heard of Gregory but no-one could list even approximately the range of his activities. In 1981 Dr C. J. Burton, Departmental Librarian, to whom I owe an immense debt of thanks, compiled with very great labour a list of Gregory’s publications for Professor Gordon Craig, which not only seemed to confirm the above numbers, but gave an insight into Gregory’s work. Burton supplied me with a copy, which although incomplete, has been an enormous help to me. Later he perused the incomplete collection of Gregory’s surviving field notebooks in the Hunterian Museum for me and references to these notebooks are to those held in that museum. On the whole these are a disappointment; they are mostly jotted down sample localities, sometimes with dates or days, sometimes with neither and with no sketches and minimal information and there is not a complete set. Burton also preserved a postcard sent to Gregory. Mrs M. Gregory donated seven bound copies of some of Gregory’s 24  16 cm ‘quarto’ sized papers dated between 1887 and 1924 that had been Gregory’s own collection, annotated in his handwriting and I presumed it ought to be possible to uncover what he had achieved in these publications, little realizing they were but a fraction of his output. However, I did not have any significant time to devote to this until I retired formally in 1997. I did, however, obtain testimonies from some old students and one long-retired technician who had known Gregory. By the time I started in earnest, the biggest problem seemed to be locating descendants of Gregory (there are nearly a thousand Gregorys listed in UK telephone directories) without whose family accounts it would be impossible to make a complete biography or to understand what influences had yielded such a prolific scientist. By great fortune, one of my former departmental colleagues, Dr George Farrow, had considered making a TV programme on the highlights of Gregory’s life (although it was eventually abandoned). By chance, George Farrow’s aunt lived in Little Baddow, near Chelmsford, where Gregory had lived in his retirement. Through this connection contact was established with Gregory’s granddaughter, Mrs Ann Mendell (ne´e Gregory) in Texas. She has supplied me with copies of letters, family dates and memories, thimble purchases for Audrey Gregory, an account of Gregory’s life and family history by his sister, Mrs Anne J. Nicholson (ne´e Gregory), an account of Gregory’s son’s life by himself, Christopher J. Gregory, and an account of Gregory’s home life in Glasgow, also by his son. I am deeply indebted to Ann Mendell for her enormous help with information, interest and encouragement in so many ways. The relationship of the Ayrtons, the Chaplins (Gregory’s wife, Audrey’s maiden name) and Israel Zangwill was also untangled for me by Ann Mendell. Without her generous help this account would not have been possible. I learnt that Gregory’s wife, Audrey had died on 13 December 1945, his sisters Anne on 20 September 1944, and

Eleanor on 4 October 1956, so by the time I started my research, none of Gregory’s generation, or either of his two children, were alive. I also wish to thank Miss Jane Rosalind Gregory, Ann Mendell’s sister, for her enormous help in tracing and supplying published works, for searching out material I never knew existed, supplying photographs and for transcribing dozens of letters. There are so many family letters that Ann Mendell and Jane Gregory have either given me copies of, or copies of transcriptions made by them, that to avoid needless repetition in the text, all letters whose locations are not given are in the possession of Ann Mendell and Jane Gregory. I also owe a special debt to Gregory’s son for his published and unpublished accounts of Gregory’s life, especially of his home life in Glasgow, all given to me by Ann Mendell. What I have tried to do is to give an account of Gregory’s work and life, in a broadly chronological order, and assess, as far as I can, the important influences on both. The emphasis is on exactly what Gregory worked on, lectured on and most of all, published on, because this was his life, not just his employment and no one can adequately assess Gregory’s scientific and other contributions without knowing the incredible breadth of his work. No one person today, or indeed even in Gregory’s time, including Gregory, can be knowledgeable in so many fields as Gregory worked in. Because of this, the account is not slavishly chronological as grouping work done in the same field at somewhat different times makes the account easier to follow, especially when it involves so many different fields of study, viz: taxonomic work on echinoids, corals, and bryozoa and their evolutionary trends, Alpine geology, mineralogy, petrology, the African Rift Valley, Spitzbergen and Polar geology, gold, copper, iron, nickel, coal and other mining geology, oil geology in Burma, underground water, a wide range of geomorphology from Australian lakes, Scottish lochs, a world-wide survey of fjords, Essex rivers and the Thames, to Tibetan, African and Australian rivers, submarine topography, the teaching of geography, racial matters, immigration and economic matters, anthropology, archaeology, the disposition of the continents, Australian, Asian and Scottish geology, glacial studies of England, Scotland and Ireland, climate stability, sea level changes, earthquake studies and other topics. Gregory saw and wrote about the geology of parts of all the continents but Antarctica and South America, indeed it could be argued that he was among the last of the genuine geological polymaths. Although not every single publication has been cited, an attempt has been made to cover most of his differing fields of activity, as is required to appreciate the range of his interests and his phenomenal output, despite this making the account much longer than was originally envisaged. However, critical assessment of his writings in archaeology, anthropology and racial matters is necessarily limited by the author’s lack of expertise in these fields. The full story of how his mother’s upbringing was so crucial, and what lay behind his first visit to East Africa have not previously been uncovered nor exactly how he became Director of the 1901 British Antarctic Expedition and why he left resignation so long, or exactly how, as Director, he revitalized the Geological Survey of Victoria, or what he worked on in the War Office in the First World War. Gregory had seen so much of the world’s geology that his alternative to continental drift was influential in persuading many British geologists to hesitate about accepting Wegener’s continental drift hypothesis, but what had convinced him of his quaint views has not previously been recorded. Although Gregory, as Fellow of the Royal Society, was undeniably a great geologist, explorer, geographer and writer, this account is not an adulation exercise; several of his conclusions were totally wrong. Science does not advance linearly. The priority of this account is to record what Gregory actually produced, and

x

PREFACE

make some assessment, necessarily limited, of the results. As Gregory was such a prolific writer, including acting as a journalist for newspapers and review magazines in addition to his books, selections of his writing are quoted verbatim in a few places so that the quality of his writing, his way of expressing his thoughts and what he believed in, may be sampled. Future work could usefully establish the real reason that Lieutenant C. H. Villiers abandoned the East African expedition he was leading, exactly what Gregory worked on regarding strategic resources and at the Air Board in 1917, and uncover some of what must have been dozens of anonymously written book reviews because of the trenchant personal views Gregory often included in such reviews. Above all, I owe prolific thanks to Wendy Cawthorne, Deputy Librarian in the Geological Society of London for her enormous help over many years not only in locating books and journals and items in the Archives and in the Tracts, but also bibliographic references. Prof. David Branagan of Sydney University provided advice, encouragement, and a number of invaluable documents relating to Gregory’s time in Melbourne. Prof. David Oldroyd of Sydney encouraged me to continue and made helpful suggestions after reading a draft of Gregory’s pre-Australian days; Prof. Andrew Gleadow of Melbourne supplied information, a fine digitized copy of the presentation made to Gregory when he left Melbourne and arranged reproduction permissions; Dr W. D. I. Rolfe, formerly of the Hunterian Museum, supplied me with innumerable items including Geikie –Gregory letters from Edinburgh University, suggestions and one book; Dr Douglas McCann of Monash University supplied information about the Melbourne days; Dr C. J. Burton of Glasgow University inspected Gregory’s field notebooks in the Hunterian Museum, drawn to my attention by Dr John Faithful; Prof. B. J. Bluck inspected Glasgow University Senate and Court Minutes; Prof. D. R. and Mrs M. Bowes helped me; Jonathan C. Clatworthy kindly sifted the Lapworth Archive in the University of Birmingham for letters from, and photographs of Gregory; Adrian Allan, Liverpool University archivist supplied information and illustrations; Prof. Paul Bishop of Glasgow University most generously lent me his personal copies of some of Gregory’s books and helped me in many other ways; my brother Dr John Leake carried out computer searches of liner passenger lists and of English births, marriages and deaths and census returns; Prof. Richard Howarth saved Gregory offprints about to be disposed of and helped in other ways; Dr Tom Darragh of Melbourne marvellously uncovered uncatalogued copies of archive documents regarding the Geological Survey of Victoria, including letters from Gregory to the

Minister with the latter’s approving comments, plus other information via Dr Charlotte Smith of the Victoria Museum. Dr Rhys Davies and John Betterton facilitated the copying of letters from the Geikie Archives, Haslemere; Jeff Liston provided a crucial letter to W. R. Smellie and Dr Iain McDonald of Cardiff supplied a book. Profs Gordon Craig, David Branagan and Paul Bishop are particularly thanked for improvements to the text and Drs Nicholas S. Robins and Jessica Pollitt for editing it, but without Alun Rogers’ computer and cartographic expertise, none of the figures would have appeared. Finally, Frances Perry of the IMMM library, Andrew Morrison, Archivist, British Geological Survey, the staffs of the British Library, the University of London Senate House Library, Cardiff University Science Library, the Royal Society Library and Archives, Glasgow University Archives and Library, Liverpool University Earth Sciences and Archives Departments and the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, are owed a debt of thanks for their helpfulness in locating sometimes obscure material. Because Gregory wrote much outside of conventional scientific journals and no complete list of his publications exists, it is certain that despite identifying 33 books (including monographs) of which two were iconic, and well over 300 papers, as listed in the Appendices, some articles, particularly numerous book reviews, will not have been found. I wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce figures: Mrs A. Mendell, Miss J. Gregory, The Geological Society, the Universities of Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, Melbourne, Tasmania; University College London, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Geological Survey, and Colin Baxter Photography Ltd, Grantown-on-Spey, PH26 3NA as listed with each figure. I thank the William George Fearnsides Fund, of the Geological Society of London, for generously meeting the costs of printing colour figures. Throughout: BA, British Association; GA, Geologists’Association; GH, The Glasgow Herald; GSG, Geological Society of Glasgow; GSL, Geological Society of London; HM, Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow; IGC, International Geological Congress; IMM, Institute of Mining and Metallurgy; ODNB, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004; PGA, Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association; RGS, Royal Geographical Society; RPSG, Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow; RS, The Royal Society of London; TGSG, Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow. Note that, throughout, interpolated comments by the author or explanations into quoted material are enclosed in [square brackets].

Chapter 1 Early life; family background and influences

John Walter Gregory, always known as Jack in the family, was born into a ‘middle class’ family at 18 Gainsborough Road, Mile End (now demolished), in the east of London, on 27 January 1864. He was the middle child between Anne Jane (1862 – 1944), born 4 July 1862, and a younger sister Eleanor (1865 – 1956), born 6 December 1865. His father, John James Gregory (1828 – 1876) was a wool salesman who came from Burton in the Wirral, and his mother, Jane Gregory (1822 – 1894), ne´e Lewis, was born in Raglan, Monmouthshire on 28 September 1822. Gregory was an intellectual, a polymath and workaholic geologist. His diverse interests and skills all stemmed from his love of geology and included exploration; he had an insatiable appetite for travel. He was also a geographer, geomorphologist, zoologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, political commentator, educationalist and teacher, as well as a journalist. In his early professional life in London he was a palaeontologist with the Natural History Museum. During an expedition to East Africa he coined the phrase ‘African Rift Valley’. His work took him to Spitzbergen, the Caribbean and elsewhere, before he obtained the Chair of Geology at the University of Melbourne in 1900 at the age of 36. There he focused on mining geology, and simultaneously put the Geological Survey of Victoria back on its feet as its Director. Gregory even flirted with past climates, although he was a proponent of constant past global climate. In 1904, he returned to the UK to the Chair of Geology at Glasgow University, a role for which he is probably best remembered, in a move driven by his wife Audrey’s poor health. He saw parts of all the continents, except Antarctica, and remained in Glasgow until 1929, when he retired ‘early’ aged 65. His copious output of papers, books and monographs actually increased in pace in retirement, but his broad brush anti-drift global science theory aided the early British rejection of continental drift. Tragically he died in a canoeing accident during an expedition to Peru at the age of 68. Most of what follows is derived from an unusually full and detailed account of the family life and history, and of Gregory’s early years, compiled by his sister, Anne (Nicholson 1932) in September 1932, after Gregory’s death. It has not been independently checked by the present author. According to this account, Gregory’s father was descended from a long line of distinguished Scotsmen traceable back to the great-great-grandfather of a David Gregory of Aberdeen, born in 1625. David was a merchant in Holland where he spent the greater part of his life. He returned to Scotland in his later years and married twice, his first wife bearing 15 children and his second 14. David lived to be 93 and had the singular fortune of seeing three of his sons become Professors of Mathematics at the same time in British universities. His brother was also a distinguished mathematician, a nephew was Professor of Medicine in the University of Aberdeen and a grandson was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. John, the eldest son of David’s second family migrated to Cheshire, probably as a yeoman farmer, and settled on the Wirral, at Burton on the Dee, where many Gregorys are buried. John Walter Gregory’s paternal grandfather, William Gregory, a farmer, was an only son and died of consumption, aged 35. His son, John James Gregory, was also the only son, as were John Walter Gregory and his son Christopher John Gregory (1900 –1977). John James Gregory was educated at Burton Grammar School and the Liverpool Academy. He wanted to be a civil engineer, but actually left school and went straight into the sample room of a well-known firm of wool merchants in Liverpool. At that

time, prior to the advent of synthetic materials, wool and cotton were the basis of most clothing and large fortunes could be made or lost in the wool and cotton industries. He became renowned as an expert judge of wool and could unravel a piece of cloth and say where each strand came from. On occasions, he was engaged as an expert witness and acted as an arbitrator in disputes about wool. When he arrived at wool sales in England or France, the news would often be telegraphed to manufacturers and salesmen from far afield. He moved to London to manage the wool department of a firm of general merchants, whose principals were friends of the composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809 –1847), and John James Gregory heard him play at parties in their homes. Unfortunately John James’ success led him to entrust a substantial sum to the highly respectable bankers, Overend, Gurney and Co., which collapsed in 1866 (the last British bank to become insolvent before the 2008 debacle, causing general financial panic in London, and the demise of over 200 companies); John James lost his investment. Later, his continuing business acumen resulted in him being offered a partnership in the firm which he accepted, although his wife was not in favour of the proposal. She was ill with typhoid fever in December 1871, as was the Prince of Wales, and the family regarded the subsequent Thanksgiving Service, in St Paul’s Cathedral, as being as much for her recovery as for that of the Prince of Wales. The firm later got into severe financial difficulties on the general merchandise (not the wool) side, as it had not been well run; for example, a large cargo of tinned mutton from Australia had been purchased to victual the besieged Paris in the Prussian– Franco war of 1870– 71; it arrived too late and could not be sold. All John James’ capital was lost, but one of the banks, which had a Director who knew John James, and respected his ability, lent him the capital, without any security, to take over the wool business. This was remarkable as John James was in very poor health and insurance companies refused to insure his life. Gregory & Prentis, with wool warehouses in Bermondsey, Sittingbourne, Ashford, Rye and other places, was formed in 1874, and was trading profitably when, less than two years later, John James died in September 1876 at the age of only 48. His son was 12 years old. John Walter Gregory’s mother, Jane, was a remarkable woman. Her father, James Lewis, was a yeoman farmer and landowner at Raglan, Monmouthshire, who had spoken only Welsh until he went to school. Her mother, Dorothy Lees, was of the Lees family of Brockton Hall in Staffordshire and a cousin of her father. The Lees had remained Roman Catholic, whereas James Lewis was an Anglican, a church warden and a player of the violoncello in the string quartets which led the hymns in the parish church on Sundays. Dorothy’s will power and common sense ensured the mixed marriage was a success with great tolerance on both sides. The two sons went to the parish church with their father. They were educated at Monmouth Grammar School, whereas the two girls had lessons from the Catholic priest at Llanarth until they went to the Castle School in Monmouth. When the Raglan land was sold, due to financial difficulties, the family moved to Brook Green, Hammersmith, opposite the mansion of the Marquis of Bute, which at that time was surrounded by an extensive deer park. Jane Lewis enrolled at the Home and Colonial College, a teacher training college that was open to women. There, she grew to know members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and would have joined them but she met John James Gregory in London who was an Anglican. Since the

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 1– 4. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.1

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Quakers did not favour mixed marriages, she abandoned becoming a Friend. But to her death she remained a most unusual amalgam of Roman Catholicism and Quakerism; the one accepting the authority of the Pope; the other of no one but one’s own conscience. Clearly, the religious tolerance shown by her parents had been deeply impressed on her and was a significant influence on the way her children were brought up. John and Jane Gregory compromised by attending a Congregational Chapel, first at Shadwell, then a pleasant residential suburb beside the Thames, where the minister was Mr Bailey, who John James had known in Liverpool. They then went to the Stepney Meeting House, where the scholarly Dr John Kennedy used to preach long theological discourses. Hence John Walter Gregory and his sisters were brought up in an atmosphere of learned evangelicalism. They attended five services every Sunday and living in Bow walked over a mile each way to Stepney. Using the horse would have broken the Sabbath; on Sundays, the young groom, Edward, only came to feed the horse. Sunday School or a prayer meeting started the routine followed by morning service which lasted at least an hour and a half, during which the children were allowed pencils and paper. They went home for a quick Sunday dinner followed by a return for Sunday school and then back home for tea, after which they attended mission church nearer home that was not so ‘high-brow’ as the Stepney Chapel. This was followed by another prayer meeting, finally returning home for an evening meal after 9 pm. No wonder that Gregory became such a fine walker with religious exercises being literally an unavoidable part of each Sunday. Bow in those days was a pleasant residential district with one of the early London boulevards. The houses stood in large gardens. About 2 km from Gainsborough Road is Victoria Park and it was on the lakes in this park that the Gregory children learnt to row and swim. Although the Stepney Meeting had no choir or any musical instrument (an organ would have been considered ‘ritualistic’) other than a tuning fork, choral society singing in local halls was common and John James Gregory sometimes sang baritone solos. He also painted flowers in a precise way – a skill his son had to acquire later in botany classes – and wrote with such an exquisite hand that several business colleagues carried specimen letters written by him as models, before typewriting did away with the daily necessity of a legible hand. Their very active social life revolved around the churches: tea parties to make clothes for missions abroad, book society teas, and prayer meetings at each other’s homes, with up to 40–50 people gathering together. The Gregory children went to the Americans Moody & Sankey’s evangelical meetings (1873 –75) and later to the black Jubilee Singers, who became friends of the Gregorys and visited their home. This was the first contact Gregory had with coloured people. Gregory had intense blue eyes, and when young, golden hair, which evinced admiration from the Jubilee Singers. The blue eyes were later reputed to have saved his life when an angry chief thought it would not be safe to kill someone with such magic eyes. Missionary meetings were popular with the family and Gregory’s interest in Africa is said to have started when the missionary Dr Moffat, father-in-law of Dr Livingstone, took Gregory onto his knee and told him about Bechuanaland. The family had morning prayers together with John James saying the collects and thanksgivings from the Liturgy, which he knew by heart, in a musical way. Despite the pervasive religious atmosphere, the children grew up with the advantage of hearing subjects discussed in perfect good temper from absolutely opposite points of view. John James was a firm Liberal and had old Chartist friends, his wife was a staunch Tory; he worshipped Gladstone, she hated him; he suspected Disraeli, she was delightedly intrigued by him; he sympathized with the south in the American Civil War, she with the north; he with the French in the Franco-Prussian war, she with the Germans. In both literature and art they also differed but again always amicably. Directly social service was needed they

were at one in their readiness to help, with John James being involved in working men’s institutes and being a much appreciated lecturer, Jane Gregory arranged and spoke at women’s meetings. Gregory did not inherit their ready powers of speech but acquired it by practice, speaking slowly in his early years. Gregory’s education began in the cradle more definitely than most children’s. His mother had enlightened views on education for her time. At a time when rote learning was pervasive, she believed that learning was more easily accomplished if the teaching was wise and cheerful. She did not leave her children to cry and as soon as they were able, they were encouraged to keep quite still for a few moments every day, the period being increased as they grew older, to teach them concentration (this was presumably a reflection of the Quaker influence in her life). Jane Gregory took the upbringing and training of her children very seriously. At breakfast time the children had to speak French, but despite this, Gregory never spoke any foreign language fluently. After tea they played an observation game; they had to look at an object, such as the tea pot, for three minutes and then, with their eyes shut, answer questions as to its precise shape, colour, etc. ‘I do not want to have blind children, most people look, but very few see’ said Jane Gregory, and there is no doubt that Gregory’s subsequent ability to notice and record in detail such a wide range of flora, fauna, anthropology, archaeology and geology, must have been improved by this early training. Although he was generally a fairly quiet boy, sometimes absent-minded, for example putting his clothes on inside out or two socks on one foot, he larked about like any normal boy, and one day he and a friend accidentally broke a shop window. Gregory bravely walked into the shop, said he was sorry and asked what replacing the pane would cost. The woman shop-keeper said she would have called the police, but ‘as you have been so honest as to come and tell me, I will trust you to fetch the money.’ He was remembered by his sister Anne as being much ‘the same gentle, resolute, philosophical, laborious, ironical, concentrated person’ when young as he was later in life. Jane Gregory strongly discouraged her children’s familiarity with anyone she considered inferior, fearing they would acquire bad habits. She carefully fostered courtesy in the home and some of the children’s friends laughed at the politeness of the Gregory children to each other, but this politeness became steeped into Gregory and was a characteristic of his adult behaviour, particularly apparent when he disagreed with someone’s interpretation. He also had the advantage of siblings close enough in age and the give and take of family life ensured that, although he was the only son, he was not spoilt (Fig. 1.1). He seems to have had an early interest in past events as when only a child, playing with his elder sister with toy animals, she said about ‘The flood’, to be asked by Gregory, ‘Which one? There were lots of them’. She replied ‘I mean the Deluge’. He said ‘You mean Noah’s’. The Gregory children did not go to school until they were six years old, but by that time they could both read and write, speak a little French, tell the time and recognize ordinary trees, birds and flowers. Jane Gregory considered the Italians were leading the way in education through the teachings of Pestalozzi, as they did later with the methods of Madame Montessori, and she found a school for Gregory conducted on the Pestalozzian system. This preparatory school was too far away for daily travel so he became a weekly border at the early age of six, much to the regret of his parents and siblings. His fellow scholars included the children of General Booth of the Salvation Army. It is hard to assess the effect this must have had on Gregory, for boarding was much more common than now and weekly boarding less traumatic than termly boarding. Nevertheless, this must have been a significant influence on his self-reliance and there is good evidence that the teaching methods used later influenced his own university teaching methods. The family rejoiced when he was old enough to go to the Stepney Grammar School, which was in Bow, and

EARLY LIFE; FAMILY BACKGROUND AND INFLUENCES

Fig. 1.1. Gregory (‘Jack’) as a boy (courtesy of A. Mendell).

so he could live at home. He sat and passed the entrance examination for Stepney Grammar School. The headmaster, the Rev. Ayrton Chaplin (1842 –1930), was so impressed by his exam answers, that he asked where Gregory had been taught, and then visited the mistress of the Pestalozzian School to find out what her teaching methods were. It was a proud day for her to be visited by this eminent head of a large boy’s school. ‘Most of the boys who come to me have learned to read, but Gregory has been taught to think’. She candidly answered, ‘Oh! I did not do that, he had learned to think before he came to me’. Clearly, a great deal of Gregory’s subsequent success can be identified as having been derived from his mother’s training and influence. Gregory was not a timorous child and the stately headmaster did not overawe him. Many years later, when Gregory went to visit his old headmaster, then in Gloucestershire, Mrs Chaplin remembered him and said ‘Gregory? Oh yes, I remember him, a little boy who used to come after school armed with huge red volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to refute you.’ This is particularly illuminating because it not only shows Gregory as an interested, inquisitive learner who went and consulted other information than that given in class, as the best students do, but it showed an important Gregory characteristic that he was himself later to emphasize, namely do not uncritically accept what an authority says, or most people accept, as necessarily true. Later in life, Gregory joined the Rationalist Society and even became a Vice President, as he veered away from his religious upbringing and gave pre-eminence to critical thought. Gregory enjoyed school. He played cricket, football and fives, swam and learned to shoot well, carried off prizes and became Head boy, but the school was not strong in teaching science. He was very good at badminton, played from home, not school. However the Gregory children had an overshadowed childhood. Their father’s health was a constant worry as he coughed his life

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away before there was any effective cure for TB. Every winter he was seriously ill, especially during the killer fogs that were so prevalent in London in those days. He left London when fog descended and went to stay in Brighton or Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. The children’s nurse, Ann Russell, was the rock of the household, nursing John James, running the place when Mrs Gregory was away attending to the social services her husband had undertaken but could not carry out, and looking after the children. It was Ann Russell who taught Gregory to sew on the instructions of Mrs Gregory who once said: ‘the girls will be sure to pick up needlework, besides they will probably always be where they can get things mended, but I do not know where my son will be.’ Gregory was always grateful for this training and Lord Conway records, after the first crossing of Spitzbergen, that the other men were envious of Gregory, because he could not only sew on straps and buttons but could use a thimble, a great consideration in the intense cold where a prick of the finger was agony. Ann Russell also taught the children a certain amount of cooking, when they could get possession of the kitchen from the cook, who was Mrs Gregory’s old childhood nurse. She always wore a crinoline, long after that fashion was past. The Gregory children were used to travelling which must have made it easier for Gregory to embark on his initial foreign journeys, such as his work in the Cottian Alps. Again, this training came at his mother’s deliberate insistence. ‘England was engaged in a race and other nations are bound to catch up. The children had better learn as soon as possible what the rivals are like they will have to contend with some day’. Mrs Gregory took her children to ‘the continent’ while they were still young, their first visit to Paris was shortly after 1870, when they saw the ruins of the Tuileries and Saint Cloud. Later they went to Switzerland and after the Toynbee Travellers Club was formed, they went annually to Italy, Spain or wherever the Club was going under the instructive leadership of Professor Thomas Okey. This travel became possible as the expanding network of railways and cross-channel steamers that gradually replaced stage coaches and sailing ships was far more predictable, safe and affordable. During the summers before 1877, the children would always spend three months in a (presumably) rented cottage at Warley, Essex, SE of Brentwood and about 23 km ENE of their London home, with Ann Russell in charge. Mrs Gregory, no doubt mindful of her own country upbringing, ‘could not have her youngsters growing up ignorant town children, they must go into the country to enlarge their vision’. They drove from London in an open chaise with huge kites of many kinds, which their father had taught them to make, tied on behind. Indeed they made most of their toys, including a doll’s house and its furniture, marionettes, and invented their own play; the cooperation of three siblings was an education in itself. In the country they had unusual liberty, even for that time and certainly far beyond what any unneglected child today could contemplate. Their mother told them it was only stupid children who got into trouble and this encouraged a sensible self-reliance, or gumption. Ann Russell cannot have been nervous about them, and no doubt the absence of media hype about isolated incidents encouraged a more realistic assessment of risk than is common today. They would wander off by themselves in the morning and not reappear until the evening, having subsisted all day on blackberries or nuts, reinforced by apples and milk bought at a cottage. They knew every wood and field path for miles around Warley. They often struck up friendships with the officers at the local barracks, and examined the guns, with Gregory crawling inside some of them, as well as the many treasures brought home from India. They followed the soldiers’ route marches and field days with their pony, but curiously, Gregory never became a good rider; to him a horse was never a companion, only a transport robot. However, he developed his love of walking in Essex. For instance, one summer (1875), the longing to see the sea, which

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they had heard was at Maldon, Gregory (1112) and Eleanor (912) set out to find it. They took the train from Brentwood to Chelmsford and walked to Maldon, 19 km away, only to find ‘that the sea was a river and had gone out for the day.’ They went to an inn by the most water they could find and ordered a meal of beef, pickles, bread and cheese and ginger beer, which cost them 912d (4p) – the 12d being for the pickles. Disappointed at the sea, they walked back by Billericay, (c. 23 km) expecting to get a carrier’s cart from there to Brentwood. They reached Billericay at 10 pm only to learn the carrier’s cart only went once a week and not on that day. Eleanor then sat down and wept but, after recovering, they marched valiantly on, playing on a pocket comb, arriving back at midnight, to find the family for once anxious about them. They must have walked at least 55 km, an unimaginable childhood feat today. Similar persistence and lack of panic paid off years later, in Africa, when Gregory was lost in the dark at night from his camp, without food or water, and having already walked all day and half the night, he found where his bearers had pitched the camp while he explored. In 1906, when replying to the award of the Bigsby Medal for 1905 from the Geological Society, Gregory (in Marr 1905) said ‘my attention was first directed to geology in order to understand the geography of the districts through which I rambled, and the, often, apparently erratic course of the rivers . . . and to understand local topography’. Later, he was even more specific ‘it was in the hope of finding some interpretation of the apparently anomalous behaviour of the Essex rivers that I first read a textbook of geology. That book gave no direct help, but it indicated that such problems are complex and require a detailed knowledge of the area concerned’ (Gregory 1922). The country rambles and

freedom of an otherwise city child were evidently extremely influential. Very surprising and difficult to believe, Nicholson (1932) claimed that ‘when little more than a boy, he said ‘Geology is the fundamental science, it is the basis of all the others, and of climate, race and civilisation’. Gregory had an unusually good upbringing largely, due to the wisdom of his mother; this must have been partly responsible for his subsequent success. Self-reliance, trust, high moral standards, politeness, and sharp observation, were instilled in him at home and critical thought and freedom to roam engendered at an early age, followed by an initial schooling which fostered, not rote learning, but personal inquiry and development. The emotional stability provided by his parents’ loving, informed, and thoughtful nurturing, gave him invaluable emotional confidence, while the example of his parents being able to hold differing viewpoints without falling out was later reflected in Gregory’s own marriage and his attitude to those who disagreed with his scientific interpretations. Making profitable use of all these advantages required the energy, wide range of interest, ambition, drive and hard work that only Gregory himself could, and did, supply; but it also needed fortunate opportunities to blossom.

References Gregory, J. W. 1922. Evolution of the Essex Rivers and of the Lower Thames. Benham & Co Ltd, Colchester. Marr, J. E. 1905. Proceedings of the Geological Society. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 61, xliv. Nicholson (Ne´e Gregory), A. J. 1932. Unpublished mss in possession of A. Mendell detailing the early life of John Walter Gregory.

Chapter 2 Becoming a geologist; burning the candle at both ends

What follows is again extracted from Nicholson (1932), unless otherwise referenced. The death of John James in 1876 left his family in severe grief. Jane Gregory was left with only a small annuity which she managed amazingly well. It was around this time that Ann Russell’s services had to be dispensed with and she left to become a lady’s maid, being helped by the small amount of French that the children had taught her. Throughout his life Gregory, who was 1212 when his father died, quoted his father and regretted his early loss. A favourite saying of both was ‘Better to wear out than rust out’ (Gregory 1977). In 1878, when the time came for Gregory, aged 14, to leave Stepney Grammar School, the headmaster felt certain he would receive a scholarship to Kings College, Wimbledon, (with which Stepney Grammar School was associated), followed by one from there to Cambridge, where John James had hoped that his son might study. But the loss of his father had affected Gregory badly. He was small and thin and coughed badly and the fear of the insidious disease that had prematurely killed his father and grandfather could not be ignored, so the family doctor, who was both respected and familiar with the family’s position, was consulted. Although this was before the days of commonly prescribed open-air treatment for TB, the doctor insisted that the best chance for him was ‘to run wild on a farm for a year’. The headmaster was disappointed, but Jane Gregory knew that Jack was inclined to study too hard and was concerned for him, and no doubt also aware of the slender available resources to supplement any scholarships. She was perhaps also concerned about him being exposed to the profligate activities of the Cambridge students, many of whom were from extremely wealthy families. So Gregory was sent to stay with relations in Cheshire who had large dairy farms and he worked there for nearly two years. His health improved, he grew slightly, but was always of small stature. He picked up a good deal of information about country life and farming, even seriously considered becoming a farmer, but the opportunities for those without substantial capital were limited, offering long hours for poor return. Although years later he lectured agricultural students, it is probable that this period of his life was valuable mainly as a source of strength and of empathy with farmers and a realization of the unremitting labour of those who earned their living off the land. Moreover, he hated hunting, shooting and killing for sport and did not have a natural love for animals. Despite him saying that his love of mountaineering began when, as a child he and his sisters pulled out the drawers of an old Scottish tallboy to use as steps and climbed up to imagine views from Mont Blanc or the Himalayas, it was during this time in Cheshire that his first real mountain adventure took place. On Christmas Day, 1878, when 14 years old, he walked up Snowdon by himself and fell into a quarry in the snow, hurting his knee. Fortunately the small avalanche had been noticed and villagers came to his rescue. Subsequently, he climbed several peaks both at home and in the Alps and became proficient at using a rope but he was not one to go climbing or walking for the sake of doing it; usually there was a purpose, something he wanted to see or collect. It was probably also whilst in Cheshire, that he obtained his first experience as a journalist, which Nicholson (1932) records, but does not date exactly. Ireland was seething over the eviction of tenants during the ‘Land Wars’ and Gregory, although only a youth, resolved to

go to Connemara, western Ireland by boat from Liverpool, to see for himself. He persuaded the editor of a local paper (unfortunately not identified and the articles not found), who was sufficiently intrigued by such an extremely youthful ‘Special Correspondent’, to appoint him its representative. This suggests that he must have written something, if only a publishable letter to the editor, which gave the editor confidence in his ability to write good copy. The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) thought this something of a joke and took him about with them. He had several friendly meetings with small farmers. No doubt, his impressions would have been biased by his association with the RIC; however, he was concerned at much of what he saw, and was not convinced that Home Rule was the solution. This incident provides the first evidence of his steadily increasing interest in international politics and the alacrity with which he expressed his views in print, which later became controversial. He returned to London in 1880, aged 16. The family had reduced the staff to one 18 year-old female servant and removed to cheaper accommodation at 28 Spurstowe Road, Hackney, (1881 Census), near Hackney Downs Station, on the edge of Clapton. The house no longer exists. The question of trying for a scholarship was again discussed, but, according to his sister Anne, ‘his mother and the doctor were still afraid of arduous study for him’. In retrospect, this seems strange given his robust constitution in later years and the hectic lifestyle that he adopted soon afterwards; however, the advice of a family doctor was commonly based on more than pure medicine and the family’s financial circumstances were sure to have played a part in the decision. Gregory was far more interested in science than the classics or mathematics which would have given him the best chance of a Cambridge scholarship. His mother was no longer well off and he wanted to earn money and study science in his own way. When the leading firm of wool merchants who had wanted to employ his father offered to take him on, he accepted after ascertaining the hours of work, and deciding that he would still have sufficient time to study in the evenings and at weekends. Thus began what was to be an extraordinary life of productive hard work, long hours, and dedication to science. He worked the normal office hours of a trainee wool sales clerk, attended the numerous wool sales, recorded the transactions at high speed, learnt the properties and uses of the wools obtained from the different sheep breeds and different sources from all over the world, and indirectly laid the foundation of his geographical knowledge. He must have carried out these duties satisfactorily for seven years because, when he resigned in 1887, the head of the firm inquired of him ‘You are not leaving for lack of scope, are you? We mean to make an expert of you like your father’ (Nicholson 1932). After work he would go straight to classes and lectures and was seldom home before midnight. He was granted time off work for his matriculation and degree examinations. He had a late dinner, followed by a hot drink of tea, coffee or milk (never alcohol – he was a life-long teetotaller and never smoked) and then he would work for at least two hours before retiring to bed for a short sleep of no more than four hours. (Years later, in Kenya, this ability to manage with so little sleep saved his camp from attack.) At some time between 1881 and the end of 1882, the family moved 400 m; by January 1883 they lived at Clare House, 12 Goulton Road, Clapton, where they lived until after Jane

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 5– 9. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.2

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Fig. 2.1. Clare House, 12 Goulton Road, Clapton where Gregory lived from c.1882 until 1894. By courtesy of Jane Gregory who took the photograph in 2010.

Gregory died in 1894. This house still exists with the same address (Fig. 2.1). The exact courses of study that Gregory took between 1880 and January 1886, when he matriculated, have not been identified, largely because of the destruction of the Birkbeck College records during World War II bombing raids, but it is known that he studied geology to an advanced undergraduate level, if partly by private study. Gregory wanted a broad knowledge of geology and science so he took classes in biology as well as geology, even though it meant an extra year’s study for his BSc. In this he may have been influenced by his close friendship from 1885 with John George Goodchild (1844 –1906) who exemplified the combined study of botany, zoology and geology. Gregory took evening classes at the City of London College and Birkbeck Institution (from 1884 this was in Breams Buildings, Fetter Lane), both of which were dedicated to part-time students and also some classes at the Royal School of Mines (RSM) part of the Royal College of Science (RCS). He was a fellow student at the latter with Herbert George Wells (1866 – 1946), the novelist and from letters (with A. Mendell) it is clear Gregory and Wells were in touch for at least thirty years. Gregory matriculated in January 1886, sitting the week-long University of London examinations at the City of London College. The printed syllabuses of the University then specified that to matriculate it was necessary to pass in each of: (1) Latin; (2) any two of Greek, French or German (almost certainly Gregory would have taken the last two); (3) a combined examination of English language & history with modern geography; (4) mathematics (included arithmetic, algebra and geometry); (5) natural philosophy (physics; included mechanics, hydrostatics, hydraulics and pneumatics, optics and heat); and (6) chemistry (non-metals, acids, bases, salts, combining laws, symbols, atmosphere, combustion, carbonic acid etc). This breadth assured a sound educational grounding. In 1886, according to the University of London records, 1100 geographically-widely spread students passed. He passed London University Intermediate Science in 1889 at Birkbeck College, coming fifth in the Zoology class. The Intermediate Science examination required passes in all of inorganic chemistry, experimental physics, mathematics and general biology and additional, not substitutionary, subjects could also be taken such as botany, zoology, animal physiology, and physical

geography with geology. Only 100 students passed in 1887. Although Birkbeck Institution did not become part of the University of London until 1920, it prepared students for London degrees and from there in 1886 Gregory obtained a first class in advanced metallurgy, and in elementary inorganic chemistry and a second in elementary practical plane and solid geometry, while in 1887 he achieved a first in elementary magnetism and electricity and in sound, light and heat with a second class in advanced animal morphology as part of the degree course. (Syllabuses of classes and Examinations & Prizes, Birkbeck; University of London Calendars). He eventually achieved a first-class degree in geology from Birkbeck in 1891 although he also studied at the RSM, despite the lack of any record being found in the Imperial College archives. Only 75 students obtained a BSc in 1891 (University of London 1892 Calendar). There is no doubt that as a broad grounding in science, the course he took was far superior to most BSc Honours degrees today. The Birkbeck geology teaching was by part-time lecturers but the complete destruction of Breams Building and all the Birkbeck records mean that it has not been established who did the geology teaching. There was, however, a strong RSM staff input for many years (Morton, pers. comm., 2004). Certainly, he became close, and long-lasting, friends with Grenville A. J. Cole (1859 –1924; Fig. 2.2) and Arthur Morley Davies (1869 – 1959) of the RSM and several humorous letters survive (with A. Mendell) from Cole to Gregory reflecting this. Gregory was also greatly influenced by Frank Rutley (1842 – 1904) Lecturer in Mineralogy at the Normal School of Science and in the RSM. J. W. Judd CB FRS (1840 –1916; Fig. 2.3) was Professor of Geology at the RSM from 1876 –1905 and in 1878 he appointed Grenville Cole, a non-graduate, as Demonstrator, which post he retained for 12 years (Wyse Jackson 2007). Judd, with Cole’s assistance, was a pioneer in Britain in introducing the first thoroughly systematic practical classes in geology that integrated theory and practice, giving all the skills needed by a practising field and laboratory geologist. Their methods were subsequently used elsewhere (Anonymous 1905) by Gregory in Melbourne

Fig. 2.2. Grenville Arthur James Cole (1859– 1924), Gregory’s close friend, (by permission of the Geological Society of London).

BECOMING A GEOLOGIST; BURNING THE CANDLE AT BOTH ENDS

Fig. 2.3. Professor J. W. Judd of the Royal School of Mines. With acknowledgements to the Geological Magazine (Anonymous 1905).

and Glasgow universities, and certainly influenced both Gregory’s whole approach to teaching and his admiration for Judd. Gregory’s education was not confined to formal study for examinations, because he used the little time left between his work and study to pursue a series of activities. He began attending the Geologists’ Association (GA) lectures and field excursions, probably in 1882, as on 5 January 1883 he joined the Association (Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association (PGA), 8, 65) and remained a member for life. On 6 February 1885, at a GA conversazione, he exhibited a table-top, meteorites, native silver from Kongsberg (S. Norway), silver ores and a thin section of a dunite from the Sierra Nevada plus other unrecorded items (PGA, 9, 73). Even if a few of the items had been borrowed, this suggests he had already started serious geological collecting and had access to, and could use, a petrological microscope. In May 1885, on a GA excursion to Grays, Gregory (1909) later recorded how he had met John G. Goodchild who was then working with the Geological Survey in London following medical problems while surveying in the Lake District. A full account of Goodchild’s Lake District mapping is given by Oldroyd (2002, p. 40–1 and 257–259). See also Figure 15.4. At 41, Goodchild was nearly double Gregory’s

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then age, but they became life-long friends and probably Goodchild influenced Gregory at a critical time in Gregory’s life, particularly in being a superb example of a scientist who kept up with, and was interested in, a very wide range of subjects, both within science and outside. While on the excursion, Gregory asked Goodchild if he could help him with the identification of the species of a Veronica plant, which Goodchild did. Gregory found Goodchild was knowledgeable in almost every branch of natural history: botany, zoology, geology, geography, etc. With the income from his work, Gregory was able to visit mainland Europe, especially the Alps, and to undertake a certain amount of climbing to examine rocks of interest to him (Gregory 1896). His sister Anne recorded that he also attended with her (at an unspecified date) lecture courses on economics given at Toynbee Hall by Alfred Milner (1854 –1925), later Lord Milner. Gregory won the annual Cobden Club Prize for an economics essay, gaining only two marks short of the maximum possible. Toynbee Hall was established in 1884 in connection with St Jude’s, Whitechapel, as a memorial to Arnold Toynbee (1852 –1883), and was the Universities’ Settlement in the East End. For many years Gregory was Secretary of the Toynbee Natural History Society, giving his Sunday afternoons and helping with summer camping excursions, an innovative activity in those days. Once he was established, he gave free lectures (e.g. The Times, 18 January 1896). In late 1885, he invited Goodchild to lead a geological excursion for the Toynbee Society near Plumstead, Goodchild’s home. From this, Goodchild became so involved with the work at Toynbee Hall that in 1887, motivated by their Christian ideals, he and his wife moved houses to Whitechapel in order to give more service and he and Gregory worked together until Goodchild was moved to Edinburgh in 1889 (Gregory 1909). Goodchild was ideal as a Toynbee Society lecturer and excursion leader because of his wide interests and knowledge. Gregory retained his connection with Toynbee Hall until he left for Australia in 1900. Among the many excursions he led, letters (with A. Mendell) from Emma Darwin (1808 –1896), widow of Charles (Robert) Darwin (1809 – 1882), show that a party visited Down House on 16 June 1889. Although Gregory never listed his pre-1887 publications even in his own privately printed, and surprisingly incomplete, list of published papers, a note he wrote on his Geological Society Fellowship application form in 1887 (four years before he graduated) of ‘Medallist in Geology, Science and Art Department. Author of articles on geology in Science Gossip’ has enabled at least some of these articles to be identified in this now obscure journal, Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip [‘Monthly medium of interchange and Gossip for students and Lovers of Nature’]. In 1885, that is, before he had matriculated, he wrote on ‘The age of the Malvern Hills’ critically examining an earlier Science-Gossip article (1883) by William Whitehead Watts (1860– 1947) and concluding that the Malvern rocks were not Precambrian, but lowermost Cambrian because elsewhere great thicknesses of lowermost Cambrian existed below the level of the oldest Cambrian fossils then known in the Malverns, and also because it was reported that the strike of the known Cambrian rocks in the Malverns paralleled that of the underlying schists. He argued that the oldest Malvern rocks were the Longmynd rocks (thought to be lowermost Cambrian) brought up by the intrusive syenites. He dismissed the arguments still lingering that only Precambrian rocks showed severe metamorphism and contained gneisses by citing instances from Norway (Christiana), Switzerland (St Gottard) and Spain (the Pyrenees) of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic fossil-bearing rocks which were strongly metamorphosed (Gregory 1885). Gregory discussed ‘Eozoon Canadense, the pseudo-dawn of Life’, the supposed early-life fossil described by Sir (John) William Dawson (1820 –1899) in 1864 and exhibited at the 1864 meeting of the British Association (BA) in Bath and at the GSL in November 1864 (Gregory 1886). It was accepted as a genuine fossil by such authorities as Charles Lyell (1797 –1875) and

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Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 –1895). Gregory recounted the controversy over whether it was an early Precambrian fossil or not a fossil at all, which was his conclusion. However, Gregory’s discussion of the importance of finding Precambrian fossils and the already highly evolved states of the earliest Cambrian fossils, which made the existence of life in the Precambrian certain, is a mature one and his final emphasis on how most of the experts (but not ‘King and Rowney, the Galway [University College] infallibles’ who stoutly maintained it was inorganic) were mistaken, is used to illustrate the need to be critical, and not accept the current wisdom without examining its basis carefully. It was generally supposed to be a foraminiferan, but Gregory commented (p. 102) ‘Foraminifera are generally microscopic in size and at the most a few inches in diameter: hence the discovery of one covering acres, was matter for surprise, though to be sure it is American’ (Gregory 1886), although actually it was Canadian. Already Gregory’s tendency to prolixity is obvious, with both the Malvern and Eozoon articles spreading over two monthly numbers. Writing must have helped Gregory’s career. Arthur Smith Woodward (1864– 1944), the greatest palaeo-ichthyologist of his time and later Gregory’s Head in the Natural History Museum, was a regular contributor to Science-Gossip, with two articles on fossil birds in 1883 and eight articles ‘On Fossil Sharks and Rays’ over the years 1884, 1885 and 1886. Indeed, one wonders whether it was Smith Woodward who might have recognized Gregory’s potential and suggested that he might try his hand at writing for Science-Gossip, because they were lifelong friends. Although, Gregory’s initial writing for Science-Gossip predated his matriculation, or what might nowadays be considered to be university

entrance standard, he was already writing with the knowledge of geology that a final year student might have. Thus he must have studied geology to some depth during the ‘missing years’ from 1880 to early 1886. The fact that he only took the matriculation examination after nearly six years of, part-time, study suggests that between 1880 and 1885 he may not have been aiming for a degree, merely to acquire knowledge. However, it may have been suggested to him, that for a post in geology, it would be advantageous to have a degree in geology, although degrees were not so essential in those days. It is clear from his sister’s record of asking him what he was going to do with this geological knowledge, and his reply ‘Only let me get it, I shall find out what to do with it’ (Nicholson 1932) that he did not have a specific post in mind when he pursued his studies, but took advantage of one opportunity (see Chapter 3), even before graduating, when it offered itself. Gregory became a Fellow of The Geological Society of London on 11 May 1887, and was a Fellow until his death in 1932 (Figs 2.4 & 2.5). He became a fairly regular attender at the fortnightly meetings held from November until late June or July. He was proposed by Arthur Smith Woodward, Grenville A. J. Cole, J. G. Goodchild and Horace Bolingbroke Woodward (1848 – 1914). Although the application predated his offer of appointment at the Natural History Museum by over five months, the sponsorship of Arthur Smith Woodward as first signatory shows he was well known in the museum, and it is even possible it was suggested to him that being FGS would help his appointment at the museum, especially in view of his lack of a degree. Gregory’s role as an author in Science-Gossip is interesting as he never lists any such

Fig. 2.4. Gregory with his characteristic drooping bushy moustache, probably at age 23 in 1887 when elected to the Geological Society, courtesy of Mrs A. Mendell.

Fig. 2.5. Photo of Gregory presented to Geological Society, probably taken at the time of Figure 2.4. (By permission of the Geological Society.)

BECOMING A GEOLOGIST; BURNING THE CANDLE AT BOTH ENDS

contributions in his own privately printed lists of publications (the latter were not started until early 1897 and are hopelessly incomplete). In view of Gregory’s later reputation, certainly justified by the quantity and alacrity with which he published, it is instructive to learn from Nicholson (1932) that effective writing did not come naturally to him – surprising for one who was to write c. 300 papers, over 30 books and numerous newspaper articles and letters and had volunteered to write for a newspaper. His success, she wrote, ‘was due to incredible perseverance’, a factor so often the source of the success that seems to the outsider to be natural talent. ‘His early papers were incoherent and were corrected and recorrected until he could not decipher his own writing and the whole had to be re-written, often with worse results’ (Nicholson 1932). Later his ability to write quickly and to the point became legendary. Perhaps he trained himself writing Science-Gossip articles because his first scientific publication gives no hint of inexperienced writing. It is also illuminating to learn from Nicholson (1932) that when he began teaching, his words were strung together with no syntax, and although as a youth he belonged to the Stepney Parliament, he spoke badly. He spoke slowly then and seemed unaware that he had often not said what he wanted to say because he was unselfconscious. He learnt to translate the written word in several languages: French, German, Italian and Russian although he never spoke them, and his DSc submission includes evidence of this. His first teaching appointment, but not its date, is recorded by Anne as ‘at the North London School of Music, Art and Science, where he was the first lecturer in geology, having already passed the Kensington Examination entitling him to teach. Your biographer was one of his students, so I know what a struggle it was for him to express himself, but his pupils loved him and used to ‘will’ that he should recover some elusive word. Their patience was rewarded, for most of them got honours, even in the advanced stages of the examination, such as mineralogy with blow-pipe

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work’ (Nicholson 1932). Even making generous allowance for the added strain of teaching a class containing a family member, that fluency only came to Gregory gradually.

References Anon. 1905. Eminent living geologists: John Wesley Judd, C.B., LL.D., F.R.S., F.G.S. Geological Magazine, New Series, Decade V, 2, 385– 397. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: a sketch. Privately printed. Based on an earlier account by his mother, Audrey Gregory, about her husband, J. W. Gregory. Gregory, J. W. 1885. The age of the Malvern Hills. Hardwicke’s ScienceGossip, 21, 125–126; 174–176. Gregory, J. W. 1886. Eozoon Canadense, the pseudo-dawn of life. Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, 22, 82– 86; 102–106. Gregory, J. W. 1896. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London. Reprinted in 1968 by the Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1909. Obituary notice of John George Goodchild, born 26th May 1844, died 21st Feb. 1906. Transactions of the Geological Society of Edinburgh, 9, 331–350. Nicholson (ne´e Gregory), A. J. 1932. Unpublished mss in possession of A. Mendell detailing the early life of John Walter Gregory. Oldroyd, D. 2002. Earth, Water, Ice and Fire: Two Hundred Years of Geological Research in the English Lake District. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 25. Watts, W. W. 1883. The pre-Cambrian rocks of England and Wales. Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, 19, 57 – 59; 81 – 82; 131– 133. Wyse Jackson, P. N. 2007. Grenville Arthur James Cole (1859– 1924); the cycling geologist. In: Wyse Jackson, P. N. (ed.) Four Centuries of Geological Travel: The Search for Knowledge on Foot, Bicycle, Sledge and Camel. Geological Society, London, Special Publication, 287, 135–147.

Chapter 3 Assistant at the British Museum (Natural History) from 1887; early years

The magnificent new and commodious building of the British Museum (Natural History) in Cromwell Road, South Kensington, (referred to here by its current name: Natural History Museum (NHM)) opened to the public in April 1881 with a staff of five in the Geology Department, including the Keeper, Dr Henry Woodward (1832 – 1921). Following the transfer of Robert Etheridge Junior (1846 –1920) and the retirement of William Davies (1813 –1891), there was a competition in 1887, involving an examination, for the two vacant Assistantships. This competition resulted in the appointments of Francis Arthur Bather (1863 – 1934), a First Class Honours graduate in natural sciences from Oxford, and J. W. Gregory (Lang 1934), despite the fact that the latter had not yet graduated or even taken his intermediate BSc examination, and needed to continue his part-time studies for several years to graduate. Clearly Gregory’s performance, reputation, enthusiasm and promise gained him the post, and with Bather, he joined the three existing assistants, Richard Bullen Newton (1867 – 1949), George Charles Crick (1856 –1917) and Arthur Smith Woodward (Lang 1934). He accepted the post of 2nd Class Assistant on 16 August 1887 and started work on 12 September 1887 with a salary of £130 per year (NHM archives). It was a stunning coup to have obtained such a post in competition with Oxbridge graduates and the family were rightly proud of his success. Even 60 years later, his sister Eleanor recounted this achievement with pride (A. Mendell, pers. comm. 2008). Grenville Cole wrote to Gregory on 9 August 1887 ‘I am enchanted to hear of your success . . . very pleasant . . . to have you working so near us’ (letter with A. Mendell). Undoubtedly one of the factors that must have spurred Gregory on was a determination to show that he could equal or better the output of any traditional graduate. If it is true that he normally walked ‘everywhere’ (Gregory 1977), it was just over 11 km from his home to work (1.5 hours at Gregory’s speed) or 3 hours return walk per day. Apart from the security and prestige of the job and its essential financial support, the post opened an Aladdin’s Cave of opportunities. Not only were the extensive museum collections at his disposal and specific items brought to his attention for description and cataloguing by his superiors, but his energy and eagerness to travel encouraged the museum to take any available opportunities to send him out collecting. This policy was rewarded when Gregory’s sharp eyes and fruitfulness as a collector were found to be combined with quite remarkable industry and a prodigious publication output that largely made up for any time away from the museum. He also helped to publicise the activities of the museum by publicly reading most of his papers before scientific societies. On 21 February 1930, Professor Albert Charles Seward (1863 – 1941) FRS, in replying to the award of the Wollaston Medal by Gregory (1930), as President of the Geological Society, said ‘You, Sir, bring to my memory many enjoyable weeks spent during vacations in the British Museum . . . I discovered there lived a man who was able in the interests of original research to utilize every spare moment, and to find spare moments which for other men did not exist’. Henry Woodward fostered camaraderie, cooperation and interchange of information and opinions among his staff and others in related fields by evening parties and these served to promote a ‘family atmosphere’ among the staff and ensured many became life-long friends (Norman 1944). Gregory became a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London in 1888, wrote four articles for its Proceedings between 1892 and 1896, and resigned in 1902, when in Melbourne (Palmer 2004,

pers. comm.) but the Linnean Society records show that he was never a member of that society. Gregory attended the Fourth International Geological Congress held in London from 17– 22 September 1888 (his membership was probably paid for by the Museum) which gave him the chance to meet some of the most famous geologists alive among the 407 attendees out of the 830 registered Congress members, by far the best attendance at any Congress at that time. The Congress may well have provided the initial links with some of the staff at the continental museums which he later visited in 1890.

Publications Gregory’s first original scientific paper was published in the Proceedings of the Liverpool Biological Society in 1888 and described the geology of Puffin Island, a Carboniferous knoll which lies east of Anglesey in the Menai Straits, Wales (Gregory 1888). The account displays the wide-ranging nature of his scientific interests reflecting both his biological and geological training, and was probably derived from the requirement to complete an undergraduate field project. The mapping may have required more than one spell of his vacation time, but was presumably completed in 1887. 1887 saw the beginning of his examination of Irish eskers (Gregory 1921) which would have been easily accessible from Anglesey. The account not only described the succession and the fossils in the limestones, identifying 10 new species not previously recorded from Puffin Island, but listed the plant species, including lichens, found growing on the island, the Pleistocene glacial history, including the sources of rock fragments and pebbles from County Antrim, the Lake District, and the Southern Uplands, recorded glacial striae, and more contentiously, as he admitted, discussed the means by which glaciers could move material uphill. The Puffin Island paper was the first trickle of a torrent of publications that continued until his death. On 6 December 1887, only four days before the reading of the Puffin Island paper (on 10 December 1887) in Liverpool, Gregory (1888a) read a paper to the City of London College Science Society on ‘The new Darwinism; or the segregation of the fit.’ In this he examined the evolutionary problems recently (1886) raised by Dr George John Romanes (1848 –1894), a Darwin supporter, such as the sterility of hybrids, a subject that certainly influenced some of Gregory’s later writings on the human race. By 14 February 1888, Gregory (1888b) was addressing the Metropolitan Scientific Association on ‘The theory of coral reefs.’ This critically examined Charles Robert Darwin’s (1842) theory of coral reef formation, and significantly, in view of Gregory’s later views on continental drift, he rejected the permanence of the oceans and continents, citing instances of submergence of reefs, although none of those actually cited was submerged more than 0.5 km. On 12 February 1889, he lectured the same Association on ‘Recent theories bearing on glaciation in Britain’ (Gregory 1889). In this he further developed the evidence he had mentioned in his Puffin Island paper that ice sheets could lift material above its source elevation. He cited the shell-bearing glacial deposits of North Wales and Cheshire (Macclesfield). He showed that these had not been deposited in situ because they were a mixture of abraded fragments of littoral and deep zone shell types from different geographical provinces. This interpretation avoided the postulated submergence of England to a depth of 400– 800 m

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 11–18. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.3

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under the sea during a Pleistocene interglacial period, as previously supposed by Prestwich, Ramsay and Lyell. Curiously, much later, he would revert to supposing a marine origin for much of the British and Irish boulder clay.

Echinoids Gregory’s next three papers, all published in 1889, were the first of many studying material in the Museum collections, and reflected the beginnings of his development as an echinoid expert. This was a somewhat surprising topic in view of the main interest of his co-appointee, F. A. Bather, who also concentrated on Echinoderms, especially the Pelmatozoa and of these the crinoids, becoming known as ‘Crinoid Bather’ (Lang 1934). As new assistants, Bather and Gregory were given their first projects and clearly both took to fields in which the museum required experts. There is evidence in the papers that Dr H. Woodward instigated at least some of Gregory’s echinoid interest, and of course the biological training he had gone to considerable effort to acquire, attested to his enthusiasm for palaeontology. The initial echinoid paper (Gregory 1889a) was read by Gregory to the Geological Society on 19 June 1889. It was the first paper he read to the society, and concerned ‘Cystechinus crassus, a new species from the Radiolarian Marls of Barbados, and the evidence it affords as to the age and origin of these deposits’ (Fig. 3.1). Gregory showed first that the species came from the Radiolarian Marl and not the overlying Coralline Limestone, that it was a deep water form of Pliocene, Pleistocene or possibly Miocene age, but was distinguished from the three modern species found by the 1872–6 Challenger Expedition at depths of 2– 4 km. That it was a deep-sea dweller confirmed the radiolarian deposit as a deep-sea ooze. Judd congratulated him on ‘the very clear way he had presented his facts and inferences’ (Gregory 1889a). Gregory pointed out that as the Radiolarian Marls reach at least 350 m above sea level, there must have been significant recent uplift, interchanging a deep-water environment for a ‘continental’ one and having major implications for the view that the oceans and the continents were permanent and not exchangeable. The findings of this paper made a lasting impression on Gregory and he used them many years later when continental drift was being considered (Marvin 1985). The illustrations in the paper were drawn by Bather, with whom Gregory seems to have had a life-long friendship. Gregory was also encouraged by the great coral and echinoid expert, Professor Peter Martin Duncan (1824 – 1891), who died only two years later. (Gregory (1891) wrote a most complimentary obituary notice of him.) The second echinoid paper (Gregory 1889b), instigated by Dr H. Woodward, described a new species of Protaster from the Upper Silurian of Victoria, Australia; the third paper (Gregory 1889c) concerned Zeuglopleurus, a new genus from the Upper Cretaceous of Glynde, Sussex, previously regarded as a Glyphocyphus; an account in which Duncan’s notes were of significant assistance. These three echinoid accounts not only brought out the wealth of material at Gregory’s disposal, but his determination to make an immediate mark in this field. The connection with Duncan proved very important. 1890 saw the publication of two further echinoid papers (Gregory 1890, 1890a); one on a Pliocene species from Suffolk, England, and the second ‘additions to the Australian Tertiary Echinoidea’ based on collections made near Adelaide, Morgan and west of Port Augusta, all in South Australia. By early 1891, a ‘A catalogue of the Pliocene Echinoidea in the Reid Collection in the Museum of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society’ was complete (Gregory 1891a), but before it was published, Gregory (1891b) had already read, on 2 January 1891, an important 44-page paper to the Geologists’ Association on ‘A revision of the British fossil Cainozoic Echinoidea.’ He was also heavily involved in completing his massive study of the Maltese Tertiary fossil Echinoidea

Fig. 3.1. Cystechinus crassus from the Radiolarian Marls of Barbados, Gregory’s first echinoid paper.

and their value in correlating the Maltese rocks. This was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 6 July 1891 for Gregory by Dr John Murray (1841 –1914), and subsequently appeared in the Society’s Transactions (Gregory 1891c). This latter paper was an erudite study, showing Gregory’s ability to translate German, French and Italian, demonstrated his technical ability as an echinoid expert, but also his capacity to synthesize creatively the geology of a large region, extending far beyond Malta, from France and Corsica through Italy and Switzerland to Austria. The paper described material in the NHM, Geological Survey Museum and the Geological Society Museum, but was largely based on a substantial personal collection made by a J. H. Cooke who lent his material from abroad. For this paper alone Gregory was awarded a DSc degree in 1893 by the University of London; however, it had been entirely written before he had gained his BSc! In this account he concluded that the Maltese succession was Upper Oligocene to Lower Miocene with no break between the two systems and that the Mediterranean was at that time a series of linked basins of different depths, but without any

ASSISTANT AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY) FROM 1887; EARLY YEARS

synchronous deep, or shallow, water periods across the whole region, including the Vienna basin. Gregory read another echinoid paper (Gregory 1891d) on the afternoon of 25 August 1891 at the Washington meeting of the Geological Society of America which was held immediately prior to the 5th International Geological Congress meeting. This paper further emphasized his widening horizons. It compared the American and European echinoids from the Carboniferous onwards. He concluded that there was a marked difference between the two faunas in the Carboniferous, but a similarity in the Lower Cretaceous that was gradually lost as independent evolution occurred towards the Miocene, when connections were re-established, and these continued into the Pliocene. The shallow-water regimes of many of these echinoids, the finding of Mediterranean and one West Indian Miocene forms in the Azores, led him to conclude boldly that his comparison showed ‘a series of phenomena wholly incompatible with the theory of the permanence of the great ocean basins.’ He alluded to shallow water having been present where now there was deep ocean. Unmentioned was the consistency of his conclusion with that of his earlier Barbados work, to which his research was already returning. On 6 January 1892, at the Geological Society, following a paper by Alfred Jukes-Brown (1851 –1914) & John Burchmore Harrison (1856 –1926) on the ‘Geology of Barbados – Part II – The Oceanic Deposits’, Gregory (1892) read his third paper to the society (the second is described later): ‘Archæopneustes abruptus, a new genus and species of Echinoid from the Oceanic Series in Barbados’. Jukes-Brown & Harrison described Globigerina and radiolarian ooze, including red clay, intercalated between shallowwater deposits, in their view clear evidence that portions of the continental area might be depressed to oceanic depths and then re-elevated. In contrast, Gregory displayed specimens of radiolarian marls from Cuba, identical to those from Barbados, disproving the objection that the Barbados deep-sea deposits only occurred on the margin of a volcanic area. The new echinoid came from a limestone at the very top of the ‘Oceanic Series’ that ought not to have been included in the same series (especially as the base of the limestone contained fragments of the underlying series, simple corals, mollusca, and fish remains) so the new echinoid did not disprove a deep-sea origin for the radiolarian marls (Gregory 1892). The record of the new echinoid was also noted briefly in Gregory (1892a). Gregory’s other 1892 echinoid paper was ‘Further additions to Australian fossil Echinoidea’ (Gregory 1892b), concerning NHM ‘Cainozoic’ specimens from Western Australia and Eocene specimens from Victoria. It was a fortunate coincidence that Sir Archibald Geikie (1835 – 1924), Director General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland, was President of the Geological Society in 1891 and 1892, when Gregory was making his early presentations. Geikie was impressed by what Gregory had to say, although the society’s record shows that Geikie was frequently absent and a Vice President stood in for him at some of Gregory’s papers. In addition, Geikie was President of the British Association in 1892 so he may have had further contact with Gregory at the BA meeting.

Eozoon On 11 March 1891 Gregory (1891e) presented an account to the Geological Society of London of ‘The Tudor specimen of Eozoon’. This was a supposed specimen of Eozoon canadense found in a Grenville marble (‘limestone’) at Tudor, Hastings County, Ontario, which had been sent to England for examination and was exhibited by Gregory at the meeting. The conclusions as to its organic origin were a re-run of the evidence and conclusions of his Science-Gossip paper five years earlier and seem to have been accepted by the Fellows with no significant dissent. The whole controversy, which is not fully considered here, came to a partial

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conclusion when four years later the Eozoon structure was found (or was claimed to have been found), in volcanic blocks from Monte Summa, Vesuvius by Henry James Johnston-Lavis (1856 –1914) & Gregory (1895, 1895a); not that the original discoverer of Eozoon, J. W. Dawson, accepted that the Vesuvius specimens were Eozoon. There is a vast literature on this matter, usefully summarized by O’Brien (1971). Gregory was intrigued by this problem, perhaps because early on it had aroused his interest (Gregory 1886) and years later, in the 1960s, Dr W. D. I. Rolfe recalls (pers. comm.) seeing acid-etched slabs of Eozoon in the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, which almost certainly had been donated or derived via Gregory, who was the Honorary Keeper of the Geological Collections.

Corals Although Gregory had shown an early interest in coral reefs (Gregory 1888b), he did not publish on coral taxonomy until 1895 (for reasons that are given later), but it is certain that he began studying and writing about them as early as 1889 (Gregory 1895). It is possible that this interest may have made him the obvious choice to assist the terminally-ill coral expert, Prof. P. M. Duncan, in his uncompleted study of material that he was donating to the NHM. It seems less likely that his interest in coral taxonomy was initiated as a result of working on this assignment. Gregory and Duncan appear to have got on well together and when Duncan died, he left some of his books to Gregory (C. J. Burton, pers. comm. 2007). Gregory’s interest in corals, coral reef formation and the West Indian and Antillean evidence of varying deep and shallow-water conditions attracted Gregory to the GSL paper by J. J. Lister (1891) on ‘Notes on the geology of the Tonga Islands’ read on 24 June 1891 with Archibald Geikie in the chair. Gregory spoke in the resulting discussion (Lister 1891, p. 114) to make the important point that the Mn nodules described by Lister had been at great depths and Lister’s study of the corals formed on them show ‘coral formation in shallow or rising areas of the sea floor for which, as Darwin himself has so emphatically insisted, his (Darwin’s) theory of coral reef formation was not proposed’.

Petrology A major influence on Gregory’s petrological work was the interest of his friend Grenville Cole, at the RSM until 1890, then Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at the Royal College of Science for Ireland in Dublin, and the lecturer Frank Rutley, in the spherulitic (small grape-like knobs of radiating minerals set in a glassy matrix) and variolitic (similar but with plagioclase needles) textures found respectively in rhyolites and fine-grained basaltic rocks. Cole and Gregory were a remarkable pair; few could out-walk Gregory’s prolonged 5 miles an hour while still fewer could overtake the almost dwarf-like Cole on a tricycle or bicycle, for he could cycle for tens of miles at racing speed, presumably helped by his low wind resistance, and he cycled through much of Europe with his wife studying geology in between producing about 500 published papers (Wyse Jackson 2007). Rutley was RSM-trained (1862– 4) and worked for 15 years in the Geological Survey, initially in the Lake District, later becoming the petrographic authority in the Survey before being appointed in 1882 by Prof. Judd to the RSM and the Normal School of Science of the RCS, which both became part of Imperial College (IC) in 1907. Between 1876 (while still working for the Survey) and 1900 he published a Geological Survey Memoir ‘The Felsitic Lavas of England & Wales’ (1885) and no fewer than 15 other papers, mostly in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, concerned with spherulitic, variolitic and perlitic

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(concentric curved cracks like onion layers) structures and with glassy or devitrified rocks from Glasgow, the Lake District, North Wales (e.g. Rutley 1879), Montana, California (Rutley 1890), Mexico and even a fulgarite from Mont Blanc. He was an inspiring lecturer, deeply engrossed by these puzzling structures and fine-grained igneous rock textures. Subsequently, he has been shown to be correct in supposing that spherulitic structures were related to devitrification. The explanation for spherulites and perlites was a hot topic at the time and no doubt Rutley communicated his enthusiasm (e.g. Rutley 1894) for the study of these structures to Cole and Gregory and also to Judd, who prompted the work by Cole described next. On 29 February 1888, Cole (1888) read a paper to the Geological Society ‘On some additional occurrences of tachylyte’, mainly dealing with samples from Mull, Kelmelfort (Argyllshire) and Co Down, N. Ireland, but suggesting that the spherulitic and perlitic structures of felsic rocks were also found in variolitic mafic rocks of the Durance on the NW Italian and SE French border, which Cole thought might be a devitrified tachylyte (a black glassy basaltic rock). Clearly Cole initiated this work, but a few weeks later, using the Easter break, Gregory attempted to examine the Durance rocks in the field alone, but heavy snowstorms made this impossible. Whether this was initially Gregory’s sole reason for becoming involved in the geology of the Cottian Alps remains obscure, because of other work which he undertook in the area later. The London-based geologist who knew the region best was Prof. Thomas George Bonney (1833 –1923) of University College, London, and he may have suggested the area to Cole and possibly to Gregory also, if for different reasons. Accordingly in August 1889, Cole and Gregory travelled together to the Cottian Alps, Gregory using some of his annual leave. They jointly wrote up their work which they read to the Geological Society on 5 February 1890 (Cole & Gregory 1890). The area lies east of Brianc¸on and above the Upper Durance River. The work described the gabbros, serpentinites, diabase (altered dolerite) dykes, variolitic diabase and tuffs which are devitrified basaltic glass forming pea- or bean-shaped spherules, and wrestled with the problems of explaining their origin. Unlike some of the previous workers, they recognized the distinction between the earlier plutonic rocks and the later volcanic, glassy, ones, which they compared to the basaltic Mauna Loa and Kilauea lavas of Hawaii, a few of which contain some spheroids in their glassy parts; one such specimen, which they described, was in the RSM. Their conclusion, after an impressive survey of the previous literature in French, Italian and German, was unequivocal. The Durance variolite was a devitrified spherulitic tachylyte, originally formed by rapid cooling, which explains its occurrence in the selvedges and edges of the diabases and also in Hawaii and elsewhere. Why rapid cooling should produce spheroids remained elusive, and in hindsight required some experimental petrology. Gregory became hooked on the problem. Gregory was thus prompted to examine similar spherules in another variolitic rock, this time from Bavaria (Germany), that both Zirkel and Rosenbusch had previously described in some detail and had agreed were igneous spherules, not fragments of the country rock caught up in the intrusion, as claimed by others. The area is near Berneck, Fichtelgebirge and was probably visited by Gregory during the summer of 1890, again on leave, but possibly in conjunction with his visit to continental museums as he also took the opportunity to examine supposed variolite samples from the Fichtelgebirge in the Munich Bavarian Museum. On 7 November 1890, he exhibited variolite specimens from Berneck to the GA (PGA 12, p. 1). The paper (Gregory 1891f), read on 17 December 1890, was the second that he read to the Geological Society, and includes detailed field and microscopic descriptions of the spherulites, concluding that they formed due to rapid, but not too rapid, cooling of an intrusive basic rock. The interesting observation that the amygdaloidal specimens were less spherulitic, was ascribed to loss of water

from the magma into the bubbles, which water loss diminished the magma fluidity, so that the spherulites could not form. The concept that rapid crystallization was needed but not so rapid that the radiating feldspar needles did not have time to form was evident, but not explicitly formulated.

Excursions abroad and first recognition During 1890, presumably as part of his Museum duties, Gregory made a quick tour of several leading continental museums to ascertain the extent of their invertebrate palaeontology collections especially their echinoid holdings, and in particular certain important echinoid specimens that he wished to examine. This survey complemented an earlier one made by Arthur Smith Woodward (1888), which enumerated some of the most interesting vertebrate collections in continental museums. These visits enabled him to see the different ways in which museums displayed and labelled their specimens, stored their type specimens, reserve collections and the facilities they had for research by visitors – all part of his training as a ‘museum man.’ Gregory visited collections in the museums of Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart, Tu¨bingen, (where an astonishing ‘clump of 70 foot (21 m) crinoids’ was noted) and, disappointingly, in Heidelberg and Bonn, where the collections were in packing cases being moved, although he did gain entry to Rosenbusch’s great petrographic collection in Heidelberg. His published account (Gregory 1890b) is but a brief summary of the much fuller information he obtained, and the contacts he made from directors downwards, and is also only one of a flush of no fewer than seven short accounts which he published in 1890 in the Geological Magazine. He reviewed Michel-Le´vy’s account in French of the ‘Geology of Mont Blanc’ with its central intrusive granites and flanking schists (Gregory 1890c); Stefani’s account in Italian of the igneous rocks of Northern Italy, including the peridotites, gabbros, diabases, granites and serpentinite breccias (Gregory 1890d); and Issel’s curious description in French of radiolarians inside authigenic albite crystals from the Ligurian Appenines (Gregory 1890e). He wrote obituary notices of Prof. Friedrich August Quenstedt (1809 – 89), the great Jurassic palaeontologist and mineralogist (Gregory 1890f), and of Prof. Melchior Neumayr (1845 –90), the great palaeontologist and palaeogeographer (Gregory 1890g), and he also supported a plea for ‘A uniform system of Russian transliteration’ headed by the Director, NHM, Sir William Henry Flower (1831 – 1899) (Flower et al. 1890). This suggests that he had already become involved in some Russian translating which at this stage probably involved the palaeontological literature (echinoids and corals). Almost all this activity, together with the research papers outlined above, took place while he was still studying part-time for his final BSc exams in 1891. Clearly his appointment at the museum had not diminished his long hours of productive work or the amount of midnight oil consumed. In August and September 1891, Gregory and his sister Anne attended the 5th International Geological Congress in Washington, D.C. The formal meetings ran from 26 August to 2 September and were attended by 251 of the 546 Congress members, after which a Pullman train with a lecture room departed on the main three-week excursion which enabled 75 participants, not including the two Gregorys (perhaps because of the cost), to visit the Niagara Falls, Chicago, Yellowstone, Salt Lake City, Colorado River, Denver and Flagstaff, Arizona for the Grand Canyon, returning to New York and Washington. The excursion was as much a proud American demonstration of their recently completed transcontinental railroad system as of the wide range of geology. Before the congress, Gregory presented his paper comparing American and European echinoids, mentioned above, to the newly-formed (1888) Geological Society of America. The

ASSISTANT AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY) FROM 1887; EARLY YEARS

congress lectures included a resume´ of the Precambrian rocks of North America by Charles Richard Van Hise (1857 –1918) and was Gregory’s first detailed introduction to the Laurentian and Archaean rocks, some of which he subsequently saw in the field, and gave him a first impression of the ‘basement complexes’ of the continents. The abundance of demonstrably intrusive gneisses may well have helped supply a solution to a problem concerning gneisses in the Cottian Alps that was puzzling him and is dealt with below. After the formal part of the congress, he and Anne travelled westward together, mostly by train, until the end of September after which Gregory returned to England and his sister stayed on travelling until the end of December. They travelled via Chicago and Burlington, (Iowa) to Denver and Salt Lake City, going down mines and visiting centres of geological interest. At Marietta, Burlington, they visited Mr. Wachsmuth’s museum and he insisted on them staying with him (letter with A. Mendall). They both climbed Pikes Peak in Colorado, at 4300 m (14 110 ft) among the higher summits in the USA (Nicholson 1932), presumably so that Gregory could see the Pikes Peak Batholith with its worldrenowned variety of pegmatite minerals and no doubt collect for the NHM. Gregory then went north to Yellowstone Park and the Great Basin, seeing the great lava sheets of the Snake River of Idaho and the Rocky Mountains, while Anne went south to Arizona and California. Although Gregory gave an illustrated lecture on these travels to the GA on 1 April 1892 entitled American scenery in its geological relations (Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association (PGA), 12, 274) there is no precise record of where he went. His son’s account (Gregory 1977) states that he also visited the Yosemite Valley, which Gregory certainly cited several times as an instance of a rift valley; indeed the very first use of the term ‘rift valley’ (Gregory 1894) is with reference to the Yosemite Valley, but curiously, neither he (in his Who’s Who entry) nor his sister (Nicholson 1932) mention him visiting California. He did note ‘the extraordinary steepness of the (Yosemite) bounding walls may be seen in photographs’ (Gregory 1896, p. 220) and where he discusses the origin of the Yosemite Valley (Gregory 1913), he does so entirely by citing references (unfortunately omitted in error), with no personal observations, which is unusual if he had seen it himself. Also, given the limited time he had, it seems unlikely he could have fitted in a visit, so the overall probability is that he did not go to California. At intervals afterwards Gregory referred to items he had seen and thus some of his route can be deduced, such as the great fault scarp of the Wahsatch mountains on the east side of the basin of the Great Salt Lake of Utah (Gregory 1894); or climbing Gray’s Peak, west of Denver, Colorado, at 4390 m (14 341 ft) in the Rocky Mountains (Gregory 1896), a Palaeogene granite intruded into Precambrian metamorphic rocks from where a fine view of the Front Range of the Rockies is obtained. This last climb was later described by Gregory (1894) as being accomplished with some ‘mountain sickness [high altitude sickness] solely from lack of food as owing to a breakdown in our transport, my sister and I had a very long march and 28 hours without food, she collapsed absolutely at 13 100 ft (4010 m) and I felt rather bad during the last 300 ft (92 m) ascent’. Gregory also saw the lithophyses (concentric shells separated by empty spaces or filled with secondary minerals, usually in obsidian) in Obsidian Cliff, NW Yellowstone, Wyoming, which had formed prior to the consolidation of the rhyolite (Gregory, 11 May 1892) in discussion of Cole & Butler’s (1892) account of the lithophyses in the obsidian of Lipari. Similarly, in the rhyolitic rocks of Yellowstone, he noted that the spherulites there are ‘often old ones in re-fused lava, and the perlites have bent around them’ (Gregory, 22 November 1893) in discussion of Rutley’s (1894) paper ‘On the sequence of perlitic and spherulitic structures (a rejoinder to criticism)’ in which Rutley argued for spherulitic structures to post-date perlitic structures; a view Gregory and others did not share.

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The first formal recognition of this prolonged whirlwind of activity came on 19 February 1892 at the Geological Society’s AGM when the President, Sir Archibald Geikie, who must have been involved in making the decision, presented Gregory with half of the Lyell Fund award for 1891, saying: ‘Mr Gregory, One moiety [one half] of the balance of the proceeds of the Lyell Fund has been assigned by the Council to you as a token of its warm appreciation of your researches and as an encouragement to you to continue them. You have shown yourself to be at once an accomplished palaeontologist and an able petrographer; we trust that in both capacities you may live amply to fulfill the promise which you have given of a brilliant career in the future’ (Geikie 1892). Gregory made a decidedly deferential reply, of the type expected in those days which seems almost oleaginous today: ‘The . . . [award] . . . helps me to realize more than usually the responsibility of holding an appointment at the Natural History Museum, for I feel that it is to the opportunities afforded by its collections and libraries, and by the generous assistance and encouragement of the more experienced members of the staff, that the little that I have been able to do is entirely owing. You, Sir, have kindly referred to the fact that I have occasionally wandered from the work of descriptive palaeontology; I can only offer as an excuse for thus presuming to intrude into the other branch of geological work, the desire occasionally to exchange the air of the museum for that of the field, as well as the wish for the training acquired in pursuing the more precise method of research. The award will encourage me to try to continue in the path of its founder in regarding fossils not merely as the cells of a phylogenetic tree, but as the witnesses from whose evidence we must learn the physical conditions and faunistic migrations of the successive periods of the past’ (Geikie 1892). This reply seems to imply that only two types of geological research existed, with petrology or petrography being the ‘more precise’ one, whereas of course, Gregory was, in the future, to work in far more than two geological fields. It does, however, point to the fact that as a physically active young man, at a time when most geologists spent long periods in the field, museum work in Central London on specimens collected largely or entirely by others, was not by itself entirely satisfying, and there is clear evidence in Gregory’s career that he seized any opportunity to do fieldwork and certainly not just within palaeontology or petrology or even geology. This award is not the first detected personal association of Geikie with Gregory, for a copy of an approving letter, dated 22 April 1891, from Geikie to Gregory, who had borrowed three specimens from the Geological Survey to describe, is in the Geikie Haslemere archive. Gregory must have made a favourable impression on Geikie early on. This was subsequently crucial to Gregory’s career.

Social and other life Gregory’s mother provided a cheerful social environment for her offspring and welcomed Jack’s foreign friends, often at a moment’s notice. Before telephones were common, a telegram of the kind ‘Speak Magyar tonight, bringing Count Szadecsy home’ would lead to a pleasant evening of conversation and music, sometimes to the surprise of the visitor, who may have thought the English an unmusical nation. Gregory would never learn to dance but could on rare occasions be persuaded to go to a dance. On one such evening, heavy snow fell and most of the would-be dancers could not get to the dance at Poplar as public transport ceased, but Gregory, who walked nearly everywhere, got through as did a few local girls from Poplar. ‘It was very maddening that the only man to get there could not dance!’ (Nicholson 1932). At home, once a month, the Gregory family had what they called ‘a literary evening’. It was generally a debate on some question of the time, such as one introduced by a man from Jamaica ‘Is

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England neglecting her colonies?’ The debates were informal but did not degenerate into conversations, and complete freedom of expression was claimed (Nicholson 1932). Increasingly, at the weekends, Gregory would lead or go on geological or natural history day excursions, with the Geologists’ Association (GA) or the Toynbee Natural History Society, including Sunday walks with the latter to places such as Coldharbour and Leith Hill (in Surrey, ESE of Guildford) and the surrounding country where Lower Greensand occurred (Gregory 1977). On other weekends, he would go geological mapping. When he was not off to ‘the continent’, he would spend a few days, such as at Easter, in the New Forest or by Savernake (near Marlborough) with the Toynbee Natural History Society. These outings provided an escape from the multiple Sunday church services and also gave him physical exercise which otherwise he only got by city street walking. He continued his attendance at GA meetings, gave a ‘lantern exhibition’ with Cole of ‘photographs of geological interest’ on 7 November 1890 (GA Circular of 10 Oct. 1890), being thanked for operating the oxy-hydrogen lantern for the lectures given in 1891 (PGA 12, p. 267), exhibiting specimens (e.g. variolites from the Fichtelgebirge on 7 November 1890), leading excursions (e.g. to Walthamstow, almost home ground, to see the Eocene London Clay and overlying gravels, on Saturday 7 May 1892 (PGA, 12, 338–339)), and becoming a Council member on 6 February 1891, a position that he retained until he resigned on going to Africa (PGA, 13, 22). He arranged the lectures for April and May 1892, was absent from the Council in April, June, July, October and November 1891 and his chief recorded contribution in the GA Council Minutes was on 4 March 1892, when he supported presenting the Pickering Collection of Pleistocene Mollusca, which the GA had been given, but could not store safely, jointly to the NHM and the Museum of Practical Geology.

Continued publication In early 1892 Gregory published his first paper in the new periodical Natural Science: A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress. This was a publication largely inspired by F. A. Bather, Gregory’s colleague, and a handful of friends, including Gregory. Bather had even more journalistic impulses than Gregory (Lang 1934). The periodical lasted from March 1892 until 1899 when Gregory departed for Australia. Whether these two events in 1899 were related is not known but, intriguingly, Science-Gossip production ground to a halt the year after Natural Science started publication, and Number 344 of August 1893 was the last Science-Gossip published for that year and was the last of the series continuously published since 1865. The two periodicals covered almost the same ground but the reason for the demise of Science-Gossip (until a New Series was started) was almost certainly illness of the Editor, Dr John Ellor Taylor (1835 –1895), who resigned from his post as Curator to the Ipswich Museum in 1893 because of illhealth and died in September 1895 (Woodward 1896). Natural Science proclaimed that ‘in addition to Notes and Comments on the progress of Natural Science, brief reviews of current literature, obituary Notices, and News of Universities, Museums, and Societies, the [periodical will] comprise . . . specially contributed articles’. Many of these articles were by very distinguished scientists (often FRS). Gregory’s (1892c) article on ‘The exploration of coral reefs by borings’ appeared in the first part of the new journal in March 1892, accompanied by others including one on ‘The evolution of fins’ by Arthur Smith Woodward, another NHM former Science-Gossip contributor. Gregory’s interest in the origin of coral reefs, shown as early as 1888 (Gregory 1888b) was re-ignited by the proposal of the BA to drill through a coral reef and establish how deep the coral foundation was, and whether it had originally formed at great depth and built up to the surface, or had started growing near the

surface, that is, shallowly, and had so continued as continuous subsidence took place. If the latter, the whole section would be of shallow water origin. The project not only aimed to resolve whether coral reefs were built up on stationary or subsiding peaks, but also whether the foundation was volcanic or not; in effect to test Darwin’s theory of the origins of atolls. In his March 1892 article, Gregory (1892c) argued that the choice of the test atoll was critical. It had to be in the central Pacific Ocean as this was the typical coral reef area; it must be a small, low-lying, wave-washed, unwooded isle, indicative of a sinking reef rather than a large, high, well-wooded island which would suggest a stationary situation, which everyone would agree could only yield a reef of shallow-water origin and did not require boring to reveal its history. Gregory suggested that the small atolls at the end of long lines of coral reef-bearing islands were most likely to be decisive in supplying sinking reefs, and indicated some of the best prospects. This article probably was responsible for Gregory becoming a member of the BA committee, as detailed later. Searching maps or the globe for such islands in the Pacific Ocean may well have impressed on him the very curious distribution of land and sea on Earth and prompted his later written considerations of this topic. Gregory’s (1892d) second article in Natural Science on ‘The physical features of the Norfolk Broads’ quickly followed the first, appearing in the July issue of the first year. This took him back to explaining the course of English rivers, in this instance how the Broads (an area of marsh and almost stagnant water, heavily overgrown with reeds) formed and why the rivers avoided the lower marshland and why they did not flow freely out into the nearby North Sea. The last point was explained by the strong north-to-south long-shore drift of the tidal movements along the East Anglian coast, which deflected the rivers to the south and eventually caused them to drop their sediment load at the turning point and partially block themselves. So in periods of flood the rivers were forced to excavate their beds to reach the sea. The normal slow motion of the flow, especially at the vegetated river edges, caused the build-up of mud along the banks, isolating the river from the surrounding marsh so that it flowed around, or even across, the marsh within largely enclosed banks. Gregory early started, and long maintained, an extensive correspondence with many foreign geologists. For example Prof. Franz Youlievich Loewinson-Lessing (1861 –1939) of St Petersburg University, was particularly interested in Gregory’s still-tobe-published work on the Fichtelgebirge variolites, and asked Gregory to give some publicity to his Mineralogical Tables which he enclosed in a letter in English, dated ‘14/26 Feb’ 1891 (letter with A. Mendell). This request seems to have prompted Gregory to begin to translate the book that Loewinson-Lessing had only recently published in 1891 in Russian, giving tables and text to enable the identification under the petrological microscope of the common rock-forming minerals. Although there were books giving the thin section properties of minerals, there was then little in the way of determinative tables to help those who were not familiar with these minerals to identify them from the microscopic characters. Microscopy was becoming widely used, even though many older workers still shunned it, and, as Gregory pointed out in his preface, it enabled the mineralogy of those vast areas of the continents that were formed of igneous and metamorphic rocks to be closely studied in a way that had not been possible before. Almost certainly, Gregory undertook the translation because he had found the book useful in his study of the Waldensian Gneisses in the Cottian Alps, NW Italy, during which he had identified kyanite, epidote, zoisite, glaucophane and titanite under a microscope (Gregory 1894a). Gregory had also shown his microscopy expertise in describing the less mineralogically challenging Trinidad sediments (Gregory 1892e in Guppy 1892, described below). Gregory had completed the translation of the book by October 1892, but had intended to write an additional chapter on the petrological microscope when

ASSISTANT AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY) FROM 1887; EARLY YEARS

he was unexpectedly asked to go immediately to Africa. He asked his friend, by then Prof. Grenville Cole, to write the chapter for him, and together with A. Morley Davies, another close RCS friend, (later best-known for his popular textbook on palaeontology), to see the proofs through the press. So the translated book (Gregory 1893) appeared while Gregory was in Africa, the preface being hurriedly written from ‘Mkonumbi, British East Africa’ (Kenya) on ‘2 December 1892’. Although the Waldensian Gneiss paper noted above was not read until 7 February 1894 and was not published until 1894, it was sent in to the Geological Society on 19 October 1892, just a few days before he was asked to go to Africa. The paper was not subsequently revised, so the work entirely predates his first visit to Africa. The area is west and SW of Turin, Italy and the problem concerned the place of the Waldensian Gneisses in the succession; whether they were older than all the adjoining schists and amphibolites, as had been assumed by most of the previous workers, or younger, which would explain why the intrusive sheets of serpentinite and amphibolite cut all the other rocks except the gneisses. Gregory (1894a), accompanied by Morley Davies, spent ‘most of the time at my disposal for field-work during the summer of 1892’ examining these rocks in detail, having already made two previous visits to the district in 1889. He noticed that the gneisses were not crumpled and folded like the surrounding rocks, and this caused him to doubt the accepted interpretation of the age of the gneisses, which was really based on dogma, not observation. At a time before any isotopic ages were available, the fact that the basement, that is, the oldest rocks of many continents, was gneissic had given rise to the axiom that gneisses in general were the oldest rocks (‘basal Laurentian’) in any sequence of metamorphic rocks. Such a view had been adopted in the Cottian Alps with the associated mica schists, marbles and quartzites being regarded as younger. Gregory showed that the gneisses intruded and cut across the metasediments and were igneous, causing contact metamorphism. The foliation in the gneisses was not, as was often supposed, relic bedding, but due to intrusion of a ‘viscid’ magma (Gregory 1894a). Moreover, Prof. C. F. Parona’s 1892 discovery of relic radiolaria in the Ligurian metasediments, which were intruded by the gneiss, meant that the metasediments were pre-Triassic in age and so the intruding gneisses could not be older than this. A late intrusive origin for the gneisses explained why they were not at one (basal) level and why the intrusive serpentinites and amphibolites, which cross the metasediments, do not intrude the gneisses. The 44-page single-authored account (Gregory 1894a) contained drawings of thin sections of the rocks, integrated the petrology and structural history and confirmed Gregory’s reputation as a competent petrologist, although the constraints of time did not allow completion of any new mapping which would have been the most conclusive evidence. In general, Gregory’s limited time in the field did not permit him to undertake the bigger field commitments required to complete a geological map; he was ‘an in and out’ man.

References Cole, G. A. J. 1888. On some additional occurrences of tachylyte. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 44, 300– 308. Cole, G. A. J. & Butler, G. W. 1892. On the lithophyses in the obsidian of the Rocche Rosse, Lipari. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, 438– 446. Cole, G. A. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1890. The variolitic rocks of Mont Gene`vre. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 46, 295– 333. Darwin, C. R. 1842. Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. Smith, Elder, London. Flower, W. H., Morfill, W. R., Lowinson-Lessing, F. et al. 1890. A uniform system of Russian transliteration. Nature, 41, 396– 397.

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Geikie, A. 1892. Proceedings of the Geological Society. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, xxxiv. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: a sketch. Privately printed. Based on an earlier account by his mother, Audrey Gregory, about her husband, J. W. Gregory. Gregory, J. W. 1886. Eozoon Canadense, the pseudo-dawn of Life. Hardwicke’s Science Gossip, 22, 82– 86; 102– 106. Gregory, J. W. 1888. The geology of Puffin Island. Proceedings of the Liverpool Biological Society, 1, 78– 94. Gregory, J. W. 1888a. The new Darwinism; or, the segregation of the fit. City of London College Science Society. Gregory, J. W. 1888b. The theory of coral reefs. Abstracts of the Metropolitan Scientific Association, No 23. Gregory, J. W. 1889. Recent theories bearing on glaciation in Britain. Abstracts of the Metropolitan Scientific Association, No 32. Gregory, J. W. 1889a. On Cystechinus crassus from the Radiolarian Marls of Barbados. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 45, 640– 650. Gregory, J. W. 1889b. On a new species of the Genus Protaster (P. Brisingoides) from the Upper Silurian of Victoria, Australia. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 6, 24– 27. Gregory, J. W. 1889c. On Zeuglopleurus, a new genus of the Family Temnopleuridae from the Upper Cretaceous. Annals & Magazine Natural History, Series 6, 3, 490–500. Gregory, J. W. 1890. On Rhynchopygus woodi, Forbes sp., from the English Pliocene. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 300– 303. Gregory, J. W. 1890a. Some additions to the Australian Tertiary Echinoidea. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 481–492. Gregory, J. W. 1890b. Invertebrate palaeontology in some continental museums. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 441–447. Gregory, J. W. 1890c. The Geology of Mont Blanc [Review of Bulletin by M. Michel-Le´vy]. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 380– 381. Gregory, J. W. 1890d. Le rocce eruptive dell ‘Eocene Superiore nell’ Apennino. By Prof. De Carlo Stefani. Bull. Soc. geol. Ital. VIII No. 2, 1889 [Review]. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 323– 325. Gregory, J. W. 1890e. The occurrence of Radiolaria in albite crystals [Review of papers by A. Issel]. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 417– 418. Gregory, J. W. 1890f. Friedrich August Von Quenstedt [Obituary Notice]. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 237–238. Gregory, J. W. 1890g. Melchior Neumayr [Obituary Notice]. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 238–240. Gregory, J. W. 1891. Peter Martin Duncan [Obituary Notice]. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 8, 332–336. Gregory, J. W. 1891a. A catalogue of the Pliocene Echinoidea in the Reed Collection in the Museum of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. Yorkshire Philosophical Society Report for 1890, 37 –43. Gregory, J. W. 1891b. A revision of the British fossil Cainozoic Echinoid faunas. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 12, 16– 60. Gregory, J. W. 1891c. The Maltese fossil Echinoidea, and their evidence on the correlation of the Maltese rocks. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 36, 585–640. Gregory, J. W. 1891d. The relations of the American and European Echinoid faunas. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 3, 101–108. Gregory, J. W. 1891e. The Tudor specimen of Eozoon. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 47, 348–355. Gregory, J. W. 1891f. The variolitic diabase of the Fichtelgebirge. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 47, 45 – 62. Gregory, J. W. 1892. Archaeopneustes abruptus, a new genus and species of Echinoid from the Oceanic Series in Barbados. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, 163–169. Gregory, J. W. 1892a. Archaeopneustes abruptus, a new genus and species of Echinoid from the Ocean series in Barbados. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 9, 89. Gregory, J. W. 1892b. Further additions to Australian fossil Echinoidea. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 9, 433–437. Gregory, J. W. 1892c. The exploration of coral reefs by boring. Natural Science 1, 50– 52. Gregory, J. W. 1892d. The Physical features of the Norfolk Broads. Natural Science 1, 346– 355.

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Gregory, J. W. 1892e. The microscopic structure of some Trinidad rocks. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, 538– 540. (Appendix in Guppy 1892.) Gregory, J. W. 1893. Tables for the Determination of the Rock-forming Minerals by F. Loewinson-Lessing. Translated from the Russian by J. W. Gregory. Macmillan, London. Gregory, J. W. 1894. Mountaineering in Central Africa, with an attempt on Mount Kenya. Alpine Journal, 17, 89– 104. Gregory, J. W. 1894a. The Waldensian Gneisses and their place in the Cottian sequence. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 232– 277. Gregory, J. W. 1895. Contributions to the Palaeontology and Physical Geology of the West Indies. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 51, 255– 310. Gregory, J. W. 1896. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London,. Reprinted in 1968 The Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1913. The Nature and Origin of Fiords. John Murray, London. Gregory, J. W. 1921. The glaciation of Ireland. Geological Magazine, 58, 137– 140. Gregory, J. W. 1930. Proceedings of the Geological Society of London. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 86, xliii–xliv. Guppy, R. J. L. 1892. The Tertiary Microzoic Formation of Trinidad, West Indies. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, 519–541. Johnston-Lavis, H. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1895. Eozoonal structure of the ejected blocks of Monte Summa. Science Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society, Series 2, 5, 259–286. Johnston-Lavis, H. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1895a. Eozoon and the Monte Somma Blocks. Natural Science, 5, 403–404. Jukes-Browne, A. J. & Harrison, J. B. 1892. The Geology of Barbados. Part II. The Oceanic Deposits. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, 170– 226.

Lang, W. D. 1934. Francis Arthur Bather 1863–1934. Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 1932– 5, 1, 303– 314. Lister, J. J. 1891. Notes on the geology of the Tonga Islands. Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Geological Society, 577, 112– 114. Marvin, U. B. 1985. The British reception of Alfred Wegener’s continental drift hypothesis. Earth Sciences History, 4, 138– 159. Nicholson (ne´e Gregory), A. J. 1932. Unpublished mss detailing the early life of John Walter Gregory. Norman, J. R. 1944. Squire; Memories of Charles Davies Sherborn. Harrap & Co., London. O’Brien, C. 1971. Sir William Dawson—a Life in Science and Religion. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Rutley, F. 1879. On perlitic and spherulitic structures in the lavas of Glyder Fawr, North Wales. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 35, 508– 510. Rutley, F. 1885. The Felsitic Lavas of England, Wales. Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. HMSO. Rutley, F. 1890. On composite spherulites in obsidian from Hot-Springs, near Little Lake, California. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 46, 423– 428. Rutley, F. 1894. On the sequence of perlitic and spherulitic structures: A rejoinder to criticism. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 10 – 14. Woodward, A. S. 1888. Vertebrate palaeontology in some continental museums. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 5, 395– 404. Woodward, H. 1896. Obituary notices in the Proceedings. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 52, lxxv. Wyse Jackson, P. N. 2007. Grenville Arthur James Cole (1859 –1924); the cycling geologist. In: Wyse Jackson, P. N. (ed.) Four Centuries of Geological Travel: The Search for Knowledge on Foot, Bicycle, Sledge and Camel. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 287, 135– 147.

Chapter 4 The abortive 1892–3 Villiers ‘Great Lake Rudolf Expedition’ to East Africa

Undoubtedly what established Gregory’s national and international reputation was his exploration of the eastern branch of the African Rift Valley (the term ‘Rift Valley’ he first coined in Gregory 1894) around Lake Baringo, in present day Kenya, then British East Africa. The 444-page account (Gregory 1896) of his journey to Lake Baringo and his ascent to over 5250 m (17 200 ft) up Mount Kenya, revealed quite remarkable courage, leadership, walking and climbing prowess and outstanding persistence in the face of severe illness, combined with a polymathic range of interest in the geology, geomorphology, botany, zoology, entomology, anthropology, ethnography and the future prospects of the country, all written in such a readable form that the book was reprinted in 1968. What follows is drawn from the 1896 account unless otherwise stated. Towards the end of October 1892, Gregory was asked if, as a geologist, he would accompany an expedition to East Africa under the leadership of Lieutenants C. H. Villiers and Bennett Stanford of the Horse Guards (Anonymous 1892). Their aim was to traverse northwestwards from the coast of British East Africa (Kenya) to Lake Rudolf (Lake Turkana) and then north and northeastwards to cross Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and end in British Somaliland (Somali Republic) on the Red Sea. They intended to explore what was claimed to be the largest ‘blank’ left in the map of Africa at that time. It would have involved well over 3000 km of walking as, even as the crow flies, it was over 2500 km. The expedition comprised eight Europeans and planned to use more than 300 African porters, soldiers, interpreters, etc. – an immense number to feed, water and organize. In a move ominous of the disorganization that was to follow, Gregory was only invited to join this ‘privately-financed’ expedition as it was about to depart, leaving four days after Gregory got the invitation and before he could submit an application for leave of absence to the Trustees of the NHM. Most unusually, the trustees gave permission within a few days, subject to the NHM having ‘its pick of the collections’. A frantic week followed. He submitted his DSc application and published paper (Gregory 1891), having just passed the obligatory two year wait after obtaining his BSc; arranged for Grenville Cole and Morley Davies to complete and see his mineralogy book published; resigned from the GA council; made arrangements for his Toynbee Natural History Society responsibilities to be fulfilled by others and no doubt also some NHM duties; went to the Royal Geographical Society for a rapid course on surveying; purchased tropical clothing including the obligatory topi hat; with his family’s help he gathered and packed his scientific equipment during one night and got it off to the docks, in a greengrocer’s van, at 4 am; packed his personal luggage and departed by train a few days later on 4 November 1892, exactly one week after getting permission to go, no doubt having hardly slept during that week. His personal luggage was packed on the seat of the horse-drawn cab going to Charing Cross Station, and, as one of the boxes would not lock, Anne Gregory went part of the way in the train in the luggage van with a hastily-obtained locksmith (from where?) who repaired the lock while the train raced towards Dover. Anne and the locksmith were dropped off at an intermediate stop while Gregory nursed the valuable delicate chronometers which he never allowed to be handled by others on the way to Africa (Nicholson 1932).

By taking express trains across France and Italy to Brindisi (SE Italy), and then a rapid steamer to Aden, presumably the one that carried his scientific equipment, Gregory arrived in Aden in the early hours of 13 November, 9 days after leaving Britain, and just in time to catch the Malda, due to leave Aden at 3 am that morning with the rest of the expedition Europeans. He transhipped immediately in the dark with his luggage but as he left his ship, rival Somali porters tried to wrest the valuable chronometers from his grasp and he was forced to knock two of them down as ‘language was not strong enough to persuade them to keep their hands off the case’. How he managed to do this while protecting the instruments, and ensuring all his other packages were hurriedly unloaded and re-loaded, is less clear than his resolution. Before describing Gregory’s joining the expedition party, some further background needs to be explained which has not been published before. Mysteriously, Gregory never identifies or names the party leader Villiers throughout his account (although it was wellknown), nor does he tell us who invited him to join the expedition, or how it was funded except that it was, at £7000, one of the most generously supported of any privately-funded expedition. His sister’s account (Nicholson 1932) twice makes clear it was the British War Office who asked for Gregory’s help, thus explaining the Army leadership, the generous funding, the quite extraordinarily rapid agreement to second him made by the NHM (he was, of course, a civil servant), and other somewhat puzzling facts. It was on the surface an allegedly privately-funded party primarily ‘in the pursuit of game’, as claimed by Sir William Henry Flower (1831 – 1899), Director of the NHM (in Gregory 1894, p. 53) who obviously knew the real truth but, like Gregory, did not reveal it. In addition, it wanted to explore, and in part map, the region from British East Africa through the present southern Sudan and Ethiopia, the boundaries of which were not then clearly defined or known, to British Somaliland. The War Office involvement was entirely covert, presumably because it would have been politically inexpedient at home, and disastrous abroad, for it to have been seen to be spying outside British territory. Gregory’s discretion on this aspect, even long after the expedition, would have put him in the good books of the War Office, who later made other confidential use of him. At least two reasons could have prompted War Office interest in the area. Britain had occupied Egypt in 1882 and British Somaliland in 1887 to ‘safeguard’ the Suez Canal and Red Sea route to India, Aden having been occupied since 1839. British incursion into north Sudan had led to the death of General Gordon in 1885 and the resulting British media-fed indignation led to slow advances to conquer Sudan from the north, delayed while a railway line was pushed southwards in the Nile Valley to ensure a secure supply route. In 1892 the war with Sudan was unresolved, not being concluded until the massacre at Omdurman in 1898, but the War Office lacked maps and had very little knowledge of what lay in what is now southern Sudan, and needed to know. Clearly, a surveyor was required on the expedition so that what was found or observed was accurately located. Since, despite the acute shortage of time, Gregory had fitted in a rapid course in surveying before leaving, and took surveying equipment with him, it seems likely the party would have otherwise been without a competent, even if inexperienced, surveyor. Secondly, the ‘scramble for Africa’ by European countries to acquire African colonies was at its peak. British East Africa

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 19–22. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.4

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(BEA) and German East Africa had been mutually recognized by the Anglo-German agreement of 1886, leading to the establishment of the Chartered BEA Company in 1887 which had governmentally-guaranteed rights to trade and administer BEA. In 1893, the Company rapidly relinquished its rights over the ‘up-country’, that is, away from the coast, leaving the British government to administer the territory. Uganda and Southern Rhodesia had also been annexed by Britain in 1890. These vast tropical areas could only be retained and governed by Britain if British emigrants could be attracted and this required valuable natural resources; good farm land or mineral reserves such as coal for the projected railway or, best of all, gold discoveries. Gold had drawn thousands to California, Australia and the Transvaal after the finds in 1848, the 1850s and 1885 respectively. A geologist was needed to look out for any such resources. Gregory himself was chiefly interested in examining and finding the cause of the ‘great depression or trough . . . (which) . . . begins with the Dead Sea, extends down the Red Sea and ends at Tanganyika’ (Galton 1884) where it had already been explored (Fig. 4.1). Eduard Suess (1831 –1914) had deduced the lake-strewn depression was due to a connected series of Earth movements (Suess 1891). Gregory’s interest in East African geology was said by him (Gregory 1929) to have started when he read this memoir on the results of the 1887–8 expedition to Lake Rudolf by Count Samuel Teleki (de Szek) (1845 –1916), written by Suess (1891), a few months before he was asked to join the Villiers Expedition. That Gregory was sufficiently interested to write to Suess about the matter and receive a letter from Suess recommending exploration of the depression in BEA, before Gregory was asked to accompany the expedition, shows Gregory’s genuine interest in the cause of the depression, so that when he received an invitation to visit that region, he ‘accepted without the slightest hesitation’ (Gregory 1929). However, Gregory would have gone without the chance to examine this depression, as the opportunity to explore and collect across the whole field of natural history, in a largely unknown region, was for him a sufficient attraction in itself. The detailed background of previous European explorations of the whole region has recently been summarized by Dawson (2008). The British India steamer, the Malda, departed from Aden southeastwards towards the intended landing at Kismayu (Chisimaio) as Gregory made acquaintance with ‘Our Chief’ (Villiers), Sir Henry Tichborne and his valet, Mr Gleave, Mr J. Bennett-Stanford, reported by Gregory to be ex-army (Royal Dragoons) and Count Lovatelli. The two other Europeans, Mr W. H. Harris & Dr A. D. Mackinnon were left behind at Aden, as explained later. The route of the expedition was altered whilst they were on the steamer; they landed at Lamu, an island, 320 km SW of Kismayu with the intention of ascending the River Tana valley instead of the originally planned route along the River Juba. Accordingly, the steamer bypassed Kismayu. Gregory disapproved of such last minute changes. Instead of plunging straight into unknown territory, the first two months would be spent in known ground and in a region that was unsuitable for camels which had been planned as the main transporting animals. Moreover, not only would the camels have to be obtained from Kismayu and brought south, but the Tana valley was a notoriously unhealthy place, as pointed out by the Administrator of BEA, Mr J. R. W. Piggott, who happened to be on the boat, and whose wise counsels were ignored. The ship reached Lamu on 20 November 1892, unloaded 300 tons of stores and equipment the next day and the party camped for a week on the island before advancing to the mainland to form a temporary camp near Mkonumbi Creek from where Gregory wrote regarding his translated mineralogy book on 2 December. By chance a small steamer, the Juba fortunately called at Lamu on 22 November on its way to Kismayu, allowing Villiers to agree with a trader to supply 110 camels and 40 donkeys from Kismayu, to be delivered to Lamu in a month’s time, albeit at an outrageous price.

The large size of the expedition was due to the defence of the caravan, particularly against the militant Masai tribe in BEA, being entrusted to no less than 150 Aden Somali armed with 150 Snider rifles plus 100 000 bullets and 10 imperturbable Turks, who manned the Maxim gun with its 30 000 cartridges, all of which had to be carried. In addition, because it was feared the Somali would not have fought against fellow Muslims in the Muslim parts of Somali, an Abyssinian contingent of c. 50 nominal Christians was also engaged, partly as porters and partly as soldiers. To supplement the camel transport, 80 Zanzibari porters had been enlisted at Mombasa, c. 280 km SW of Lamu. Such was the disorganization, that the Abyssinians had not been ready when the party left Aden, so Mackinnon and Harris were left behind to follow on with them later, calling at Zanzibar Island (280 km SW of Mombasa) to collect the Zanzibari, returning northwards via Mombasa, and then marching c. 300 km to join the rest of the expedition that was waiting for them. The complicated logistics, the immense numbers to be fed and watered, and the porterage required to do this, plus carrying the weapons, ammunition and equipment, to permit eight Europeans, two of whom were professional soldiers, to make a traverse across part of Africa, defeated the organizational ability of the leader, and in retrospect one wonders what the real purpose of the expedition was. Probably the War Office files would reveal this, but that is another story. Problems with the main party from Lamu quickly began to surface. The stores had been badly packed, the rice and dates bought in London were unpalatable so the men refused to eat the rice and 20 tons of it were sold and the rest exchanged at a heavy loss. The cooking pots were useless, the tents unsuitable and two of them were missing as were other essential items. The men were lazy, troublesome, quarrelled among themselves and looted the neighbourhood; no doubt the boring wait itself fuelled trouble. The rains began and 20 to 30 Somali became prostrated with fever after each storm, some so seriously ill that a small party, including Gregory pushed on to Witu, where there was a doctor who might come back and render assistance. The district around Witu, together with Zanzibar Island, had only recently (1890) come under British rule, being exchanged with Germany for Heligoland Island in the North Sea. Witu had telephone communication with the coast and by this means Gregory learnt that Harris and Mackinnon had landed with 145 men but did not expect to arrive at the new rendevous at Ngatana until 24 December. Ngatana was inland on the Tana River and was approached via Kau. The change of plan left food and loads at two places while the available porters were foodless and idle at a third and Gregory and Tichbourne were sent with porters to take rice to Kau, only to receive a letter shortly after they arrived ordering them back to Witu, in preparation for departing to Ngatana to select a campsite for the whole expedition. While in Witu, Gregory received a message saying ‘The Chief’ was ill. All this delay precipitated increasing trouble with the Somali, culminating in open mutiny which the Witu garrison put down to stop the Somali depredations. Gregory set off from Witu with 12 men and 7 camels to Ngatana but it took him until 2 January 1893 to reach the rendezvous point for the rest of the expedition. The long march had still not begun. In spite of these difficulties, Gregory continued his meticulous collecting until he developed severe leg ulcers and could not walk for over a week. This was probably due to it becoming entangled in a poisonous vine while collecting a specimen. The poisoned thorns gave him 28 ulcers, which persisted for weeks until they could be treated by a doctor, who was astonished at his forbearance as the deeply buried thorns were extracted without him wincing in the face of excruciating pain (Nicholson 1932). Outbreaks of malarial fever and gastritis affected the camp. (It wasn’t until 1897 that Ronald Ross (1857 –1932) demonstrated the role of mosquitoes in spreading malaria). The

THE ABORTIVE 1892–3 VILLIERS ‘GREAT LAKE RUDOLF EXPEDITION’ TO EAST AFRICA

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Fig. 4.1. Simplified map of the African Rift Valley System from Gregory (1920). The Gregory Rift is the branch east of Lake Victoria. Some associated fractures are marked by broken lines. Some reviewers commented on the poor quality of many of Gregory’s figures. Inset is Holme’s (1978) depiction of the rifts on each side of Lake Victoria.

devastating message came that ‘The Chief’ had abandoned the expedition and had gone through Mombasa ‘on his way to the interior’ of the country without leaving any message or explanation. Gregory gives absolutely no written hint of his reaction to this seemingly outrageous betrayal, but his subsequent unwillingness to even name Lieutenant C. H. Villiers was presumably derived from Villiers’ disaffection rather than his appalling mismanagement and lack of leadership, which would have only exacerbated the apparently inexcusable act of desertion. I write ‘apparently’ because without knowing what initial and later instructions Villiers may have received from the War Office, it is difficult to be certain. If Gregory knew that Villiers had been diverted to another task by the War Office, Gregory could not have revealed this without also exposing the War Office involvement in the original expedition, so Gregory’s non-naming of Villiers in his published accounts may well have been due to his maintenance of secrecy if it was not due to Villiers’ shabby behaviour. The last reason was what most reviewers of the book concluded, for example, The Times 27 May 1896 in a long review: ‘[the author shows] wonderful restraint of the mismanagement of the expedition and avoids even mentioning the name of its leader.’ Army records may show whether Villiers was arraigned over the incident and thus reveal more of what really happened. The only additional information the writer knows is that ‘The Times’ of 25 October 1893 reported that ‘Lieutenant Villers left (the expedition) in order to join the mission under Sir Gerald Portal to Uganda.’ Up to an average of 50 men at a time were ill and several died. On 17 January 1893, Gregory himself was taken so severely ill with malarial dysentery and a very high fever that he could not

see, not even enough to identify the medicines in the chest: he could only identify the needed quinine by taste (how did he know?). After several days he began to recover but he suffered a complete loss of memory for some time, not being able to count above ‘two’. After several days of desperate illness, he could recollect ‘three’ and then later ‘four’, by which time he concluded he was recovering. None of the other expedition members were prepared to continue so as soon as they were well enough to retreat they did so to Mombasa, although in the initial part of the withdrawal, Gregory still could not walk, and he collapsed with dysentery and fever at intervals in the trek back to the coast. After one such relapse, his first words on recovering were ‘I think I shall start an expedition to get up to Lake Baringo’ (Gregory 1894, p. 518). In Mombasa the expedition was formally abandoned and the remaining Somali shipped back north. Thus ended in some ignominy ‘The Great Lake Rudolf Expedition’.

References Anonymous. 1892. Editorial. Natural Science, 1, 655– 656. Dawson, J. B. 2008. The Gregory Rift Valley and Neogene –Recent volcanoes of Northern Tanzania. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 33. Galton, F. 1884. In discussion of Thomson, J. 1884. Through the Masai Country to Victoria Nyanza. Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, New Series, 6, 711. Gregory, J. W. 1891. The Maltese fossil Echinoidea, and their evidence on the correlation of the Maltese rocks. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 36, 585–640.

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Gregory, J. W. 1894. Contributions to the physical geography of British East Africa. The Geographical Journal, 4, 289– 315, 408– 424, 505– 524. Gregory, J. W. 1896. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London. Reprinted in 1968. The Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1920. The African Rift Valleys. The Geographical Journal, 56, 14 – 47. Gregory, J. W. 1929. Eduard Suess memorial tablet. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 85, cxxxvi– cxli.

Holmes, A. 1978. Principles of Physical Geology. (3rd ed.) Nelson & Sons, Sunbury-on-Thames. Nicholson (Ne´e Gregory), A. J. 1932. Unpublished mss detailing the early life of John Walter Gregory. Suess, E. 1891. Die Bru¨che des Ostlichen-Afrika, p. 555– 584. In: von Ho¨hnell, L. R., Rosiwal, A., Toula, P. & Suess, E. 1891. Beitrage zur geologischen kenntniss des o¨stlichen Afrika. Denkschriften-kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Klasse, 58, 447– 584.

Chapter 5 Gregory’s 1893 Lake Baringo & Mount Kenya Expedition: ‘The Great Rift Valley’

Except where noted otherwise, the following is taken from Gregory’s 1896 book (422 pages), mostly Part II. It is not intended to give a detailed resume´ of that gripping account, but to outline what Gregory achieved and some of the difficulties he faced, the first of which had been surviving the unnecessary stay in the notorious malarial inland zone during the previous expedition. In this zone, the annual death rate among Europeans was 23%. In Mombasa, an island good for health, Gregory confirmed his plan to mount his own expedition to the Rift Valley. He telegraphed home to his family for ‘a small sum of money’ (Flower in Gregory 1894, p. 515; Nicholson 1932), almost certainly much less than £50, for his annual salary was less than £200. He was determined not to burden the Museum with unexpected expenses, but he did obtain carte blanche from the NHM trustees to act in whatever way he thought best, consistent with his own safety, as his enthusiasm was well known in the NHM and there were concerns that he might become reckless (Flower, op. cit.). Many years later, J. R. Norman (1896 – 1944) revealed that Charles Davies Sherborn (1861 –1942), an old and intimate colleague of Gregory’s at the NHM, had had a considerable tussle with Whitehall on Gregory’s behalf in order to allow Gregory to mount his own expedition, although neither Flower nor Gregory made any reference to this (Norman 1944). The probable reason is given below. Despite his meagre finances (his salary and some small savings) he was helped by having the pick of the unused stores and equipment from the abandoned expedition. Without these he would not have been able to proceed. No other European would accompany him. He had learnt a great deal from the difficulties of the Villiers expedition, and he saw that a much smaller body of able-bodied Zanzibari could move much more quickly, required less organization, and would have fewer internative disputes than the previous disparate, unwieldy caravan. None of the Europeans in Mombasa, including those with considerable experience of previous expeditions, would agree that his plan of taking a party of only 40 or so men (all he could afford) would succeed. At least 70 were said to be needed, including protective soldiers, and this was probably a realistic estimate. Indeed Gregory himself noted in the preface to his book that a thousand men had been massacred on the Uganda road by the Masai since he had completed his book. In retrospect, Gregory survived by a mixture of exceptionally good luck, shrewd judgement, rapid movement and extraordinary vigilance; he was certainly somewhat foolhardy. Nevertheless, he hurriedly assembled what he needed of the abandoned stores, carefully engaged selected interpreters (about 75 different languages are spoken in Kenya), Zanzibari porters, a cook, and crucially, a reliable Headman, Omari ben Hamadi, Headman of the Zanzibari contingent, an energetic young man, who had previously served other expeditions, including one of Stanley’s. Gregory had observed him to be trustworthy during the previous debacle. Charles William Hobley (1867 –1947) of the Imperial British East Africa Company later revealed how he had helped Gregory and also became a life-long friend (Gregory 1920). Essential equipment and food not available from the previous expedition were purchased, but the only surveying equipment he could muster was a prismatic compass, an Abney level, a clinometer, an aneroid barometer calibrated only to 710 millibars (21 inches) which was used for determining relative heights, and two boiling point thermometers which enabled the air pressure

(and thus approximate height) to be determined by the boiling temperature of water. The last was used every day, sometimes several times a day when traversing variable topography. The precious chronometers (for longitude determination) seem to have been lost or broken. The main aims were to obtain more precise geological information as to the structure of what we now call the Rift Valley, to map geographically a still largely unknown country, and to make natural history collections of a wide and varied nature. Gregory was very conscious of how little of this research had been carried out in BEA, compared to what the Germans had achieved further south. He had time, hurriedly, to write to Suess and even receive a reply encouraging him to proceed, as what he planned was, in Suess’s view, scientifically definitely worthwhile. Nearly four of his eleven months leave had gone, leaving him March to the end of August, when he would need to get a steamer home. This precluded getting to and from Lake Rudolf; realistically, Lake Baringo was the furthest he could aim for. The looming onset of the rainy season encouraged him to avoid elaborate measures for carrying water which would have necessitated more porters. A renewed attack of the malarial fever, while he was at Mombasa, delayed his preparations. One matter he did not mention in any of his accounts of his activities is recorded by his son (C. J. Gregory 1977): ‘In the interval between the two African expeditions in 1893, while convalescing from severe illness, he [. . .] learnt to handle a native canoe, taught by ‘my friend the son of the Pokomo chief’’. In the end, on 23 March 1893, with only five months left, an expedition of 41 men including Gregory, the Headman, four sergeants, 33 porters, a cook and a tent boy, left Mombasa despite Gregory still being quite ill with fever. Gregory bravely insisted on proceeding, partly because he was worried the natives would desert if near Mombasa, and partly because he realized time was running out. Although he made little of his sickness . . . ‘a breakfast-less start’ . . . ‘a frugal dinner of a cup of arrowroot’ . . . which was all he could take initially, at times he had a temperature of 41 8C (106 8F), and at the start had even to be lifted onto a donkey so that the party could advance. There is no question that he showed astonishing determination and courage. The fever subsided after three days but having only eaten a little arrowroot during this time, two hours walking was all he could do before collapsing behind the caravan – ‘the most dismal experience throughout the expedition’ (Gregory 1896, p. 65). The next day he began to recover and walked 14 km (9 miles) in 4 hours and from then on gradually strengthened. The route was northwestward to Fort Smith (Nairobi), the last European settlement, from which Gregory purchased nearly a ton of food, three donkeys to carry the extra load, and a small flock of sheep as food ‘on the hoof’. His sleep was invariably broken as he began the practice of going round the camp several times during the night to ensure the sentries remained awake. Breakfast was at 5 am, he went to bed at about 11 pm, usually spending the evening preparing specimens and writing up extended notes to supplement those taken during the day. During the day, in suitable places, he often left the caravan and went alone to collect and observe peripherally from the route of the main party, often sub parallel, but because of his much greater speed, his tent boy could not keep up and was a hindrance and so Gregory was frequently solitary. These walks were the most rewarding periods scientifically but also, being alone in the generally unmapped wilderness, one of

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 23–27. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.5

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significant danger from either becoming lost, or meeting hostile men or animals (Fig. 5.1). The following three extracts from his book (Gregory 1896) illustrate three of the main dangers, apart from disease, which has already been dealt with, namely, getting lost, hostile natives and lack of water or food, and also shows in his own words, the style of his account. Thus from pp. 95– 96: . . . the geology was so tempting that I went off alone. By this time the men were accustomed to my going by myself, for I did so whenever the country was safe and the next camping-place easy to find. These solitary rambles were to me the most delightful incidents in the expedition. Free from the bother of the caravan, I could climb a mountain, track a river, visit a neighbouring lake, chase butterflies, and collect plants as careless as a schoolboy. But that day I nearly had to pay a high price for my pleasure . . . [In the morning I was told] the next camp was at the foot of ‘yonder hill.’ This seemed very simple, so I said Kwaheri (Good-bye), and struck westward through the scrub to examine a mountain – Doenyo Nyuki – which appeared very different from the others in the Rift Valley. I found it was the denuded remnant of an old volcano, traced the bands of ash and tuff that encircle it, examined the sections cut by ravines . . . and climbed its four highest pinnacles. From the summit of one of these I thought I could see the camp in the place where I expected it to be; I therefore finished my study of the mountain at leisure. Afterwards I struck off to the supposed camping-ground, but could find no one. I shouted, but only an echo from the cliff answered. I climbed a tree, but could see no smoke. I made a circle round the point at a distance of about half a mile, but could find no track that answered to the men’s. So I went back to Doenyo Nyuki, and after some trouble picked up the trail of the caravan. I ran along it for three miles as quickly as I could go, but then the sun set and I had to slacken my pace. It was soon dark and I lost the trail; it began to rain and before long I was wet through. As I floundered on, hopelessly lost in the thorn scrub, I remembered that it was here that one of Thomson’s [an earlier explorer] men, who had straggled behind, was killed by a lion. I thought I could see a lion under every bush, and regretted that I had not stopped at the point where it first became so dark that I could not recognize the trail. I ought to have done this, made a ‘lean-to bivouac,’ and waited till the men came to look for me. But I was too proud then to admit that I was lost, and it was now impossible to find my way

back. I thought, however, that the camp must be near the river, so I struck off due east until I reached it and then followed up its course. The river forked, and fortunately I took the wrong branch. Before I discovered that this was only an insignificant tributary, I came across a trail in the mud. I went on my knees to examine it, and found the footprints of men, sheep, and donkeys; so it was probably that of our caravan. By going very slowly, often on hands and knees, I managed to track it for about half a mile when I saw the flicker of a fire. I crept cautiously towards it, fearing it might be that of a Masai kraal; but as I approached I could see a tent, and I knew I was ‘home.’ I called out to inquire, as I approached ‘Mpokwa rudisha?’ (Has ‘Loaded pockets’ come back?). But in spite of my effort to disguise my voice it was recognized, and the men came rushing to greet me, shake my hands, and lead me into camp. I found that Omari and some of the men were out on the search, and that since four o’clock there had been great anxiety owing to my nonappearance. I ridiculed the fear of my losing the way, and told them what a charming day I had had; but I did not think it necessary to add . . . the feelings of self-reproach and fright that had possessed my soul . . .

Clearly, although keeping his head and not panicking so that his tracking skills were not lost had been crucial, basically he had been lucky. He was more careful thereafter. Notice his nickname which tells of his avid collecting; he was after all, primarily a museum man. Similarly, his luck held out with the party’s encounters with the Masai, which Gregory sought to escape by diverting around their kraals and by moving quickly. But some encounters were unavoidable as large numbers of Masai came down to graze their flocks in the wet season, and he had to traverse this area. After one confrontation in which a large party of Masai in full war costume danced in front of them, the interpreters indicated that a Masai elder was assuring them that the Masai did not have hostile intent (p. 104): . . . I felt more at ease, [but] I still did not deem it safe to go to sleep. I sat wrapped up in a blanket, with my revolver, shot-gun, and rifle ready loaded on a table beside me. Every halfhour I went around the camp to see that the sentries were awake, and that the fires were burning. We had fortunately lighted fires at a little distance from the camp, and these illuminated a considerable space around us. Shortly after midnight, just after returning to my seat beside the fire, I saw the cook spring to his feet in such haste that I guessed there was something wrong: I threw off my rug, seized my rifle from the table, and looked around. By the light of the outer circle of fire, we could see a party of about twenty Masai creeping up to camp. They were carrying their spears, but not their shields, apparently lest these should make noise that might betray them. The cook and I shouted ‘Masai,’ and this, with my order of ‘Bunduki tiari’ (Guns ready), roused the camp. The men took their places quietly and quickly, and looked as though they meant fight . . . Several of the men under the Kiringozi, Wadi Hamis, had been told off to climb the small cliff above the camp, to guard that approach, and be able to fire down at a foe upon the plain . . . He found another party of Masai approaching from that side, and at once opened fire, while I discharged four shots over the heads of the men on the plain. As the Masai now saw that there was no chance of surprise, they turned and fled . . . We stood on guard, expecting at any moment an attack in force by the main body. But as this was not delivered, and I knew there would be no lack of sentries for the rest of that night, I turned into the tent and enjoyed my first three hours of continuous sleep since I had left the protection of Fort Smith.

Gregory’s ability to manage with incredibly little sleep, his watchfulness and preparation and sheer good luck, had paid off. In the morning they breakfasted at 4 am and sneaked away with the first light, wading the swamps beside the corner of a lake to make tracking difficult. Although it was known that in the dry season long distances separated drinking water in some areas, the wet season meant that most days it rained; but in some areas of rain-shadow, it did not. Thus (pp. 110 –115):

Fig. 5.1. Gregory during his 1892–3 East African expedition. Courtesy of A. Mendell.

. . . ‘In the afternoon we emerged from the [thick jungle-covered] valleys on to a plain where the scrub was thinner, and I went on ahead to try and find water and a camping-place. Suddenly, without the slightest warning, I found myself on the edge of a precipice 1900 feet [590 m] in height. For some hundreds of feet the cliff was absolutely vertical. A few yards away from where I stood it actually overhung, as the wind had cut away the soft beds of ash below the lava that formed the summit . . . At our feet, at the base of the precipice, lay a long narrow lake, . . . the view was certainly the most beautiful I had seen in Africa . . . but was not without its drawbacks. The precipice . . . barred our progress and drained the plateau dry. Water was absolutely necessary, so we started off in different directions to search for it [unsuccessfully]. We hoped the usual evening’s rain would enable us to fill up our bottles; but though a terrific storm of wind nearly blew the tents over the cliff into the lake, not a drop of rain fell nor could the boiling of water for height determination be accomplished [as he had been forced to drink it (Gregory 1894, p. 521)]. I had in consequence a breakfastless start. [All day spent trying to find a way down the cliff to the lake, Lake Losuguta]. An enterprising porter . . . had . . . gone off on his own account, and towards evening succeeded in finding an old game track that led down to the shore. It was then too late to descend that night, so we camped in a hollow, and served out the last ration of food,

GREGORY’S 1893 LAKE BARINGO & MOUNT KENYA EXPEDITION: ‘THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY’

which, however, could not be cooked owing to lack of water [They possessed no more food]. We started at dawn next morning, hoping to reach the lake early, breakfast there, and then hasten on to Njemps. But the descent was longer and more difficult task than we had expected . . . [with much] ledge-digging and bush-cutting . . . for the donkeys [so that] it was nearly eleven o’clock before we reached the shore. Then, to our horror, we found that the water was salt and sulphurous. The first man who reached the lake returned to us making hideous grimaces and groaning . . . its emetic properties acting on the man’s empty stomach brought on such a violent attack of retching that it was necessary to give him some cocaine. The sight of the water drove the donkeys almost mad, and they made most desperate efforts to reach it; we dared not let them drink, for it would probably have killed them. Bitterly disappointed we resumed our march along the eastern shore of the lake. In our thirsty condition we . . . [felt] the heat. The whole place [was] a sun-trap . . . the bare lava became hotter and hotter . . . and the heat from [it] almost intolerable. Occasionally we had to wade for short distances through the lake, to avoid dense thickets of bush or rocky headlands . . . we had to tie sacks over the donkeys’ heads to prevent them from drinking; as we could not take the same trouble with the sheep, they drank what they wanted, and two out of the three died. I dragged the lake for shells, but could get none. [Then after near-fatal encounters with several rhinoceros] the porters were too exhausted to go farther . . . several had fallen behind . . . some had to be almost carried on. To add to our annoyance, we could see rain pouring down on the other side of the lake. It had rained every day but two since we left Mombassa [before this drought]. We were too tired to pitch the tents, so our camp that night was a very dismal one. [The next morning they set off again] progress was very slow . . . we could [only] stagger along . . . or the men would fall exhausted . . . and it seemed as if the whole caravan were on the point of complete collapse [when] a slight shower of rain fell; we caught as much as we could and shared it. Omari refused to take his share, and gave it to a porter. The drink, small though it was, refreshed us somewhat, and we went on again. [I went ahead with two others looking for water] and at length we found some in a swamp . . . We fired a shot to announce the good news . . . and the others came . . . many without their loads [ending] forty-one hours [of] total abstinence.

A close run episode with total disaster only hours away, but note Gregory was still trying to collect even in this desperate emergency. If they had not survived, retrospective observers, after 1912, might have recalled Scott’s ill-advised delay to collect rocks on his unsuccessful return from the South Pole. With no

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food, and an unmapped river which required bridging by felling trees, they were still in a precarious position, and even when they reached Njemps, they were dismayed to find the place in the grip of a famine with listless, skeletal figures of starving Africans who had no food to supply them with. Memories of the advice given at the coast about not relying on being able to obtain food at Njemps returned, but Gregory’s luck held, and purely by chance, an Arab caravan was there and they supplied enough food for the expedition to survive, although Gregory’s ravenous state can be judged by his tucking into a thin gruel supplied by the Arabs, despite it having a black cap of live and drowning flies, due to a plague of flies, (bred on the numerous corpses lying around?) so that he ate ‘on the principle of “open your mouth and shut your eyes, and see what fate will send you” ’ (p. 121). This sustenance enabled Omari and some of the porters to go on to Elgeyo to purchase some food, while Gregory and the rest of the party, remained at or near Njemps, and survived on Gregory’s shooting the little available game, the drought having reduced the numbers of wild animals. The main geological work was carried out from Njemps, just south of Lake Baringo (Figs 5.2 & 5.3). Gregory managed to reconnoitre the geology of the Western Plateau, the western wall of the Rift Valley (Kamasin Scarp) and the floor of the Rift Valley as well as Lake Baringo. The return journey to the coast was by a more eastern route across the Laikipia Plateau to explore Mount Kenya and to avoid the main area of the Masai. This enabled the eastern wall of the Rift Valley to be examined so that a cross-section right across the Rift Valley could be drawn. Gregory recognized that the Earth movements which produced the faults must have been very recent because the faults were so little eroded. It is largely on the basis of this work that

Fig. 5.2. Geological sketch map of British East Africa (Kenya) showing the locations of Lamu Island, Witu, Mombasa, Lake Baringo and Mount Kenya, all visited by Gregory in 1892– 3, plus an outline of the Rift Valley. From Gregory (1896).

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Fig. 5.3. Map of the routes taken by Gregory in British East Africa from Lamu Island to Mombasa, Mombasa to Lake Baringo and back via Mount Kenya. Simplified and redrawn from Gregory (1896) by Alun Rogers, cartographer.

the arm of the Rift Valley in which Lake Baringo lies in Kenya is commonly referred to as ‘the Gregory Rift’. Gregory’s exploration of Mount Kenya (Fig. 5.4), the summit of which had not then been climbed, was notable although he was not able to achieve the distinction of being the first to reach the summit, which was undoubtedly his main aim, as detailed later to the Alpine Club (Gregory 1894a). He thought he spent five days over 4000 m (13 000 ft), ascended above 4900 m (16 000 ft) several times, and twice above 5200 m (17 000 ft), all crudely estimated figures but, to his disappointment, could not reach the summit across the ice fields. He was not only limited by lack of time, but more crucially by lack of anyone willing to accompany him in making some stiff climbs that would have been foolish to have attempted alone. The Zanzibaris suffered greatly in the low temperature, partly from lack of suitable warm clothing, but also from frost-bite and haemorrhage in the lungs due to high altitude sickness. They were totally unaccustomed to any form of mountaineering which they regarded as unacceptably dangerous (as many people still do today!), and to be shunned. Gregory suffered fatigue, shortness of breath and, at the highest altitudes reached, always by himself, some high altitude weakness. However, it was no mean feat to be the first to reach the snowline without guides or ropes, and to endure the deadening slow hacking through absolutely solid close-grown bamboo trees which showered freezing cold water down on the ascending party, day after day. When the summit (5199 m; 17 058 ft) was eventually climbed by (Sir) Halford Mackinder (1861 – 1947), in 1899, he named the great glacier after Gregory. Gregory determined that the glaciers around Mount Kenya had once extended far below their 1893 levels, as considered below. He always retained his early interest in the effects of glaciation (e.g. the Puffin Island work, Gregory 1888) and reviewed a book on ‘Man and the Glacial Period’ for the July 1894 issue of the Glacialists Magazine (Gregory 1894b), after his January 1894 RGS lecture revealed his interests in both archaeology and glaciations.

Fig. 5.4. Reproduction from his 1896 book of a view of Gregory and an African climbing on Mount Kenya.

GREGORY’S 1893 LAKE BARINGO & MOUNT KENYA EXPEDITION: ‘THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY’

After descending Mount Kenya, the party managed to sort out the vexed question of the nature of the headwater tributaries of the River Tana, even crossing it in shoulder-high flood in Gregory’s desperation to get back to Mombasa in time. Some cases were swept away but one was later recovered, but with half the plants ruined. The caravan rapidly returned to Mombasa on Saturday 19 August 1893, (Gregory 1894) with Gregory almost back to his old form, walking at 7.2 km (4.5 miles) per hour. The expedition had covered 2640 km (1650 miles) in ‘two days short of five months’ (Gregory 1896, p. 209) traversing at c. 24 km (15 miles) per day when on the move; a record at the time. Gregory arrived back, just in time to pay off the men before the bank closed for the weekend. He was able to catch the steamer leaving Mombasa on 25 August, together with his collections. With slender finances, and indifferent health due to recurrent attacks of malaria, but with immense determination, praiseworthy loyalty and hard slog by the Africans, and above all with remarkably good luck, the expedition was successful in what Gregory observed, and what he brought back in the way of multifarious specimens. Throughout the whole foray, Gregory was acutely conscious of the geomorphology of the region he passed through, noticing and measuring the heights of old lake terraces, volcanic topography, plateaux and valley floor heights etc. and mapping as best he could, the topography and main rivers etc. Indeed his first published reports were to the Royal Geographical Society and concerned the topographical mapping of the region, including the correct course of the River Tana. In addition to geomorphology, at times his eyes roved over the landscape with an archaeologist’s scrutiny, discovering some very old stone cairns, at other times he closely examined what was beneath his feet and noticed many instances of pre-historic stone implements, especially near a ford on the Gilmore River (36.24E, 0.36S). Here he discerned an old settlement with stone implements, hundreds of obsidian chips and fragments of pottery. Sir John Evans later identified the implements as being of Neolithic age and Gregory had noted that the deposits pre-dated the cutting of a gorge through the

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lava flow that was there, thus confirming their old age. Despite the collections lost while fording the flooded river, he brought back many specimens for experts to examine. These included: specimens of fish, reptiles, lepidoptera, mollusca, birds, land crustacean, mammalia, plants, fungi, insects, arachnids, myriapods, earthworms and rocks, being of course greatly hampered in the collection and preservation of material (e.g. the careful skinning of animals to museum standard) by being the only person who could do this amidst all the other duties which required his attention. Gregory’s Expedition Flag was recently re-discovered by his grandchildren and was in 2005 presented to the RGS (A. Mendell, pers. comm. 2005).

References Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: a sketch. Privately printed. Based on an earlier account by his mother, Audrey Gregory, about her husband, J. W. Gregory. Gregory, J. W. 1888. The geology of Puffin Island. Proceedings of the Liverpool Biological Society, 1, 78– 94. Gregory, J. W. 1894. Contributions to the physical geography of British East Africa. The Geographical Journal, 4, 289–315, 408– 424, 505– 524. Gregory, J. W. 1894a. Mountaineering in Central Africa, with an attempt on Mount Kenya. Alpine Journal, 17, 89 –104. Gregory, J. W. 1894b. Review of ‘Man and the Glacial Period’ Glacialists Magazine, 1, 263– 266. Gregory, J. W. 1896. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London. Reprinted in 1968 The Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1920. The African rift valleys. The Geographical Journal, 56, 14– 47. Nicholson (ne´e Gregory), A. J. 1932. Unpublished mss detailing the early life of John Walter Gregory. Norman, J. R. 1944. Squire; Memories of Charles Davies Sherborn. Harrap & Co., London.

Chapter 6 Home after the African expedition

East African-related publications and activities Gregory returned to London in early September 1893. He was 29 and although he was never plump, he looked skeletal compared with how he had looked when he left. His reception amongst those who knew East Africa and appreciated what he had accomplished was enthusiastic. Henry Morton Stanley (1841 –1904) was stricken with his last illness, but begged Gregory to go and see him. He was surprised at what Gregory had achieved with only a few porters, especially in passing unscathed through the Masai region (Nicholson 1932). Gregory kept in touch with Stanley for some time (1895 letter with A. Mendell). Some of what had happened was known in outline from letters sent back by Gregory and from African newspaper accounts (e.g. Zanzibar Gazette; Natural Science, 3, 1893, 257). Gregory was interviewed by the press and for a long time was in demand as a lecturer and writer to recount his experiences, for example, even two and a half years after his return, in May 1896, he lectured at the Whitechapel Museum on his African expedition (Natural Science, 8, 1896, p. 282). Simultaneously he was trying to write up the scientific results, catch up with a mountain of arrears of work at the NHM, and cope with the returning attacks of malaria, which sapped his energy and reduced his phenomenal working abilities to being ‘merely’ exceptional. His DSc application had been successful without requiring any oral examination and the news of this had been sent out to him while he was in Africa, so he returned as Dr Gregory, even if not formally so until the awarding ceremony. In a society where possession of titles and degrees meant very much more than today, his status was notably increased. Gregory’s first paper dealing with East Africa ‘The Natural History of East Equatorial Africa’ appeared in Nature as a mere note in 1893 (Gregory 1893). The first full account of some of his exploits, and particularly of the results he had obtained, was presented to the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) on 15 January 1894. Gregory had been elected a member on 27 November 1893 (RGS records) and the society had endorsed the original expedition. The account was entitled ‘Contributions to the Physical Geography of British East Africa’ and was published in three parts in The Geographical Journal in October, November and December 1894 (Gregory 1894), presumably because the 61 pages were too many to go into one single part. The geographical and topographical results had to be finalized first in order to produce a map and thus locate the collections and the geological cross-sections and deductions. By using a map produced by a survey for a (proposed) railway, to which he only had access after his expedition, together with earlier mapping, Gregory was able to integrate his results with what was already known, make corrections and reduce the blank spaces. The account details the physical features of the district, describing the various zones inland from the coast, with, according to handwritten notes made by Gregory on his personal copy, the very first use of the term ‘Rift Valley’(Gregory 1894, p. 295) being applied to ‘the famous Yosemite valley’ (California) as an instance. The structure had previously been termed ‘Graben’ by Suess. He described the Rift Valley as far north as Lake Baringo, the surroundings of Mount Kenya, with its extensive volcanic scenery, the sources of the River Tana, the flora zones and finally the former course of the River Nile. The discussion following the reading of the paper gave him outstanding praise. W. H. Flower, Director of the NHM, spoke first,

and was unstinting in his commendation, especially stressing how difficult collecting, preserving, and recording was when he was also responsible for geographical positioning, the running and defending of the camp and its many duties, including being the medical doctor. Bonney, of University College, London, spoke next. He commented first on the difficulties of understanding the causes of the great linear hollow in the Earth’s crust and secondly on the importance of the discovery of the former enlarged extent of the glaciation around Mount Kenya in terms of understanding the history of the (Pleistocene) glacial epoch. He ended (Gregory 1894, p. 516); ‘As Sir William Flower said, he [Gregory] is a singularly all-round man; in fact, even as a geologist, I never know where to classify him. He is supposed to be a palaeontologist, but he is quite as much a petrologist; he has also that determination and pluck which shows that all the good blood has not yet gone out of the Englishman’.

This reveals a familiarity with Gregory that clearly predates the African adventure. Later Bonney’s admiration of Gregory would be much to Gregory’s advantage. Thirdly, Captain Frederick John Dealtry Lugard (1858 –1945), later Lord Lugard, spoke. He was knowledgeable about BEA, having been partly responsible for the building of the first fort, later destroyed by Africans, near Fort Smith in 1890. In ‘only one or two words’ [which were nearer to a 1000!] he first lavishly complimented Gregory (1894, p. 517): ‘He went from Naivasha, the head-quarters of the Masai, into the Laikipia country, where no [European] one had passed before him, and from which Mr Thomson had to fly for his life after getting to the lower slopes only of [Mount] Kenya. [He] passed boldly through Laikipia, and turned down through Kikuyu, as dangerous a country as you could find in Africa, without any fighting, and managed to make friends with the people’.

He then pointed out that the plateau that forms most of inland BEA, slopes away downwards on all sides, which partly controls the drainage, but ensures a cooler climate than elsewhere near the equator. Lugard became a life-long friend of Gregory. The botanist William Carruthers FRS (1830 –1922) spoke next, mentioning a new species of tree groundsel that Gregory had found on Mount Kenya, and a new tree lobelia, to be named Lobelia Gregorii, and the extension of the known distribution of the Cape type South African heath further north than ever known before. W. W. A. Fitzgerald spoke glowingly about the agricultural potential of BEA. This account so impressed the RGS that they awarded Gregory their prestigious Cuthbert Peek Award in 1894 (RGS archives) and he became an instant celebrity and well-known to a number of people who became life-long friends: (William) Martin Conway (1856 –1937), later knighted and then raised to the peerage; Miss Mary Henrietta Kingsley (1862 –1900); Sir Harry Johnston (1858 –1927), the famous African explorer, and Edmund Johnston Garwood (1864 –1949), later Professor of Geology at University College London. One compliment he much appreciated was when Sir William Richard Gowers (1845 –1915), the great brain specialist, gave a partie carre´e in his honour, including Rudyard Kipling (1865 –1936), and it was to have included Cecil John Rhodes (1853 – 1902), but he was detained and Leander Starr Jamieson (1863 – 1915) (of ‘The Raid’ in 1895 and later Prime Minister of Cape Colony) came instead (Nicholson 1932). A number of letters survive (e.g. 1929) which show that Gregory kept in touch with Kipling for many years. The Rift Valley expedition marked Gregory out as being much more than an unusually prolific writer in the geological sciences. Various sources (including Margaret Macdonald, pers. comm. 1993, see later), confirm

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 29–36. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.6

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that he was not ‘a party man’, being quiet, seemingly slightly shy, and certainly not ‘full’ of his exploits. Gregory (1894a) was invited to speak at the Alpine Club on 6 February 1894 about his attempt to reach the summit of Mount Kenya. He was familiar with the Club from his own climbing in the Alps, referred to in Gregory (1896), although the Club records show he was never a member. His sister’s account (Nicholson 1932), suggests that he was not interested in climbing or conquering summits for their own sakes, but because of the geology or geography there. However, his attempt on the summit of Mount Kenya undoubtedly had the partial aim of being the first to accomplish it. This characteristic of putting the science first over the adventure or achievement for its own sake was later to become a crucial factor in him declining to be involved in racing to the South Pole. Despite the pressure of other work, Gregory managed to write an 8-page obituary notice of John Tyndall, FRS (1820 –1893), retired Professor of Natural Philosophy, mainly because of his renown as an Alpine mountaineer (Gregory 1894b). At the Alpine Club (Gregory 1894a) he not only detailed his attempts on Mount Kenya but also his successes in climbing other lesser peaks such as Longonot in the Rift Valley. In Gregory (1894c) he provided another popular account of his time on Mount Kenya, while in Gregory (1894d) he wrote about ‘The natives of East Africa’. The last is the first intimation of an interest that would later develop greatly, namely a study of different human types, and his book (Gregory 1896) on his African expedition includes much on the natives of East Africa – see below. The strong journalistic urge in him clearly found expression in his African experiences and observations, but the last two publications may have also been a way of earning some money to replace what he had spent of his own limited resources in BEA. Gregory spoke at the meeting of the Zoological Society on 6 March 1894 (Gregory 1894e) about ‘Some factors that have influenced the zoological distribution in Africa’, emphasizing the importance of the East African rift valley systems (‘two long cracks forming rift valleys’, p. 165) and that Lake Nyanza (Victoria) had discharged to the north to form the headwaters of the Nile. Palestine was once under a freshwater lake discharging to the south into what is now the Red Sea; rivers from Lake Baringo and Turkana discharged to the NE into the southern end of the present Red Sea, thus explaining the similarity of the land and river molluscs of Abyssinia with those of Syria, neither of which places he had visited. This reveals that he was reading whatever he could find about biological correlations and contrasts that might throw light on the previous evolution and drainage of the various rifts in this part of the world. He made no mention of the correlation of freshwater fish between Kenya and the River Jordan that appeared in Gregory (1896), so this had not come to his attention by early March 1894, although he may have been advised of it as result of this meeting of the Zoological Society. Certainly, by 6 February 1895 Gregory showed by his questions to Professor Edward Hull (1829 – 1917), who was reading a paper (Hull 1895) on the post-Miocene supposed freshwater Eastern Mediterranean and on the freshwater fish therein and in the Nile and the Jordan headwaters, that he was by then knowledgeable about the freshwater fish in these districts and disagreed with Hull, who unlike Gregory, did not accept any previous postEocene link between the Red Sea and the River Jordan. Gregory had read the Hull paper very thoroughly as he had refereed it (letter of 17 February 1895), which alone shows Dr Gregory’s improved standing and the respect for his African and biological knowledge. Parts I and II of Gregory’s (1896) book have been summarized already. In Part III, he described the physical geography and geology of Eastern BEA and discussed problems of the distribution of the flora and fauna, together with notes on the specimens encountered, and then continued with what would now be a political minefield, namely the characteristics of the different African

races, as based on only 9 –10 months of observations. He was clearly interested in the different characteristics, origins, migrations and the diverse languages of the Zanzibari, the Pygmies, the Negros, the Negroids, the Hamitic and Semitic races and, more controversially, he included comments on the Stone Age in Africa. This considerable interest in anthropology was unusual for a geologist, and even for most botanists and zoologists, especially the extent of the publication it eventually engendered and the wide reading he undertook to understand what was known about the different human races. His interest became increasingly pronounced with time. Finally, he surveyed the future prospects of BEA, including the agricultural potential, and argued that the gradual abolition of slavery, which had a long tradition in the country, was preferable for the best long-term advancement of the country, rather than its immediate complete prohibition. He categorically excluded any comments on possible mineral reserves as he claimed that he was unable to do any exploration of that type. This exclusion was so pointedly made and out of character that one wonders whether it might not have been part of the Whitehall problem alluded to by Norman (1944). The question of the ownership of the rights to any discoveries might have become controversial as Gregory, who although being paid as a civil servant, was running and financing his own expedition, rather than a civil servant who was working on a government project; this would not have been overlooked by the Civil Service, concerned as it is with minutiae. Appendices include extensive lists of identified specimens. The text is interestingly written to hold the attention of all readers, not just specialists, and allowed some of the unfulfilled journalism within Gregory to be expressed, as is seen in many of his later writings, such as Gregory (1906). Certainly his polymathic interests are apparent and although some of the information was clearly culled from the literature and integrated with his own observations, this is only as would be expected. The coloured frontispiece of his 1896 book epitomized the wide scope of the account with an apparent foxglove-like plant (Tinnaea), painted by Gregory’s wife, Audrey, from his drawings; it is actually a cluster of green, white and red insects mimicking a plant. Part III may well have taken him the longest to write because of the need to read widely first, for example, about freshwater fish and the history of the different human races. Gregory proposed that the Rift Valley developed due to massive post-Jurassic extrusion of volcanic material, which caused subsidence of the crust around the Rift Valley, leaving the rocks of the Rift Valley forming an unsupported arch, that eventually collapsed along north –south vertical marginal faults, which were initiated in the Eocene. After this, renewed volcanism occurred in and around the Rift Valley. The raised arch was prompted by Gregory’s shrewd deduction that the Rift Valley complex had, before its depression, acted as a watershed between drainage flowing eastwards, to the Indian Ocean, and that flowing west to the Atlantic Ocean. This early uplift is well recognized today as the East African Dome (with an analogous Ethiopian Dome to the north) caused by a magma rise (with a separate magma rise, or possible plume, under the Ethiopian Dome) that uplifted the region before extension caused the rifting (e.g. McDougall & Watkins 2006). Gregory noted the lack of folding in the rifted rocks (Fig. 6.1) suggesting a tensional collapse, not a compressional one, and he recognized from the horizontal strata of some of the mountains in the Rift Valley, the existence of ‘Block Mountains’ (Fig. 6.2). He also deduced, from numerous previous lake terraces that he had recognized, especially in the Kedong basin (368350 E, 1850 S), the former existence of a substantial lake, at least 125 m (400 ft) deep in the Rift Valley. He named this Lake Suess, after Prof. Suess who had already proposed that, what Gregory termed the Rift Valley, extended from north of Palestine (Dead Sea etc.) to Lake Nyansa (Victoria), being formed by one set of non-synchronous movements (Suess 1891). By now Gregory was so impressed with Suess’s powers of global synthesis that he became a life-long Suess disciple.

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split off the spreading Indian Ocean. The whole northern part of the system is liable to volcanism as the splitting mantle is partially melted, in places giving extraordinarily alkaline magmas. The Gregory Rift is the eastern arm of the system in Kenya. Although Suess, Gregory, and others had no inkling of the present understanding, they did realize that, interpreting this major geomorphological feature on the Earth, would give important insights into geological processes, and Suess (1891) had early proposed that the formation of the Indian Ocean and the African Rift Valley were linked; a view Gregory accepted.

Publications on bryozoa, corals and Barbados and other activities

Fig. 6.1. Section across Rift Valley from Gregory (1896), figure 9. F, faults.

Gregory thought Lake Suess had discharged to the north in the Rift Valley and he became intrigued by the whole question of the former drainage patterns in the Rift Valley, using published evidence such as the similarity of species of freshwater fish found in the Upper Nile and the River Jordan, which were not found in the Lower Nile, to suppose past lake or river connections. Of course the fundamental question as to why a narrow band of the crust extending for thousands of kilometres, should have been differentiated from that on both sides, remained unexplained by Gregory’s hypothesis and the simple solution of a tensional crack with subsidence, was presumably rejected by the need to explain an earlier episode of linear uplift. Today it is appreciated that the East African Rift System is the best instance on Earth of active continental splitting, extending from incipient cracking in the far south in Botswana, through multiple extensional fracturing to the north in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania to the great Afar Depression, with its voluminous basaltic magmatism, in Ethiopia and Eritrea, which with the Red Sea, is a proto-oceanic

Fig. 6.2. Section across a ‘Block Mountain’ from Gregory (1896), figure 10. F, faults.

While writing up his expedition and researching African geology, biology and climate occupied much of his time between returning in September 1893 and the publication of the book in 1896, Gregory did not neglect either his old interests or his museum duties. He started to become a bryozoan expert, presumably upon the bidding of his NHM superiors, who may have felt new challenges were needed for this man. His first bryozoan work was undertaken in museum time after his return. During late 1893 he catalogued the Jurassic bryozoa in the York Museum (Gregory 1894f) as part of a planned ‘Monograph of the Jurassic Bryozoa’. This project also led him to describe the first reliably confirmed Jurassic Cheilostomata Bryozoa from a specimen in the NHM from the Bathonian of Normandy (Gregory 1894g). The last two papers were uncharacteristically brief in view of his intended monograph, but his 60-page work on the British Palaeogene Bryozoa, presented to the Zoological Society (Gregory 1893a) showed he was serious about Bryozoa. Apart from his systematic descriptions, the gist of his conclusions was that the number of species of British Eocene Bryozoa was numerically small, dwarfed by the wealth of forms in the Mediterranean basin, at a time when the two areas were separated by a land barrier. In 1893, the first of a two-part study by Gregory appeared in Palaeontologica Indica, palaeontologically monographing The Jurassic Fauna of Cutch (Gujarat, western India). This is discussed later with part 2, which did not appear until 1899. The first part, probably written before he went to Africa, dealt with the echinoids and was comparatively brief (14 pages plus two plates; Gregory 1893b) but the second part, dealing with the corals, was 223 pages (and 28 plates); a book in itself (Gregory 1899). This study, spread over 6 –7 years, made Gregory familiar with the Jurassic faunas of western India so that he was able to recognize and appraise similarities to, and differences from, the Jurassic palaeontology of eastern Africa. This knowledge led him to propose that eastern Africa and India could not then have been separated by an ocean basin, such as now exists. In October or November 1893, he hurriedly named three polyzoa from ‘an interesting polyzoon bed’ in the Lower Greensand of Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight that a GA member, Thomas Leighton (1858 –1906), had collected. He had delayed publishing until Gregory returned (Leighton 1894), no doubt partly also because he wished to discuss his results with Gregory. Gregory was re-elected to the Council of the Geologists’ Association on 2 February 1894. He led a GA excursion to Guildford and Shalford to examine the Lower Greensand below the Gault and above the Atherfield Clay, on Saturday 21 July 1894 (Gregory 1894h) but resigned from the Council on 1 February 1895. He still led excursions, for example, going to Chilworth, the same area as the previous excursion, for a more detailed examination of the cherts in the succession on Saturday 11 May 1895 (Gregory 1895). He presumably resigned due to pressure of work and perhaps because the NHM was already heavily represented on the GA Council, but possibly also because, as an engaged man, he needed more time with his wife-to-be.

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Geological Society Council membership and BA activities Most significant was Dr Gregory’s election to the Council of the Geological Society at the AGM on 16 February 1894, which indicated his acceptance by the geological elite. The council, the executive actually running the Society, normally met fortnightly from November to late June or early July. This election may have been prompted by members of the Society, or even those on the council, who wished to get rid of the Geological Society’s Museum (which occupied the present Upper Library) in order to use the released space to accommodate the desperately overcrowded library (now the Lower Library). Agreement to take the collections into a national museum was essential if the space was to be used by the library, and Gregory, with his NHM post, would have been a valuable ally, especially as the curation of the society’s collections left much to be desired. The first move in the matter, as regards Gregory, was his rapid appointment to the Library and Museums committee on 21 February 1894, the very first council meeting after he was elected, and he was re-elected to that committee in the following two years. The museum matter did not come to a head in the council until 1895 with Gregory supporting a move of the material to the NHM, but nothing actually happened for another 16 years, as detailed by Herries-Davies (2007). On 9 January 1895, the Treasurer, Rutley, and Gregory were appointed members of the House Committee, and the council gave support to the RGS proposal to mount an Antarctic Expedition, the first mention in the council minutes of that matter. Gregory continued on the council for the normal three year term, retiring on 19 February 1897, having commendably attended 41 council meetings and been absent from 14, including those held while he was in Spitzbergen. The only item of note that Gregory seems to have moved was on 20 November 1895, coincidently the same date that the council voted to offer the GSL Museum specimens to the NHM. Gregory proposed that the date on which manuscripts intended for publication were received by the Society should be published, but the matter was deferred for the motion to be put to the next council meeting. At the next meeting (4 December 1895), the matter was postponed and did not re-emerge during Gregory’s time on council or for long afterwards, so it seems likely he was persuaded to drop the matter by those who opposed it. Opposition could have been based on not wanting the protracted time the society took to assess and publish some papers to be made evident. The meeting of 20 November 1895 seems to have been swept with modernizing proposals as it was agreed to purchase a typewriter and a mimeograph (duplicator) and that the installation of electric light in the apartments should be left to the officers (GSL Council Archives). Only a few days before the Geological Society’s AGM, on 7 February 1894, the delayed reading of Gregory’s (1894i) Waldensian Gneiss paper to the Geological Society took place as already detailed. By 21 February, Gregory was back at the Society for the reading of a paper by Sir William Dawson on the genus Naiadites in the Coal Formation of Nova Scotia. In the discussion, Gregory (1894j) pointed out that the use of a generic name in botany does not preclude its subsequent use in zoology. Since botanists insist on using names already used for animals by zoologists, zoologists are entitled to do the reverse! Gregory was also present at the Society on 11 April when Bonney read a paper on the Lepontine Alps, and Gregory exhibited specimens of the Ecca Conglomerate from near Grahamstown, S. Africa (Abstracts of the Proceedings GSL, 623, 76). On 9 May 1894, an account of the geology of Monte Chaberton was given by A. Morley Davies & Gregory (1894) after one by Alfred Harker (1859 –1939) on the Carrock Fell Gabbro, but a third paper, ‘On a Bagshot outlier on the Corallian at Highworth in North Wiltshire’ by Gregory, promised in Abstracts of the Proceedings GSL, 624, was not presented and never appeared, for reasons that are unknown.

The Monte Chaberton study in the Cottian Alps arose from the previous work there in which unsolved problems had remained after the Cole & Gregory (1890) study of Mont Gene`vre. Solving these was made more difficult by the area being very close to the French – Italian border and the unpredictability of gunners firing from the Italian forts, which meant remaining at a safe distance whilst working. It involved Davies and Gregory in some strenuous walking and climbing to over 3000 m, which was no doubt part of the attraction, to resolve the disputed age (Silurian, Triassic or Cretaceous?) of the limestone found previously only in blocks at the base of Monte Chaberton, north of the Mont Gene`vre pass. They found the limestone in situ near the summit, identified a fossil coral as Calamophyllia fenestrata Reuss, a Cretaceous form, mapped out the Cretaceous limestone as being thrust on a base of black shales onto the Triassic dolomites and then vertically down faulted into the dolomites, which had previously not been clearly differentiated from the limestone. A tentative cross-section showed the Triassic dolomites themselves thrust over pre-Carboniferous calc-schists. The second major advance made by the paper was to identify three sets of intrusive basic (or mafic) rocks, the first being pre-Triassic, the second being post-Triassic but pre-Cretaceous, and the third being Cretaceous or Tertiary. Crucial specimens and thin sections were exhibited so that fellows could examine the evidence for themselves. In the subsequent discussion, Prof. G. Cole stated how impressed he was with the evidence of what would now be called Alpine metamorphism, which he thought ‘equalled anything that had gone on in earlier eras’. This statement was in effect a rejection of the prevalent idea that metamorphism in the Precambrian was much stronger than in more recent rocks. Only two weeks later on 23 May 1894, Gregory (1894k) read yet another paper, being his first account to the Geological Society of any of his African work. ‘The glacial geology of Mount Kenya’ that clearly presaged a forthcoming series of accounts. The paper’s title is prefixed ‘Contributions to the Geology of British East Africa – Part I’ but Parts II and III did not appear until 1900. In Part I, he described the moraines, glacial striae, perched blocks and roches moutonne´es which showed that glaciation had extended at least 1646 m (5400 ft) further down Mount Kenya than did the termination of the glaciers in 1893. He ascribed this to the former greater elevation of the mountain, not to any universal glaciation. There was still some residual incredulity as to whether widespread glaciation could occur so close to the equator, so he felt compelled to present the evidence in some detail. At the society meeting on 20 June 1894, Frederick Chapman (1864 –1943) (1894) acknowledged Gregory’s significant help in Chapman’s study of ‘The Bargate Beds of Surrey, and their microscopic contents’; it seems that Gregory was increasingly being consulted for his expertise. He even found time to return to, and of course publish on, his old interest in explaining the reasons for the present courses of the rivers in SE England and examined ‘The evolution of the Thames’ (Gregory 1894l). In this he wrote (p. 97) that ‘no one provided with eyes and wits can travel about England without being puzzled by the singular anomalies in the courses of our rivers’. He concluded that the rivers of SE England owe their present courses to flowing originally off a ‘great central plateau’ lying to the NW, whose age was not known except that it was post-Eocene. This is a remarkably prescient deduction, albeit a little too young, which was only explained when Cope (1994) pointed out that the drainages in England, Wales and Ireland reflected the existence in Late Cretaceous to late Palaeogene time of a major domal uplift in the north Irish Sea due to inflation by basaltic magma connected with a mantle plume. This great dome caused the general uplift which resulted in the consistent, and otherwise puzzling, eastward-younging stratigraphical succession across the whole of England and Wales that dominates the geological map. Although Holford et al. (2005) questioned whether this Palaeogene uplift was so great, and emphasized the greater importance of substantial Neogene uplift

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in the Central Irish Sea, Cope & D. Q. Bowen (pers. comm. 2009) have confirmed that a pre-Neogene date is correct. The Times of 27 July 1894 reported that Gregory, a Life Member of the British Association (BA), was to lecture on 9 August at the Oxford Meeting on what could have been a lengthy topic: ‘Unsolved problems of African Geology.’ However, in the more reliable BA tabular record of previous meetings (e.g. the 1908 BA volume of the 1907 Leicester Meeting), he is repeatedly recorded as leading an evening discourse on ‘Experiences and prospects of African exploration’ at the 1894 meeting. At that time, the BA was a much more important force in science than now and conducted numerous investigations, and it was a most prestigious common forum for the reporting of scientific results. Gregory’s role at the Oxford BA Meeting was therefore a considerable honour. Sadly, the visit to Oxford was marred by a re-occurrence of an attack of malaria (letter from E. E. Chaplin to Gregory dated 7 August [1894]). At the end of 1894, on 19 December, Thomas Leighton (1895) read a paper to the Geological Society on ‘The Lower Greensand above the Atherfield Clay of East Surrey’. He claimed to be able to subdivide the Lower Greensand using pebble beds thought to be of shallow-water origin and chert layers believed to be derived from deep-water sponges. In the discussion (Leighton 1894a), Gregory said ‘he felt much interest in this paper, as he had examined a good deal of the country in the effort to make a map of the coastline and shore deposits of the Lower Greensand sea. He worked over the Reigate-to-Tilburstow area in the winters of 1887– 88 and 1888 –89, but had left this [area], as, though the sections were clear, the mapping was more difficult than farther west.’ He doubted whether the pebble beds constituted constant horizons that could be correlated, as he knew of localities where pebble beds occurred stratigraphically between those correlated by Leighton; also he thought pebbles could pile up on one side of a coastal promontory and not on the other. He had himself deduced that the currents ran not from the NW to the SE as Leighton thought, but in the opposite direction with a connection to the sea to the west. Others contributing to the discussion doubted the deep-water origin of the sponges. It is clear that Gregory had studied both the rocks and the area in some detail but he did not complete or publish his work, perhaps because Leighton’s paper had shown the difficulties of using lithologies to correlate, a view Gregory himself had by then realized, and perhaps because some of the ground Gregory had mapped had been covered by Leighton anyway. Certainly before Leighton’s paper was read on 19 December, Gregory had already written a short account of a collection of 140 fossils he had made in the winter of 1889–90 from the Lower Greensand of Great Chart in Kent (Gregory 1895a), because he added a footnote about the revelation made by Leighton on 19 December 1894, that the only fossil found in the Folkestone Beds of the Lower Greensand was a typical Gault form. The Great Chart Lower Greensand also contained Gault fossils, being Albian not Aptian. This led him to emphasize again that parts of the Lower Greensand were diachronous, without using that term. More significantly, between November 1894 and April 1895, was the development of Gregory’s understanding of correlation between different continental masses. On 21 November 1894 he was particularly interested in an account given to the Geological Society by the Rev. Richard Baron (1847 –1907) (1895) on ‘Geological notes of a journey in Madagascar’. During the discussion, Gregory recognized ‘the close and interesting analogy between this area and that of the peninsular area of India and the mainland of Africa. The gneiss seemed to resemble that which forms the whole tableland of East Africa, and is covered by volcanic rocks of the same types. . . The occurrence of ancient lake basins of vast area is another resemblance to East Africa’ (Abstracts of the Proceedings of the GSL, 630). Such comparisons, in what would later be recognized as parts of Gondwana, show how, long before continental drift was proposed, he was reading widely

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and struggling to make correlations with East Africa that would later become very significant. Another explicit instance of correlation across the Indian Ocean occurred shortly after, on 3 April 1895, when he attended an account by Major Herbert de Haga Haig (1855 –1944) of the ‘Physical features and geology of Mauritius’ (Abstracts of the Proceedings of the GSL, 640). In this second example, Gregory commented on the occurrence of schists both on the Seychelles and Mauritius. ‘He thought that better support for the view of the former land-area could be obtained by the distribution of the Negrito, than from the nautical Malaysian race’. Although the confusion of events now known to be widely separated in time may seem absurd, there were no isotopic age data available at this time, little knowledge of the quite brief antiquity of Homo sapiens, and argument about whether Thomson’s (Lord Kelvin) estimate of the age of the Earth as less than 100 million years was correct. A third instance occurred on 20 February 1895, when Gregory (1895b) returned to his studies of Barbados and the West Indies with a significant elaboration of his previous deductions (Gregory 1889).

West Indian corals and more on Barbados Gregory’s first publication on the taxonomy of corals was published in 1895 (Gregory 1895b). It is a major coral study and a tour de force. In a massive study of the taxonomy of recent and fossil (mostly Miocene) corals, which had been confused by previous workers, he attempted to straighten out an abject muddle. To do this, he drew on evidence that he had been accumulating since 1889 (Gregory 1889) involving the examination of specimens in the museums at Yale, Harvard, Washington DC, the Royal University of Turin, Paris, the Geological Society and NHM, plus material specifically collected for him and various gifts, including material from the deceased Prof. Martin. He had a completed manuscript on the corals by the autumn of 1892. Foolishly, he took it with him to East Africa, presumably to work on the conclusions, and it was stolen when his luggage was looted, together with the records he had made in Paris. His papers were normally hand-written in a clear round script, as typing was not yet common, and photographic copying was not usual, so the whole paper, which was even more impressive than his DSc study, had to be re-written, hence the delayed publication. In this study, he showed that the names of about 40 coral species were synonyms. He made an early attempt to record the sizes and point out the measured range of variation of the epitheca of Porites clavaria. Although the coral work alone was a most important contribution, there were dozens of other fossil identifications of molluscs and radiolaria, but the geological deductions are of much more general interest and were no less important. Gregory showed that the Barbados ‘Oceanic Series’ with their Radiolarian Marls must be largely Miocene, possibly with basal Upper Oligocene beds and maybe with some Pliocene top beds. Using the evidence from Barbados, Cuba and Antigua, he considered that the Panama Isthmus finally emerged as land in the Miocene (23 –5 Ma, according to Ogg et al. 2008) or Late Oligocene, and that there had been no direct connection of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in that area since then. This is not too far from the views of Schmittner et al. (2004) who placed the closure at between 11 and 3 Ma ago, that is, Miocene to Pliocene, Coates et al. (2004), who claimed it was between 12.8 and 9.5 Ma ago, that is, Upper Miocene, or of Denniston et al. (2008) who, on the basis of U –Pb dating at 5.52 + 0.15 Ma of an exceptionally well preserved aragonitic coral Goniopora hilli from the late Miocene of the Dominican Republic, showed that the Panama seaway closed after that date. Gregory argued that the subsidence of the Caribbean Sea was simultaneous with the emergence of the isthmus, and that this subsidence was profound, plunging former land to ‘abyssal depths’, giving the deep sea oozes, which were

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subsequently re-elevated in the Pliocene or Late Miocene. The clear evidence of shallow-water deposits underlying those of the deep sea and the whole succession now elevated to over 300 m above sea level seemed indisputable evidence against ‘the permanence of the great continental masses and of the ocean-basins’ (Gregory 1895b, p. 307). Because the Barbados Miocene corals had no Pacific affinities but were of Mediterranean Miocene types, with the nearest living relatives in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, Gregory supposed they had spread across the site of the present Atlantic by means of a shallow-water ridge that allowed these shallow-water organisms to migrate westward, and it must have seemed significant to him that Barbados is the most easterly of the Lesser Antilles, that is, it is the nearest to Africa. As the past supposition of such ridges is today often regarded as incredible, Gregory could not understand how such corals could have ‘crossed the cold abysses of the Atlantic, and, as they are absent from the Miocene deposits of Northern Europe and the United States, it is clear that they did not work their way round the shallow waters of the North Atlantic.’ ‘As some echinoidea of similar range, which have no free-swimming larval stage, must have crossed at the same time, it is not probable that the faunas reached the West Indies by larvae floating across the ocean’ (Gregory 1895b, p. 309). In effect, he was forced into postulating the existence of a Miocene shallow-water ridge across the Atlantic in order to explain his findings. He agreed with George Frederick Harris (1862 –1906), who, in the discussion, pointed out that the evidence of the different molluscs on the different Caribbean Islands did not support the idea of a previous continental mass extending from Florida across the Caribbean Sea to South America. Nevertheless, such thoughts and other possibilities had been awoken in Gregory and, for instance on 6 January 1897, two years after the reading of the West Indies paper, he commented at the end of the reading of ‘Changes of level in the Bermuda Islands’ by Ralph Stockman Tarr (1863 –1912), that he had hoped the age of the basal rock of Bermuda might have been settled by this paper (Abstracts of the Proceedings of the GSL, 667). The ideas explicit and implicit in the above studies, especially the importance and frequency of major vertical movements, were to be influential with Gregory for the rest of his life. They would have serious implications for his views on continental drift and on submerging wide areas of the crust to form ocean basins. In view of the importance to Gregory of the entirely understandable mistaken geological history of Barbados (in the light of the knowledge at that time), it is worth summarizing how present understanding now explains the supposed vertical oscillation of the island. According to Speed (1994), Barbados is the only exposed part of the extensive forearc accretionary Barbados Ridge (Fig. 6.3), that lies above the westward subducting Atlantic Ocean lithosphere which passes under the overriding Caribbean Plate. This accretionary ridge lies to the east of the Lesser Antilles magmatic arc caused by this subduction zone, and has evolved over the last 50 Ma, but was only tectonically uplifted above sea level during the last million years. The oldest Barbados rock, the Basal Complex, is very thick (  5 km) and composed of numerous fault-bounded packets (at least 45 have been identified on the surface alone) of Eocene terrigenous mudstones, turbidites and sandstones containing thrust lenses of slightly older, but still Eocene, hemipelagic radiolarian mudstones and radiolarites. The Basal Complex is overlain by the sedimentary deposits of the Prism Cover of younger (Oligocene, Miocene and possibly Pliocene) sediments, deposited after the Basal Complex was accreted. Covering both the Basal Complex and the Prism Cover is the later Oceanic allochthon, tectonically emplaced in the late Miocene or Pliocene, of lower bathyal and abyssal sediments, according to their contained foraminifers and ostracods. Melange diapirs preceded the Quaternary limestone reef that has now been uplifted and subaerially covers most of Barbados.

Accordingly, before the thrust history was recognized, there were apparently a number of moderate depth sediments alternating in deposition sites with a number of deep-sea sediments, all covered by modern shallow-water reefs that have now been uplifted above sea level. This lead to the obvious interpretation that the rocks of Barbados record violent oscillations in the depth of deposition of the sediments with all levels from deep to shallow to the present subaerial situation being preserved on one island. Modern studies of the extremely deep seafloor (.8000 m in the west) of the Puerto Rico Trench, NW of Barbados, by ten Brink et al. (2004), reveal it to be ‘atypical of oceanic trenches. Subduction (of the North American Plate, which lies to the north, under the Caribbean Plate to the south) is highly oblique to the trench axis with a large component of left-lateral strike –slip motion’. An east –west carbonate platform tilted to the north towards the trench ‘provides evidence for extreme vertical tectonism in the region’. This platform was horizontally deposited over Cretaceous to Paleocene arc rocks (on the Caribbean Plate) starting in the Late Oligocene. Then, at 3.5 Ma, the carbonate platform was tilted towards the trench over a time period of less than 40 ka such that its northern edge is at a depth of 4000 m and its reconstructed elevation on land in Puerto Rico is at þ1300 m (U. ten Brink et al. 2004). The dating of these events closely matches Gregory’s deductions and although the events in Barbados were quite different from the above, there is a coincidence of timing of now-proven major vertical movements with those erroneously supposed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even though there is still no agreement about the history of the Caribbean Plate. Gregory did not rely solely on the results from Barbados. On 8 June 1892, H. Woodward had read a paper for Robert John Lechmere Guppy (1836 –1916) (1892), who was ill, in which he described some of the Tertiary (Palaeogene) rocks of Trinidad. Guppy had asked Gregory to carry out a microscopic examination of a series of samples without Gregory being told where in Trinidad they came from so that an independent opinion about them could be obtained. Gregory (1892 in Guppy 1892) identified a sequence from sublittoral glauconite-bearing sand to one with deeper-water foraminifera to much deeper-water red clay with radiolaria and finally radiolarian marls, resembling those of Barbados. Gregory spoke at the meeting pointing out that Trinidad lay at the intersection of ‘two Caribbean lines of movement’, namely the Cordillera of Venezuela and the Antillean chain. The picture of former very deep water in the West Indies seemed widespread.

General As the above shows, Gregory was a regular contributor and even more regular attendee at Geological Society meetings. The Society meetings attracted papers on the geology and geomorphology of a wide variety of far-flung and near places. The Victorian network of steam trains, steamships and regular postal services made travel and communication easier and quicker than ever before. London was the hub of a large empire. The reading of papers at the Geological Society was often accompanied by exhibitions of rocks, fossils, thin sections, models and photographs of material from almost all of the world. This, and perhaps the best geological library in the world, provided fellows with a broad view of world geology, even if the Geological Society museum exhibits, although occupying a large amount of space, were not kept up to date. The society was also a place to meet and talk with visiting geologists. Adjoined to the society in Burlington House were the Royal Society apartments, and it was only a few minutes walk to the Geological Survey’s Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street. Although not quite so regular as at the Geological Society, Gregory nevertheless regularly attended the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) meetings which were commonly held in Burlington House. Gregory was a life-long member

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Fig. 6.3. Map and cross-section across the Barbados Ridge taken from Speed (1994). (a) Southern Lesser Antilles arc system. (b) map showing forearc divisions; Vs are active volcanoes; (c) cross-section of forearc along trace A– A’ on (b). IFDB, Inner forearc deformation belt; FTB, fold–thrust platform; SA, South America; T, Trinidad; TP, Tobago platform.

from just after his return from Africa until his death. RGS meetings dealt with a wealth of exploration in all parts of the world, except, until later, Antarctica. Thus, quite apart from when he was involved in reporting exploration in which he was involved, such as African (15 January 1894) or Polar (25 January 1897) work, other topics such as ‘Who discovered America?’ (on 19 November 1894), also attracted him to RGS meetings. Geomorphology and geography were main-stream interests with him throughout his life. Gregory’s urge to write was not exhausted by publishing papers; he was in contact by letter with many foreign workers and thus could obtain opinions from world experts on many of his wide ranging interests. All these sources of information, plus the excellent library in the NHM, and his close friendly relationships with the staff at RSM, a few minutes walk from the NHM, meant that the exchange of geological ideas and facts was easy, and for one like Gregory, with a multitude of geological interests, a constant source of stimulation. Gregory’s developing thoughts about Africa and his forthcoming book occupied much of his mind, and malaria reduced his output, nevertheless, with 15 papers published in 1894, he was producing at his old rate and certainly justifying the NHM’s support for his absence from the museum. Even the recurrent attacks of malaria were not exempt from being written about by him. They prompted him to find out what was understood about the illness and its causes, and on Saturday 19 April 1894 he consulted Sir Patrick Manson FRS (1844 –1922), ‘the father of tropical medicine’ (letter with A. Mendell) no doubt hoping for relief or cure

or at least facts about the disease, and these he summarized in an article on ‘The parasites of malarial fevers’ (Gregory 1894m). This predated Ross’s discovery of the crucial role of mosquitoes and was largely a summary of what had already been published, partially providing an explanation for the periodic nature of the recurrent attacks.

References Chapman, F. 1894. The Bargate Beds of Surrey, and their microscopic contents. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 677– 730. Coates, A. G., Collins, L. S., Aubry, M.-P. & Berggren, W. A. 2004. The geology of the Darien, Panama, and the late Miocene –Pliocene collision of the Panama arc with northwestern South America. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 116, 1327– 1344. Cole, G. A. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1890. The variolitic rocks of Mont Gene`vre. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 46, 295– 333. Cope, J. C. W. 1994. A latest Cretaceous hotspot and the southeasterly tilt of Britain. Journal of the Geological Society, 151, 905–908. Davies, A. M. & Gregory, J. W. 1894. The geology of Monte Chaberton. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 303–310. Denniston, R. F., Asmerom, Y., Polyak, V. Y., McNeill, D. F., Klaus, J. S., Cole, P. & Budd, A. F. 2008. Caribbean chronostratigraphy refined with U– Pb dating of a Miocene coral. Geology, 36, 151– 154. Gregory, J. W. 1889. On Cystechinus crassus from the Radiolarian Marls of Barbados. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 45, 640– 650.

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Gregory, J. W. 1892. The microscopic structure of some Trinidad rocks. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, 538– 540. (Appendix in Guppy 1892.) Gregory, J. W. 1893. The natural history of East Equatorial Africa. Nature, 49, 12. Gregory, J. W. 1893a. The British Palaeogene Bryozoa. Transactions of the Zoological Society of London, 13, 216–279. Gregory, J. W. 1893b. The Jurassic fauna of Cutch. The Echinoidea of Cutch. Palaeontologica Indica, Series IX, Vol. 2, Part 1. Gregory, J. W. 1894. Contributions to the physical geography of British East Africa. The Geographical Journal, 4, 289– 315, 408– 424, 505– 524. Gregory, J. W. 1894a. Mountaineering in Central Africa, with an attempt on Mount Kenya. Alpine Journal, 17, 89– 104. Gregory, J. W. 1894b. John Tyndall. Natural Science, 4, 10 –18. Gregory, J. W. 1894c. An expedition to Mount Kenya. Fortnightly Review, New Series, 55, 327– 337. Gregory, J. W. 1894d. The natives of East Africa. Phonographic Quarterly Review, 1, 8– 13 & 72 –82. Gregory, J. W. 1894e. Some factors that have influenced zoological distribution in Africa. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for 1894, 165– 166. Gregory, J. W. 1894f. Catalogue of the Jurassic Bryozoa in the York Museum. Report of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society for 1893, 58 –61. Gregory, J. W. 1894g. On some Jurassic species of Cheilostomata. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 1, 61 – 64. Gregory, J. W. 1894h. Excursion to Guildford and Shalford. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 13, 377–381. Gregory, J. W. 1894i. The Waldensian Gneisses and their place in the Cottian sequence. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 232– 277. Gregory, J. W. 1894j. Abstracts of Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, 620, 58. Gregory, J. W. 1894k. Contributions to the Geology of British East Africa. Part I. The glacial geology of Mount Kenya. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 515– 530. Gregory, J. W. 1894l. The evolution of the Thames. Natural Science, 5, 99 –108. Gregory, J. W. 1894m. The parasites of malarial fevers. Natural Science, 5, 195–201. Gregory, J. W. 1895. Excursion to Chilworth. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 14, 120–124. Gregory, J. W. 1895a. On a collection of fossils from the Lower Greensand of Great Chart, Kent. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 2, 97 –103. Gregory, J. W. 1895b. Contributions to the palaeontology and physical geology of the West Indies. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 51, 255– 310. Gregory, J. W. 1896. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London. Reprinted in 1968 The Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London.

Gregory, J. W. 1899. The Jurassic fauna of Cutch; the corals of Cutch. Palaeontologica Indica, Series IX, Vol. 2, Part 2. Gregory, J. W. 1906. The Dead Heart of Australia. A Journey Around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 1901–2 with Some Account of the Lake Eyre Basin and the Flowing Wells of Central Australia. John Murray, London. Guppy, R. J. L. 1892. The Tertiary microzoic formation of Trinidad, West Indies. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, 519 –541. Herries-Davies, G. L. 2007. Whatever is Under the Earth: The Geological Society of London 1807 to 2007. Geological Society, London. Holford, S. P., Green, P. F. & Turner, J. P. 2005. Palaeothermal and compaction studies in the Mochras borehole (NW Wales) reveal early Cretaceous and Neogene exhumation and argue against regional Palaeogene uplift in the southern Irish Sea. Journal of the Geological Society, London, 162, 829–840. Hull, E. 1895. On the physical conditions of the Mediterranean basin which have resulted in a community of some species of freshwater fishes in the Nile and Jordan waters. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 51, 93 – 94. Leighton, T. 1894. On a discovery of fossils in a new horizon in the lower Greensand at little stairs point, Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight. Proceeding of the Geologists’ Association, 13, 188–190. Leighton, T. 1894a. Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, 632, 21 – 24. Leighton, T. 1895. The lower Greensand above the Atherfield Clay of East Surrey. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 51, 101– 124. McDougall, I. & Watkins, R. T. 2006. Geochronology of the Nabwal Hills: a record of earliest magmatism in the northern Kenyan Rift Valley. Geological Magazine, 143, 25 –39. Nicholson (Ne´e Gregory), A. J. 1932. Unpublished mss detailing the early life of John Walter Gregory. Norman, J. R. 1944. Squire; Memories of Charles Davies Sherborn. Harrap & Co, London. Ogg, J., Ogg, G. & Gradstein, F. 2008. The Concise Geological Timescale. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Schmittner, A., Sarnthein, M. et al. (19 others) 2004. Global impact of the Panamanian seaway closure. EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 85, 526. Speed, R. C. 1994. Barbados and the Lesser Antilles Forearc. In: Donovan, S. K. & Jackson, T. A. (eds) Caribbean Geology: An Introduction. University of West Indies Publishers Association, Kingston, 179–192. Suess, E. 1891. Die Bru¨che des Ostlichen-Afrika, p. 555– 584. In: von Ho¨hnell, L. R., Rosiwal, A., Toula, P. & Suess, E. 1891. Beitrage zur geologischen kenntniss des o¨stlichen Afrika. Denkschriftenkaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, MathematischNaturwissenschaft-liche Klasse, 58, 447–584. Ten Brink, U., Danforth, W. et al. 2004. New seafloor map of the Puerto Rico trench helps assess earthquake and tsunami hazards. EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 85, 349– 354.

Chapter 7 Marriage, Bryozoa & journalism

Marriage The general acclaim brought by his African adventures was initially somewhat blunted by his family circumstances. His mother had been ill all the time that he was away; indeed she was ill before he left but had hidden it from him. She became enormously swollen with an ovarian tumour or cyst and was operated on in Guy’s Hospital in the middle of January 1893. That gave her some relief but was not a cure. She was determined to live until his return, which she did, but not for very long after; on 26 February 1894, she died. Gregory’s elder sister Anne married Henry Jarries Nicholson (1860 – 1944) and was known as Mrs Gregory Nicholson. Eleanor, known as Nellie, married John Ward Young and they used the surname Ward Young, eventually going to New York. Each of Jane Gregory’s children received a mahogany table from her as a wedding present (A. Mendell, pers. comm, 2006). With both his sisters married, the family home at Clapton was given up and Gregory took rooms in 17 John Street, Bedford Row, Bloomsbury, a flat in one of the pleasant old eighteenth century houses still remaining round about Gray’s Inn. When one of his sisters visited there, the landlady was thankful to ask for help. Every time she asked her lodger what he would like for his evening meal he replied ‘mutton chop’. The sister explained that meant, ‘give me what you like and don’t bother me about food’. The landlady duly acted to mutual satisfaction, according to the account given by Gregory’s son (Gregory 1977). This emphasizes a life-long characteristic of Gregory, namely that he was not a bon vivant; he ate and drank to keep going, not for the pleasure of good food and drink. He only joined the Geological Society Dining Club when he became President of the Geological Society and membership was effectively obligatory. He was not a discriminating eater. In one letter of 6 January 1895, he complains that although the house has been burgled, his rooms were not and he wished they had come and taken the coffee pot, which for some reason he wanted to be rid of. However, like many men living alone in lodgings after being at home, he soon found time to carry out some serious courting and get married. Adriana Chaplin had noticed Gregory for many years; probably since 1878 when Gregory, carrying a hefty encyclopaedia, had called on his then Headmaster, the Rev. Ayrton Chaplin to refute him. The Headmaster’s second daughter, Adriana, (named after her father’s mother) but always known as Audrey, was then only about six (born on 26 April 1872). Later, unbeknown to her, Gregory had told himself ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry’. The Chaplin and Gregory families had friendly relationships so that Gregory and Audrey Chaplin naturally encountered each other from time to time. It is clear from preserved letters sent to Rev. Chaplin between January and March 1893, from both Audrey and his wife, Edith Elizabeth Chaplin (ne´e Pyne) (1845 – 1928), that Jane Gregory and Edith Chaplin were quite close friends, as were Audrey and John Gregory, at least two years before their formal engagement on 17 or 18 October 1894, about eight months after Jane Gregory’s death. The serious courting must have begun about August or September 1894 because a letter from Audrey to Gregory, dated 3 August (1894) addresses him as ‘Dr Gregory’, whereas later letters, such as one of 18 October (1894) are ‘Dear Jack’, or by 15 November (1894), ‘Dearest Jack’ (Fig. 7.1). The mahogany table wedding gift suggests that Jack (as he was always called by both families and his wife) and Audrey’s relationship was well known to Jane

Gregory and accepted long before she died (C. J. Gregory, mss). Indeed, according to a letter from Gregory’s sister Nellie Young to Audrey, dated 20 October 1894, Gregory’s mother had wished him to marry Audrey and it is apparent that Edith Chaplin actively encouraged the match. Thus Edith invited Gregory to stay with them, meeting him in London and, when his intentions became clear to her, passing on (by a letter of 17 August 1894) to Gregory a letter from Audrey then in Switzerland, to her mother. Thus Gregory and Edith Chaplin corresponded with each other long before the formal engagement and long afterwards; he then writing ‘My dear Mother’. . .[from] ‘your affectionate son, Jack’. Further evidence of Gregory and Audrey’s long friendship is shown by a letter dated 2 August 1891 from Ayrton Chaplin to Gregory which reveals that Audrey and her sister Ursula (1869 – 1937) had spent the preceeding Sunday having a marvellous time in Savernake, presumably accompanying a Toynbee excursion, but had to miss the following Salisbury Plain visit to attend a cousin’s wedding on 30 July 1891. Gregory was not a man to waste time looking for a wife when he had such an agreeable childhood sweetheart and this may have partly explained his complete lack of interest in attending dances or learning to dance. On 6 June 1895 (Branagan 2004) in Woodham Walter Church (10 km east of Chelmsford), Gregory married Adriana (Audrey) Chaplin, then residing at Bassetts, east of Chelmsford. Immediately after the wedding, the couple were driven to the station to take the train to honeymoon in Switzerland, exactly where is not recorded, but at some tiny hamlet near the snowline (C. J. Gregory mss). Later, Gregory (1913, p. 412) stated that in 1895 he had looked across the great Aletsch Glacier (the largest in Europe) and noted the triangular truncations of the four side valley spurs by the glacier. This suggests they honeymooned in southern Switzerland, perhaps NE of Brig above Fiesch in the upper Rhone valley, perhaps (speculatively) in part because Gregory wished to ski and to teach his wife, and in part because he wished to see the Aletsch Glacier. However, a severe attack of malaria intervened and Audrey had an alarming time getting him down to a lower altitude and trying to find appropriate food. Upon their return they set up home, presumably rented, where Audrey had earlier lived with her parents at 3 Aubrey Road, Campden Hill, on the north corner of Holland Park. Originally, this was one of six detached ‘Gothic Villas’ built between 1843 and 1859 but later extended into a terrace before 1886 (pers. comm., Jane Gregory, 2010), and now somewhat changed (Fig. 7.2). For Gregory, it was within very easy walking distance of the NHM, 3–4 km; virtually all his weekday exercise consisted of walking to and from work. Much later, in March 1922, in a letter to W. R. Smellie, (GU Archive ACCN3299), Gregory wrote: ‘When I was married Judd passed onto me the congratulations he had received from Darwin on the same occasion. D. told him that he had no idea that anything could have added so much to the joy of life as a happy marriage. Judd said his experience was the same’. A few words about Gregory’s wife and her family background are needed because they came to be quite crucial in influencing Gregory’s career itself. In the Chaplins, Gregory joined a large and close-knit family; both his wife’s parents were one of six children and the Ayrton and Chaplin families had intermarried. After being Headmaster at Stepney Grammar School, the Rev. A. Chaplin became Headmaster of Uckfield Grammar School and then later set up a small private school at the Hermitage,

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 37–41. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.7

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Fig. 7.1. Audrey (Adriana) Gregory (ne´e Chaplin). Courtesy of A. Mendell.

Fig. 7.2. 3 Aubrey Road, Campden Hill, London. By courtesy of Jane Gregory who photographed it in 2010.

Nailsworth, in the Cotswolds. Here Audrey, her older sister Ursula (known as Ulla), brother Henry (1876 – 1905) and many cousins were pupils. Some time after June 1889, the Rev. Chaplin and his wife left the Hermitage and moved to 3 Aubrey Road, Campden Hill, in London. From there Audrey received training in art at a private art school, while her sister Ursula Chaplin studied at Girton College and qualified for a degree (although at that time Cambridge University did not award degrees to women). In 1892 the Scottish Universities Commission published an Ordinance enabling women to graduate (including in medicine) and Ursula then moved to Glasgow University to enable her to qualify in medicine and to practise as a doctor, which was impossible for a woman in England at that time. Audrey’s brother Henry later followed to Glasgow for medical training. Audrey’s paternal grandmother was a member of the distinguished Ayrton family, her brother’s son, that is, her nephew, William Edward Ayrton FRS, being a physicist and electrical engineer. By the middle of 1893, when Gregory was in Africa, the Rev. Chaplin and his family had moved again, this time to Bassetts, a house through which the boundary ran between Little Baddow and Woodham Walter, east of Chelmsford. Here Audrey Chaplin and her first cousin Edith Ayrton (later Zangwill) spent the summer in the old orchard, both taking an open air rest cure for TB. A page in one of Audrey’s sketch books shows the two women wrapped up warmly in the orchard (C. J. Gregory, mss). While this remedy seemed to have worked, the TB left Audrey’s lungs permanently damaged, as subsequent events revealed. It is clear from letters to Audrey from ‘Jack’ that he knew about the state of her lungs before he married her, and was also concerned about her light weight, addressing her in a letter of 6 January 1894 as ‘My darling 7 stone 13’ and urging her to ‘drink gallons of milk, pints of cod liver oil, and to eat lots of rice pudding’. Audrey was a good wife to Gregory and expected his work to come first and never seems to have demurred at the prospect of him being away for lengthy periods, even when their two children were born, or a proposed 18 months isolated in Antarctica, or accompanying him for a lengthy period in Australia, although it is clear that she missed him greatly (SPRI; letters between Audrey and her mother). Of course, she knew him well enough before the marriage to know that long hours of work and short hours of sleep plus a dedicated passion for research were an integral part of him, just as he knew her health was fragile. So in the characteristic fashion of packing in as much work as possible, on the night before his marriage, 5 June, George Francis Scott-Elliot (1862 – 1934) and Gregory exhibited specimens and thin sections, and read a paper on, the geology of Mount Ruwenzori (Uganda; 5109 m) to the Geological Society (Scott-Elliot & Gregory 1895). So Gregory’s stag night was spent at the Geological Society Club, who traditionally entertained the Geological Society speakers to dinner after the meeting. Scott-Elliot was a geographer and botanist who had done the fieldwork, although he modestly claimed that ‘his work had merely consisted of bringing back specimens and making very insufficient field notes’ (Abstracts of the Proceedings of the GSL, 644, 108– 109). He consulted Gregory about what he had found on Ruwenzori and Gregory worked on the samples he had collected. The results showed that Ruwenzori was not volcanic, as had been supposed, but probably a fault-block of Archaean granite gneiss and schist. Gregory was particularly interested in the fact that in the recent past, glaciers from the mountain went down to an elevation of 1585 m (5200 ft) whereas in 1894 the snowline was no lower than 4572 m (15 000 ft). This confirmed the former existence of much more widespread glaciation, even in the tropics, although the possibility of the mountain being much greater in elevation in the past could not, as with Mount Kenya, be ruled out. Clearly Gregory was becoming an authority to be consulted on the geology and geomorphology of East Africa, even before his 1896 book was published. As with most of Gregory’s travels, publication resulted, but the one possibly associated with his honeymoon seems to have been written before the event, being ‘Recent contributions to the

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geology of the Western Alps’ in the newly started Science Progress, which according to notes in Gregory’s own writing, appeared in April 1895 (Gregory 1895). This is a review of current controversies about the structure of the Western Alps and may have been written as Gregory prepared himself by reading the recent literature to become knowledgeable about the then state of knowledge about the Western Alps. Gregory’s reading, in identifying critical localities, may even have influenced where the honeymoon was to be based and the paper served to summarize in his mind the overall geology. The published views of Bonney, who still maintained that virtually all the schists, including the ‘Schistes Lustre´s,’ were Archaean, whereas Bertram maintained the latter were Mesozoic, showed how much was still uncertain. Gregory’s paper really added little or nothing to the advance of knowledge, but summarized the extant controversies and concluded more work was needed to resolve them. It fulfilled the aim of Science Progress to summarize the state of knowledge. It also focused Gregory’s mind on the still unresolved problem of the age of the ‘Schistes Lustre´s’ and he set about trying to conclude the matter, possibly, but not certainly, during Easter 1895 before his marriage, as described later.

Bryozoa and echinoids In addition to the West Indies paper described above (Gregory 1895a) into which he had put a major effort extending over some years, the most important of Gregory’s 1895 papers were the first two parts of ‘A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa’ which were rapidly followed in 1896 by the remaining six parts. Surprisingly, there is not an illustration in any of the parts, presumably because of the plates in his catalogue, which he was working on at the same time. In Part I (Gregory 1895b), which appeared in March 1895, he dealt with the Genus Stomatopora; in Part II (Gregory 1895c), which appeared in December 1895, the Genus Proboscina; in Part III (Gregory 1896) of January 1896, the Genus Berenicea; in Part IV (Gregory 1896a) of February 1896, the Reptomultisparsa and Diastopora; in Part V (Gregory 1896b) of March 1896, the Families Idmoniidae and Entalophoridae and in Part VI (Gregory 1896c) of April 1896, the Fascigeridae, Theonoidae, Dactylethrata and Trepostomata, thus completing another substantial palaeontological contribution. No sooner had these appeared than his massive 239-page British Museum (N.H.) Catalogue of the Jurassic Bryozoa was published (Fig. 7.3) (Gregory 1896d), so that in 1895– 6, his main museum work was in Jurassic bryozoan studies while his midnight oil must have gone into completing his book on his African expedition (Gregory 1896e). However, Gregory did not neglect his echinoid studies with the description of a new species (the only echinoid species known) from the English Oxford Clay (Gregory 1896f), a new genus from the Lias (Gregory 1896g), and a new genus of Lysechinus from a curious dwarf fauna in the Trias of St Cassian, Austrian Tyrol (Gregory 1896h). More unexpectedly, he ventured into the classification of the Palaeozoic Ophiuroidea, a subclass of the Stelleroida, which he described from Silurian, Devonian and Lower Carboniferous rocks, the last two papers being read to the Zoological Society on 15 December 1896 (Gregory 1896i). The need to systematize these echinoids was forced on him, he wrote (Gregory 1896i, p. 1030), by the fact that he had agreed to write an account of the relations of the fossil and recent forms of these echinoids for a forthcoming ‘Oxford Natural History’ but could not do so until the unsatisfactory nature of the extant classification was sorted out. Thus to his reputation as an echinoid and coral expert, Gregory now added the perhaps less glamorous and more obscure, Jurassic bryozoa. There is no doubt that although Gregory had many interests, relinquished few of them, and published over a wide field in geology, his foremost expertise and the one in which he repeatedly made fundamental contributions during his NHM years, was in the field of palaeontology.

Fig. 7.3. Various Proboscina illustrated in the Catalogue of Jurassic Bryozoa (Gregory 1896d). With acknowledgements to the NHM.

Other activities Amidst all this publication activity, Gregory loyally continued to support the activities at Toynbee Hall with excursions, lectures and administration. Thus in a letter dated 17 February 1895 to Audrey, after describing a jolly time at the GSL anniversary dinner when he sat next to Jethro Justinian Harris Teall (1849 – 1924) and Robert Stansfield Herries (1860 –1942), he wrote ‘I have to take the Geologists’ Association for an excursion this year in May. So shall have to fix up that for one Sat. & the Toynbee trip to Bassetts for another Sunday; and squeeze both in with exam work . . . I have a Toynbee tramp tomorrow . . . I ought to stop at home next Sun. to finish off some work in the Zool. Soc. Library all Sunday . . . I have a long paper to read at the Geol. Soc. on Wed.’. Another instance is that in early 1896 he gave one of the ‘Free Sunday Lectures’ in a series on ‘Some Great Men of the 19th Century’, probably lecturing on Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 –95), who had recently died (The Times, 18 January 1896). On 16 October 1897 he lectured at Toynbee Hall on ‘Sixty years of African Progress’ (The Times, 16 October 1897). Also, as revealed in Dr Henry Woodward’s fine recommendation of 23 October 1899 (NHM; DL106/29), Gregory was Chairman of the Toynbee Governors from 1895 to 1899. A letter to Audrey, dated 8 August 1895, described a few wet days spent

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in Middleton-in-Teesdale including one day walking with a party of men and women up to Cauldron Snout waterfall and getting completely soaked wading across a swollen stream on their return. As there was no GA excursion there in August 1895, it must have been a Toynbee trip and would have used some of Gregory’s leave allowance. The 17 February 1895 letter shows that by then he was involved in examining work, probably in the University of London, judging from the Woodward recommendation referred to above. Further contributions to his total of about a dozen 1896 publications included a return to the problem of the age of the ‘Schistes Lustre´s’ (Gregory 1896j). From examination of Mont Jovet in Savoy, SE France, he concluded these problematic rocks were definitely pre-Triassic, with unconformably overlying Triassic dolomites, and were probably also pre-Carboniferous and possibly much older. This view was endorsed by Bonney, the paper being read to the Geological Society on 6 November 1895 and published in February 1896, so the fieldwork had presumably been carried out during 1895, perhaps Easter 1895, as he made no reference to his conclusions in the article published in March 1895 (Gregory 1895). Although Gregory alluded to the difficulty of being sure that the various occurrences of the Schistes Lustre´s were really all from the same stratigraphical horizon, especially in view of the very different lithologies, such as with or without quartzites, it seems in retrospect that rocks of very different ages were probably being grouped together purely because they were all schists. Another 1896 publication (Gregory 1896k) which contributed to his growing familiarity with the Jurassic correlations of eastern Africa and western India, was a note on the geology of Somaliland, in which using specimens collected by three explorers, he identified a new coral, Cryptocoenia Lort-Phillipsii, n. sp. and Neocomian and Bathonian limestones, which enabled him to draw a section across northern Somaliland south from Berbera. He recognized that the occurrence of Parallelodon Egertonianus Stoliczka in Somaliland and on the western coast of India strengthened the view obtained from other evidence, that these two places were once part of the same continental mass called, as he wrote ‘Gondwana-land or Lemuria’, his first known use of the first term. His knowledge of Somaliland became part of his continued enlargement of his East African expertise, and included his examination of the geological collection made by the American Dr Arthur Donaldson Smith (1866 –1939) on his journey through Somaliland and between Lake Rudolf (Lake Turkana) and the Nile (Smith 1897; Appendix E by Gregory).

Journalism By far the most important of Gregory’s 1896 publications in terms of his general reputation outside his specialist NHM studies, was the publication of his book on his African Expedition (Gregory 1896e). The current account focuses on Gregory’s geological work; however, voluminous as these geological publications were, they did not exhaust Gregory’s ‘ink in the blood’ obsession. He also wrote and published his views on a wide range of contemporary issues, partly as a means of supplementing his quite limited income, especially as his dependants grew. It is amazing that he managed to fit in all his varied activities. Unfortunately there is no list of these accounts, and from the few identified, it is clear that he published in a variety of magazines concerned with current issues, and probably in a number of newspapers also. Later his writing extended to non-geological books, despite continuing unchecked with his geological output. His colleague Bather was even more deeply involved in journalism; many said he should have been a journalist. He founded and edited the 15 volumes of ‘Natural Science’ and wrote brilliant book reviews, especially in ‘The Times Literary Supplement’, so much so that it seriously diverted him from his research (Lang 1934), an accusation that certainly could not be made against Gregory. Bather’s journalism is mentioned as it must have formed part of the

setting in which the two colleagues influenced each other. However, Gregory seems to have been able to make a clear separation between his NHM work, undertaken with great vigour, and his numerous other interests, whether geological or otherwise, that he pursued outside his NHM paid time. This probably seemed like a natural continuation from the seven years, 1880– 1887, when he worked as a wool clerk during the day and studied and wrote afterwards on matters of his own choosing, a routine he continued when employed at the NHM. One Gregory article (Gregory 1896l) appeared in The Nineteenth Century in February 1896, entitled ‘The proposed German barrier across Africa.’ This was a piece of journalistic speculation, fuelled by a telegram from the Kaiser which itself was provoked by the ‘Jamieson Raid’ in which the Transvaal became effectively British-controlled. Gregory supposed that Germany was seeking to establish a continuous strip of German-controlled territory from German East Africa through part of the Congo Free Territory and the east of Portuguese-controlled Angola to German Southwest Africa. He concluded that ‘England’ should allow this and not be worried about it so long as Germany in return left ‘England’ to rule south of the Zambezi and have a free hand in the Transvaal. In this, Gregory showed himself as a typical Englishman who thought of the British Empire as the English Empire, with scant recognition of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. It was not until Gregory went to live in Glasgow that this changed. A second example of his journalism is in the Contemporary Review for December 1897, sandwiched between articles on ‘The first Russian Census’ and ‘Liberal Catholicism’, Gregory (1897) wrote on ‘The fur-seals: the American case.’ This dealt with American attempts to stop the hunting of Otaria ursine on and off the Pribylov Islands, in the Bering Sea, where the herd was being rapidly depleted by Canadian hunting, and faced future extinction if the killing of females at sea was not stopped. This was because they were almost invariably pregnant and their death often also resulted in the starvation of a pup left on land, so two pups died. Gregory concluded that the American case was sound and that hunting should be restricted to the bachelor males. The English interest was because virtually all the skins came to London for treatment and sale. Gregory wrote under the authorship of ‘A British Naturalist’ with no indication of his actual identity, presumably because he did not wish the NHM to be in any way associated with what might be construed as a controversial view, but anonymous writing makes identification of such articles extremely difficult, especially in view of the scattered nature of the magazines and journals used. The last two articles were found in Gregory’s personal collection of bound scientific offprints and dated in his own handwriting, but this collection is hugely incomplete. None of the scientific papers printed on pages larger than 25  16 cm (such as his DSc thesis) or his books are included, nor any of the non-scientific papers, except by accident, as with the above two articles. Moreover, since the first compilation was not made until 1899, and he had not kept copies of some of his earlier scientific papers (some had to be retrieved from recipients), the bound collection is additionally incomplete. In 1894, he completed his study of the tribes of East Africa for a section in his forthcoming ‘The Great Rift Valley’ book, a third instance of a non-geological publication. Unusually, it was printed solely in Pitman’s shorthand in the short-lived (two volumes only; 1894– 6) Phonographic Quarterly Review as an article entitled ‘The natives of East Africa’ (Gregory 1894). Presumably the Editor, Thomas Allen Reed, had requested an article from Gregory. The purpose of the Review was to help those taking Sir Isaac Pitman (1813 –97)’s shorthand to become familiar with the correct symbols to be used in shorthand. Presumably the article was ‘translated’ by an expert, rather than Gregory. The brief life of the Review was probably in part due to the esoteric subjects chosen for the articles, those learning shorthand not being enthralled by accounts such as ones about the natives of East Africa or ‘The vitality of seeds’.

MARRIAGE, BRYOZOA & JOURNALISM

A fourth instance is of his second single-authored book, the 267-page ‘The Foundation of British East Africa’ (Gregory 1901) which is entirely non-geological, and is described later. He also reviewed books on subjects in which he was considered an expert such as Africa for ‘The Saturday Review’. Thus in the 17 February 1895 letter referred to above, he stated that he had just received two books for review in ‘The Saturday Review’: ‘The story of the expansion of South Africa’ and ‘Niger and the Map of Africa by Treaty’. Unfortunately, most of the ‘The Saturday Review’ articles were unsigned and reviews of ‘The Story of the Expansion of Southern Africa’ by the Hon. Alexander Wilmot (1894) and ‘Au Niger: Re´cits de Campagnes, 1891 –92’ by Commandant E´tienne Pe´roz (1857 –1910) (1895) in French, appeared unsigned in the 6 April 1895 issue. Only because of the letter can they be confidently attributed to Gregory (1895d). He contrasted the completely different methods of colonization of Africa by the French and the ‘English’, the first an expeditionary force supported by the Government, the second by private individuals ‘unaided, handicapped by the mistakes and interference of their home Government, and denounced by the sentimentalists who claimed to be the real friends of the African natives’. The review is interestingly written and shows Gregory’s not-uncritical support for the British Empire. Gregory (1895d) wrote that ‘The only important point the two books have in common is the absence of an index.’ Gregory’s publications of this type have not generally been identified, as the mentioned letter was the sole source of knowledge of Gregory’s involvement with ‘The Saturday Review’. According to letters at one time in the possession of A. Mendell, Gregory’s African exploits and his journalism brought him into friendship with the remarkable Miss Mary Henrietta Kingsley, the distinguished author, lecturer and well-known traveller and collector of zoological specimens along the west coast of Africa, Nigeria, Gabon and the Congo (Birkett 1992), who climbed the volcanic mountains of Cameroon (4095 m) and Mungo Mah Lobeh (4195 m). She belonged to the literary Kingsley family. Her father was the author George Henry Kingsley (1827 –92), whose writer brothers included the famous Charles Kingsley (1819 – 75), author of ‘The Water Babies’. She lived in Kensington in the 1890s and was friendly with both Gregory and Audrey and they visited each other. A few letters written between 28 January 1897 and 15 January 1900 (the last the day after Gregory left for Australia) were in A. Mendell’s possession and suggest that Mary Kingsley asked Gregory for advice over certain West African matters and campaigns that she was waging on behalf of the Africans. This connection, and Gregory’s writings, must have given the Gregory’s an entre´e to at least the fringe of the London literary world. Finally, reverting to geology, Gregory had become a recognized expert and with it came the burden of writing signed reviews of a flow of scientific books on topics within his wide interests, such as in Nature on 6 August 1896 ‘Through Jungle and Desert. Travels in Eastern Africa by W. A. Chanler (Gregory 1896m) and on 21 July 1898 on ‘The Stramberg Corals’ [Die Korallen der Stamberger Schichten] by M. Ogilvie in which his fluency in written German was also called upon (Gregory 1898).

References Birkett, D. 1992. Mary Kingsley: Imperial Adventuress. Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. Branagan, D. F. 2004. John Walter Gregory (1864– 1932): Geologist and explorer. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 23, 677– 678. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: a sketch. Privately printed. Based on an earlier account by his mother, Audrey Gregory, about her husband, J. W. Gregory. Gregory, J. W. 1894. The natives of East Africa. Phonographic Quarterly Review, 1, 8 –13 & 72– 82.

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Gregory, J. W. 1895. Recent contributions to the geology of the Western Alps. Science Progress, 3, 147–174. Gregory, J. W. 1895a. Contributions to the palaeontology and physical geology of the West Indies. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 51, 255– 310. Gregory, J. W. 1895b. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa. – Part I. The Genus Stomatopora. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 15, 223–228. Gregory, J. W. 1895c. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa. –Part II. The Genus Proboscina. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 16, 447– 451. Gregory, J. W. 1895d. Two methods of colonization. The Saturday Review, No. 2058, April 6th 1895, 448– 449. Gregory, J. W. 1896. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa. –Part III. The Genus Berenicea. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 17, 41 – 49. Gregory, J. W. 1896a. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa. – Part IV. The Genera Reptomultisparsa and Diastopora. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 17, 151– 155. Gregory, J. W. 1896b. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa. – Part V. The Families Idmoniidae and Entalophoridae. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 17, 194– 201. Gregory, J. W. 1896c. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa. – Part VI. The Fascigeridae, Theonoidae, Dactylethrata, and Tepostomata. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 17, 287– 295. Gregory, J. W. 1896d. The Jurassic Bryozoa. Catalogues of Fossils in the British Museum (Natural History). Gregory, J. W. 1896e. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London. Reprinted in 1968 The Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1896f. Pseudodiadema Jessoni, sp. n., an echinoid from the English Oxford Clay. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 18, 465– 466. Gregory, J. W. 1896g. Archaeodiadema, a new genus of Liassic Echinoidea. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 3, 289–294. Gregory, J. W. 1896h. On Lysechinus, a new genus of fossil echinoderms from the Tyrolese Trias. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for 1896. 1000– 1005. Gregory, J. W. 1896i. On the classification of the Palaeozoic echinoderms of the Group Ophiuroidea. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for 1896. 1028– 1044. Gregory, J. W. 1896j. The ‘Schistes Lustre´s’ of Mount Jovet (Savoy). Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 52, 1– 11. Gregory, J. W. 1896k. A note on the geology of Somali-land, based on collections made by Mrs E. Lort-Phillips, Miss Edith Cole, and Mr G. P. V. Aylmer. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 3, 289– 294. Gregory, J. W. 1896l. The proposed German barrier across Africa. The Nineteenth Century, 39, 240– 248. Gregory, J. W. 1896m. Review of ‘Through jungle and desert. Travels In Eastern Africa’ By W. A. Chanler, 1896. Macmillan, London; Nature 54, 313– 314. Gregory, J. W. 1897. The fur-seals: the American case. Contemporary Review, No 384, December 1897, 846–853. Gregory, J. W. 1898. Review of the Stramberg corals. Nature, 58, 282– 283. Gregory, J. W. 1901. The Foundation of British East Africa. Horace Marshall & Son, London. Gregory, J. W. 1913. The Nature and Origin of Fiords. John Murray, London. Lang, W. D. 1934. Francis Arthur Bather 1863– 1934. Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 1932–5, 1, 303–314. Pe´roz, C. 1895. Au Niger: Re´cits De Campagnes, 1891–92. Calmann Le´vy, Paris. Scott-Elliot, G. F. & Gregory, J. W. 1895. The geology of Mount Ruwenzori and some adjoining regions of equatorial Africa. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 51, 669– 680. Smith, A. D. 1897. Through Unknown African Countries. Appendix E by J. W. Gregory, ‘Note on Dr Donaldson Smith’s Geological Collection’. Edward Arnold, London. Wilmot, A. 1894. The Story of the Expansion of Southern Africa. T. Fisher Unwin, London.

Chapter 8 The 1896 Conway Spitzbergen (Svalbard) Expedition and related polar work

Spitzbergen Gregory’s reputation as an intrepid explorer had been confirmed by the publication of his book on his African expedition. Sometime during the spring of 1896 he was invited by Sir Martin Conway, later Lord Conway of Allington, to join a three-month expedition to explore the interior of Spitzbergen (Svalbard) (Gregory 1897). Although Conway had not read Gregory’s book when he invited him (Conway 1897), he was familiar with Gregory and his exploits. The aim of the expedition was to explore and make a map of an island whose interior was almost completely unknown. Except for a journey along part of the west coast by G. Nordensk (?1869 –1928) and a three-day excursion inland from Sassen Bay by M. C. Rabot, nothing much was known about the interior – it was a blank piece of map. A practical objective was to identify if there was a walkable land route to the west coast from the coast of the great ‘Stor Fjord’ in which whaling ships and whalers were regularly trapped by pack ice from the east and could not escape. If it were possible for the whalers to reach the west coast they could either be picked up by ship and saved, or survive the winter at one of the huts or food depots maintained by the Tromso Fisherman’s Association. The NHMs interest, and the reason Gregory was released to participate, was revealed by Garwood & Gregory (1896). Although several European museums owned collections of rocks from Spitzbergen, the NHM did not have any such collection and Gregory was deputed to obtain representative sets of specimens. The departure of the party had to be delayed because Gregory could not leave in May (Natural Science, 8, p. 358), for unspecified reasons. Certainly, Gregory had agreed to exhibit his new geological map of British East Africa, with cross-sections and accompanying specimens, at the Royal Society Conversazione on 6 May 1896, which he fulfilled (The Times, 7 May 1896; full account in Nature, 54, p. 38). This would have brought lustre to the NHM which his employers would have wanted. Also, he had a long-standing agreement to lecture at the Whitechapel Museum in May (Natural Science, 8, p. 282) on a topic connected with his African expedition. The publication of his African expedition book in Spring 1896 is unlikely to have been the cause of the delay. It was published before May, and was reviewed at length with accolades in The Times of 27 May and a little later by William Thomas Blanford (1832 –1905), FRS, although that review was not published until August 1896 (Blanford 1896). Most likely the NHM felt that he should see his massive 239-page museum catalogue of the Jurassic Bryozoa in print (Gregory 1896) before departing. The Author’s Preface was dated 12 May 1896, and the preface by the Keeper, Henry Woodward, was even later, 23 May 1896. The length of the exploration inevitably meant that he was away when his first child, Ursula, was born on 29 July 1896, with the announcement in The Times of the next day, 30 July, of the birth of a daughter to the wife of Dr J. W. Gregory at 3 Aubrey Road, Campden Hill. The following is extracted from Gregory (1897), given in a lecture delivered in Liverpool on 25 November 1897, unless otherwise noted. An unusually large cache of letters mostly from Gregory to Audrey describing what happened was unearthed in 2009 by Gregory’s grandchildren and what follows includes a little of their contents, which were written by Gregory as a diary of events. Sometimes pressed plants were enclosed. They also reveal that due to the contorted Civil Service rules which

Gregory had not appreciated, for part of the time Audrey was unable to obtain any of Gregory’s monthly salary as it could not be paid to his wife. There were eight men in the party. Sir Martin Conway, formerly Professor of Art at Liverpool, a keen scientific geographer and well known for his mountaineering feats in the Alps and Himalayas was the leader (Fig. 8.1). The other members included Mr Edmund Johnston Garwood, also an expert mountaineer, as well as being an experienced geologist and an accomplished photographer, Mr Ted Conway, brother of Martin, was an artist, Mr Aubyn Bernard Rochfort Trevor-Battye (1855 – 1922) an ornithologist, Mr Studley was purely a sportsman, and Gregory had been invited ‘because, having had some equatorial experience, I might be useful in cases of sunstroke’ (Gregory 1897, p. 47). Two Norwegian sailors, Pederson and Williamsen, neither of whom could speak English (and no one else knew any Norwegian!), completed the number. Gregory’s talents as an all-round biologist, geologist, geographer, mountaineer, skier and enduring walker, together with his keen interest in glaciation and its effects, his general amiability and proven toughness, undoubtedly explained his inclusion. The expedition left Kings Cross station, London for Hull on 2 June 1896 with either 42 or 48 pieces of baggage and ‘Gregory carrying a bundle of geological hammers and crowbars tied up with an old Snider, brown with East African rust’ (Conway 1897). Martin Conway and Garwood travelled First Class on the train; Gregory economized in the 3rd Class with Ted Conway and Trevor-Battye, and used the time to ‘clear up arrears of letters so I wrote 18 on the way’ (letter to Audrey of 4 June [1896]) They crossed to Stavanger for a stop of 2 –3 hours before continuing on the steamer to Bergen. They found the summer was exceptionally late, so the delayed start was an advantage as they had started too soon even early in June (Gregory 1897). At Bergen they found their ship, the steamer Raftsund was in dry dock and would not be ready for some days so Gregory inspected Bergen, climbed the 300 m hill in 35 minutes, and worked in the Bergen Museum (letter already cited). The Raftsund took them up the coast of Norway with various stops such as at Trondheim. On the steamer Conway read Gregory’s account of his African expedition for the first time and got a running commentary when he quizzed Gregory; ‘I kept asking him for travelling tips and he [Gregory] replied ‘Travellers should take with them a sausage machine for tough meat, a bellow for bad fuel, and a packet of seeds of quick-growing vegetables’; ‘We found him a mine of valuable and peculiar information, most of which I have forgotten’ (Conway 1897, p. 24). They crossed the Arctic Circle on 12 June, revelled in the beauty of the Lofoten Islands, and while the steamer re-coaled, Conway and Gregory climbed to the summit of the island of Stokmarkness at midnight, astonished at the beauty of the panoramic scene before them. A day or two later they reached Tromso, where they bought the last of their stores plus two ponies and were joined by the two Norwegian sailors, who were engaged as assistants and completed the party. When about to sail from Tromso, Conway (1897, p. 36), wrote ‘The ship, as the day advanced, became a mere pandemonium. . .All sorts of people came to say good-bye. . . The deck was crowded. Glasses were clinked. Everyone was in the way of every one else. . .In the midst of the shindy, Gregory digested geological papers from various journals, cross-questioned anyone that came handy about Spitzbergen birds or the Norwegian vocabulary, and went on piling up information generally. “You read always”

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 43–48. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.8

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Fig. 8.1. (William) Martin Conway (1856–1937) by Bassano 1895. Leader of the 1896 Spitzbergen Expedition. With permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

said a French gentleman to him. “Yes” was the merry reply; “you see I am young and have a lot to learn.” At sea, “Cold breezes and showers drove us to seek employment below. . . He [Gregory] was

actively employed measuring the details of four hundred specimens of a bone from the head of cod-fish. He said the pastime was excellent.” They left Tromso and after a brief and very smelly stop, due to rotting whales, at the whaling station of Rolfso, they set course for Spitzbergen. By present-day standards, Conway’s (1897, p. 9) description of Gregory’s role is somewhat extravagant but is quoted several times because it was a contemporary assessment or account and from a man in no way beholden to Gregory: ‘How valuable was the companionship of the author of the Great Rift Valley of Africa, how useful was his experience, how helpful his energy, readers of that fascinating description of a most plucky and fruitful journey will readily appreciate.’ Gregory’s modesty and his ability to work under a leader had apparently not been compromised by his African experience; perhaps after all the multitudinous duties of being a sole leader, he was pleased to be able to concentrate more on his own interests. That Gregory had made a deep and lasting impression on Conway is proved by Conway’s subsequent unsuccessful attempt in June 1898 to get Gregory to come with him to Bolivia (letter with A. Mendell) and another offer described later. Their steamer Raftsund could not force a way directly to Spitzbergen because of thick ice so they had to divert along ‘leads’ or lanes through the ice. They first sighted Spitzbergen on 17 June, by coincidence the tercentenary of the first recorded discovery of Spitzbergen in 1596 by Wilhelm Barents (c. 1550–1597). On the 18th they anchored at the entrance to the ‘great Ice Fjord,’ and went ashore to shoot birds, collect eggs, plants and fossils (Fig. 8.2). They were quickly joined by the Virgo, the steamer taking Herr Andre´e and his balloon to be launched from Spitzbergen and attempting to fly to the North Pole. They were boarded by two men, the survivors of a ship which had been caught in the ice the previous autumn. The men had over-wintered in great privation. This emphasized the need for an overland route to the west coast. On 19 June the Raftsund was able to enter the fjord and anchor at the entrance to Advent Bay (Fig. 8.2) which itself was still covered in ice. They quickly unloaded stores and pitched camp on the beach. ‘Late at night a shot was fired from the steamer (at some bird, I suppose). Gregory, half asleep, leaped up. He thought it was the Masai coming to loot his camp’ (Conway 1897). This suggests that the fight with the Masai, which was Gregory’s first real experience of the reality of

Fig. 8.2. Map of a portion of Spitzbergen (Svalbard) showing localities mentioned (Garwood & Gregory 1898).

THE 1896 CONWAY SPITZBERGEN (SVALBARD) EXPEDITION AND RELATED POLAR WORK

warfare, had made a deeper psychological impact on him than the popular image of the ‘intrepid’ explorer generally recognized. Climbing a hill, ‘Gregory went ahead like a steam-engine, whilst I did the puffing and blowing behind’ (Conway 1897). On the 21st, Conway, Garwood and Pedersen hauled a load of stores inland preparatory to the trek across the island, returning in the evening, while Ted Conway and Gregory assisted in the burial of one of the shipwrecked sailors whose frozen body had been kept from the bears in two barrels. On the 22nd Gregory was to go with Conway and Garwood (Fig. 8.3) to set up another camp but malarial fever struck Gregory, and he was unable to go with them; he followed two days later with Pedersen and Trevor-Battye. The attacks of fever were not trivial, and although Gregory made only passing reference to them, they clearly had a debilitating effect on him and he was pushing himself to leave on the third day. In later years he would remark in a matter-of-fact way, ‘the Arctic killed all my tropical disease germs’ (Hobley 1932) but it seems unlikely to be true. Just as they were nearly ready to leave, a school of white whales came into the bay and, together with members of a Swedish expedition led by Baron Gerald Jacob De Geer (1858 –1943), who was making a map of the Ice Fjord, they managed to shoot, harpoon, tow ashore, photograph, skin and flense three beluga whales, so their departure was delayed until midnight on 24 June. Pulling two sledges they started up Advent Dale towards Conway’s camp. They had expected to cross a narrow coastal strip to an immense ice plateau over which they would have been able to pull their sledges with relative ease compared with

Fig. 8.3. Edmund J. Garwood (1864– 1949) geologist and a member of the Conway Spitzbergen Expedition. By permission of University College London Archive Photographs, UCL Library Services.

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the ‘oozey bogs, and half-thawed snow, and the fording of cold swollen streams. . .in the pelting rain’ (Gregory 1897, p. 49). They reached Conway’s camp at 6 am in full daylight. After food and a short rest, Trevor-Battye returned to the coast and the others continued eastwards through the melting snow on mud, slime, bog and rock, into which on level ground they always sank up to their knees, or plunged at intervals to their waists, and, occasionally fell into up to their shoulders. The two ponies were even more hampered and sank into the mire so deeply that they had to be kept apart so that one, on firm ground, could, with ropes, pull the other out. They had to wade through torrents of near-freezing water cutting through ice and were constantly surrounded by the prevailing fog, mist and rain that prevented the drying of any wet clothes, so they slept in wet reindeer sleeping bags. Food and fuel were limited by the need to restrict the weight of the loads. This unexpected terrain wrought havoc with the sledges, which were of a type designed by Fridtjof Nansen (1861 –1930) for ice work, so that pulling them across rocky ground quickly wore them out. At a camp by a waterfall, which was nearest to the coast where they had arranged for their boat to bring further stores, Gregory and Pedersen, ‘t’king a few hours ‘f walking’ (and fossil collecting), took the empty sledges to the trysting place on Sassen Bay, only to find no boat there. They had broken the Arctic rule of never travelling anywhere without food, wraps and shelter so they were without food, fire and tent, except that Pedersen, who was to transfer to the boat, had his sleeping bag. They resolved to wait for 24 hours. Pedersen slept in his sleeping bag while Gregory paced up and down in his wet clothes ‘to keep off chills,’ until at 2 am a shot was heard and Gregory sent Pedersen to investigate while he snatched a few hours sleep in the warm sleeping bag. Pedersen came back at 10 am with matches and enough food for one man for three days from the De Geer Swedish Expedition. Despite being ravenous, Gregory left the food and Pedersen and walked back to the camp where he fed and rested before setting out the next day to wade alone the 53 km back to Advent Bay, to hurry up the boat. Conway (1897) wrote ‘Gregory started for his thirty-mile bog-tramp to Advent Bay. He went forth in the gayest fashion, saying it was some time since he had walked fifty miles at a stretch, but he thought this thirty might be counted as an equivalent, which indeed was true.’ The sledges having been brought back to Advent Bay and mended, Ted Conway and Gregory rowed them back to Sassen Bay and then Gregory and Williamsen took them up to Conway’s camp at the waterfall. Here they left everything that was not absolutely necessary and Martin Conway, Garwood, Gregory and Williamsen continued the interrupted journey to the east coast (Fig. 8.2). They marched up the Sassendal and Fulmer Valley, across hills of moraine, formed of mud and slush lying with sheets of ice, and slid down to the level plain of the Upper Fulmar Valley, of thick soft mud and pebbles that was so tenacious that the two ponies and the four men together were needed to drag one sledge. At a vertical cliff of ice, the Ivory Glacier, they halted. This was the watershed. They decided to make a camp, leave the sledges there with Williamsen. After a long rest and a big meal, the remaining three climbed onto the glacier, crossed it and descended, by steps cut in the ice of a vertical face by Garwood, to the plain and then to the coast at Agarth Bay, Stor Fjord (Fig. 8.2). Spitzbergen had been traversed for the first time. After collecting and photographing they returned to the camp. The rain became so bad they were forced to abandon their plans for further exploration of the area and they returned, half-starved, to the waterfall camp. From there Conway and Gregory went back to Sassen Bay to return by sea but the expected boat was not there and they had to wait a week until Garwood arrived at Advent Bay and brought a boat for their relief. With completely ruined sledges, no further inland work was possible. What the letters to Audrey reveal is that apart from the dreadful terrain of icy swamps, deeply crevassed glaciers and gluey

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moraines, the torrents of cold rain which soaked them and the mud that flowed into their tents, the perpetual daylight encouraged them to work excessive hours then collapse into the tents; ‘I had been on the move for 46 hours, straight off’ ‘Nevertheless we are enjoying ourselves and will come back as tough as wire’ (letter to Audrey, 19 July [1896]). Presumably the last comment was a statement of fact to re-assure Audrey, who only a year before had seen Gregory laid low with malaria. On 24 July, Gregory managed to shoot, and then over several hours, skin and cut up a reindeer to supplement their inadequate food supply, and later the same day also shot a blue fox that repeatedly tried to steal some of the meat. This shows that although Gregory hated hunting as a sport, he was not squeamish. During the night his sleep was broken by gulls trying to steal the meat and one piece showed the teeth marks of another fox, so Gregory ‘restacked the meat with a tin full of stones on the top. Half an hour later I heard the clatter of the falling tin, sprang thro the tent door with my Snider to find a grey or silver Arctic fox creeping off some 25 yards (24 m) away. A bullet thro the heart added a second fox to my scanty zoological collection’. Gregory skinned the valuable fox furs and kept them for the Museum which especially wanted Arctic fox skins. On 27 July, Martin Conway and Gregory discovered a botanist, Eugen Honoratus Jørgensen (1862 –1938), from the Bergen Museum, camping with two inadequate home-made tents and working with great energy to collect plant specimens. Gregory compared notes with him and ‘I felt that I need not be discouraged with my own collections.’ They gave Jørgensen some meat and he lent them his boat (letter of 30 July [1896]). Later Gregory collected fossils voraciously from the Tertiary, Cretaceous and Jurassic rocks and with Garwood, tried to find Carboniferous fossils (letter of 7 August). A small 12 ton steamer, (The Empress), which had brought tourists to see Salomon August Andre´e (1854 –1897) and his hydrogen-filled balloon, was chartered by Conway to explore the northern coast of Spitzbergen. They met Andre´e and saw his balloon but could neither circumnavigate the North East Land, nor venture far south as ice blocked their way. Andre´e abandoned his attempt to balloon to the North Pole in 1896 as fog and snow descended. He made an ill-fated attempt in 1897 and disappeared without trace until three bodies and diaries were found on White Island, eastern Spitzbergen in August 1930. The balloon had become coated in ice and forced to the ground. His disappearance provoked questions as to why none of the carrier pigeons he had taken had returned to civilization, which prompted Gregory (The Times 30 August 1897) to reveal that Andre´e had taken 70 pigeons to Spitzbergen in 1896 and released several but none reached Norway, as Gregory had ascertained by asking when he returned to Norway. The distance across Arctic waters was too great. Privately, but presciently, to Audrey (letter of 7 August) Gregory expressed his doubts about Andre´e’s ability to keep the balloon clear of snow. Conway and his party left Spitzbergen on Saturday 15 August on the steamer Lofoten and returned to England uneventfully. Gregory left the party at Trondheim and went to Stockholm, seizing the opportunity to see the Spitzbergen collections there, returning by Christiana (Oslo) and a direct ship to Tilbury which was also cheaper than travelling via Hull. He arrived home on Saturday 29 August (letter of 21 August, which also includes ‘I shudder in contemplation of the work awaiting me. There will be masses. But fortunately I am as tough as a doorknocker’). Gregory brought back a Spitzbergen polar bear skin which he kept at home for many years (C. J. Gregory mss). The exploration showed that Gregory was not just a man who could perform well in the Tropics, but could also pull sledges, perform under polar conditions, retain a sense of humour (and in his letters) and cooperate with his companions even when he was not in charge of the expedition. Most significantly, in view of his later interest in Antarctic exploration, he had experienced the deadening fatigue and exhaustion caused by man-hauling sledges, which

cramped mental activity through dog tiredness, and he saw the need to avoid sledging whenever possible. Conway is noted for his experiments with skiing while in Spitzbergen, which made him one of the British ski pioneers (ODNB 2004) and either before or while in Spitzbergen, Gregory would have experienced the advantages of skiing which became a recreational activity to him as recorded in Who Was Who (1941). Immediately upon his return, Gregory dashed off a summary of the expedition’s work for Nature, which was published on 10 September 1896 (Gregory 1896a), and Garwood & Gregory (1896) produced a brief summary for the Geological Magazine readers even before the specimens had been unpacked. They had managed to obtain samples from the Archaean, Lower Palaeozoic, Devonian, Carboniferous, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous and Miocene rocks but the faunas found were limited, prompting them to suggest that Spitzbergen had always been near to the Pole and a cold place, which was a distinctly precipitate conclusion, but one Gregory subsequently maintained. Garwood & Gregory’s (1896) paper also reveals the reason Gregory was allowed by the NHM to participate in the Spitzbergen expedition. Several continental museums had collections of Spitzbergen rocks and fossils but the NHM was lacking such material and clearly, as a matter of pride, was somewhat piqued that past collectors had chosen to present their material to other museums. Gregory was therefore deputed to obtain a comprehensive collection and no doubt part of the reason for his inspection of the Stockholm collections was to compare them with the material collected for the NHM. However, examining the collected material was much more difficult, and even the good ammonite material was not described for 25 years until Leonard Frank Spath (1888 –1957) (1921), assisted by some further notes on the Triassic –Jurassic succession given by Gregory (1921), identified the ammonites as mostly from the Lower Triassic with some Middle Triassic and Upper Jurassic to Lower Cretaceous specimens. Gregory (1897) summarized in more detail the geological findings of the expedition as being: (1)

(2)

The discovery of clear proof that the Pleistocene ice did not form one great sheet that extended from the Pole over the whole of North America and northern Europe covering everything. It did not extend far beyond the present coast line in Norway and some peaks, lacking the characteristic rounding caused by glaciation, stuck out through the ice [forming nunataks]. While no doubt the latter was wellknown to many Greenlanders and Norwegians, it was not generally accepted in Britain, although, as Gregory pointed out, it had been maintained by a number of geologists. The maximum extent of the Pleistocene ice-sheets is of course still a matter of debate, complicated by the now-understood multiplicity of glacial and interglacial episodes and recent work, including seismic studies of gorging of the seafloor, has tended to support the existence of a single ice-sheet covering the whole of the North Sea between Scandinavia and the British Isles (Clark et al. 2004) at least between 35 000 and 15 000 years ago. Arguments about the erosive character of ice were resolved in that ‘it is impossible for any one who has seen the Arctic fiords to doubt that they have been cut by the glaciers that flow into them’ Gregory (1897, p. 57). But ice-sheets are also protective in that where the ice-sheet has melted, rivers cut gorges and chasms in the underlying surface which the ice had previously protected. This equivocation about the erosive power of glaciers was resolved by Garwood & Gregory (1898) in favour of only limited erosive power with the fjords being the result of earth movements and their shape being only modified by the glaciers, a view in

THE 1896 CONWAY SPITZBERGEN (SVALBARD) EXPEDITION AND RELATED POLAR WORK

(3)

accordance with that of Bonney (1893), which no doubt kept Gregory in Bonney’s good books. Finally, Gregory (1897, p. 58) erroneously supposed that the North Polar region had always lain under the blight of Arctic cold. He did not even accept that the Spitzbergen coal is evidence of at least one episode of a previous warmer climate, thinking that the coal was formed from drift wood such as that which now litters the Spitzbergen shore. He did not give a single reason to support this view, simply stating it, but in the paper to be noted next, he did give some evidence.

More detailed descriptions of the ice phenomena encountered on Spitzbergen were given by Garwood & Gregory (1898), read to the Geological Society on 2 February 1898. The realization that only the basal layers of glaciers are generally loaded with debris; that ice can move uphill and carry seashells with it; the existence of raised beaches and seafloor; the nature of the different moraines, including those made of interglacial material; and the manner of formation of one particular esker; are all aspects of ice-sheets and glaciation that scientists familiar with northern climes had observed before but with which most British geologists were not familiar. Some of the points merely re-iterated opinions previously expressed in print by Gregory, but this time they were supported by actual observations of glaciers and ice sheets, which were new to Gregory. Of course he noticed the evidence supporting the phenomena that he had previously had to deduce or argue for, even back to his 1887 Puffin Island study. The discovery of the prePleistocene glacial deposits thought to be of Mesozoic or early Cenozoic age and also those of Hecka Hook, which were

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correlated with those of the Varanger Fjord, provided the reason for Gregory’s belief in the long-continued cold climate of the district. The correlation with the Varanger deposits may have been prompted by the reading of two papers to the Geological Society a year before Garwood & Gregory’s (1898) account. On 20 January 1897, Aubrey Strahan (1852 – 1928) (1897) gave an account of the glacial phenomena of Palaeozoic age in the Varanger Fjord and the raised beaches and glacial deposits of Varanger Fjord. The best assessment of the glacial results reported by Garwood & Gregory (1898) was given by Percy Fry Kendall (1856 –1936), the English glacial expert, later Professor at Leeds University, in the discussion after the reading of the paper. He said (Proc. GSL, 686, pp. 37– 38): ‘The paper would mark a distinct epoch in British glacial geology. Hitherto, one body of geologists had attributed the drift-deposits of Britain to the agency of land-ice, while another had invoked the agency of the sea. The latter had argued that glaciers cannot move uphill, that they cannot transport materials from lower to higher levels, . . . nor gather up materials over which they are moving, and that, even if they could pick up shells, they would grind them to powder. The Authors have shown that the glaciers of Spitzbergen were actually doing each of these things.’

Kendall did however caution that sharp splintered peaks were not conclusive evidence that the peaks had not been overridden by ice as rapid shattering by severe frosts could quickly generate such splintered peaks even if they had earlier been under a glacier. Twenty-three years later Kendall’s view of Gregory’s glacial work was to be very different.

Fig. 8.4. Map of ‘The Polar Basin’, that is, the Arctic Ocean as deduced by Gregory (1897a) when the ocean was not universally recognized. Probable limits of the Arctic Ocean in the Silurian (lined area) and of its transgression in the Devonian (dotted area) are shown.

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Polar geology The Spitzbergen foray and his already demonstrated interest in glacial phenomena had ignited a concern in Gregory for polar geology. As early as 11 February 1897, that is, only a few months after his return from Spitzbergen, Gregory began giving a course of three lectures at the Royal Institution (cost: half a guinea (55p) on ‘Some problems of Arctic Geology’ (The Times, 23 January 1897), the gist of which presumably appeared under the same title in Nature in July and August 1897 (Gregory 1897a). The content of this article, published in two parts but without references (on editorial direction), throws important light on how Gregory viewed the relationships between the oceans and the continents and seems to show his mind set on the permanence of the oceans. The first part (pp. 301–303) dealt with ‘The Polar Basin’ that is, the Arctic Ocean. He pointed out that until [Nansen’s] Fram crossed the Arctic Ocean (in 1893– 6) it was generally agreed that there was no Arctic Ocean only a relatively shallow sea, possibly with some ice-covered islands, because it was thought that only shallow seas could be completely covered with sea-ice. Although the renowned oceanographer, Dr John Murray (1841 – 1914) dissented, the view was so strongly entrenched that the Fram was not even equipped to measure oceanic depths, despite Scoresby having let out well over 3 km of line west of Spitzbergen. The Fram showed that the Arctic Ocean really existed. Gregory then considered the reports of Precambrian rocks fringing the present Arctic Ocean in all of northern Canada, Greenland, northern Europe and Siberia, and supposed this was a very ancient arrangement. Marine Silurian rocks in both the Canadian Arctic and on the northern parts of the Euro-Asian continent, with an even wider distribution of Devonian rocks on the opposite sides of the North Pole, led him to conclude that the Arctic Ocean must have extended from the Canadian Arctic to northern Siberia since the Lower Palaeozoic, that is, it was essentially ‘permanent’ (Fig. 8.4). Of course there was no evidence to prove that an ocean connected rocks on different sides of the Pole in past time; this was a piece of speculation or circular reasoning. No past deep-sea deposits had been found, but no doubt Gregory would have argued that the marine Silurian and Devonian rocks were each on the continental shelves on opposite sides of the postulated ocean. What was not discussed was the direct contradiction of a conclusion of ‘oceanic permanence’ with the West Indian-derived conclusion, Gregory had previously embraced, unless there were two types of oceans, permanent and transient. This paradox was to remain with Gregory for years, and was exacerbated later when he went on to suppose that the present distribution of the continents and oceans was a primary feature of the Earth. The second part of the article (Gregory 1897a, pp. 351– 353) supposed that ‘based on fossils’ the Arctic Ocean climate had probably been similar to the present Arctic climate since at least the Silurian. The overall conclusion was that the newly discovered ocean supported both the theory of the permanence of the oceans, as believed by some for the more familiar oceans, and the constancy of the cold polar regions. Of course, a bold clear statement like this attracted far more attention than any catalogue of Bryozoa was ever likely to, and Gregory’s reputation as one who understood the Arctic grew, despite his very limited actual experience. Nevertheless, this was an early instance of what would become one of his outstanding features, namely popularizing geology, both in lectures and in publications, but with a speculative element, that was not always correct, nor identified as speculation. While he and Garwood were writing up their Spitzbergen work, he did not miss the opportunity of hearing (and speaking after) an account, read on 23 June 1897 to the GSL, by Newton & Teall (1897) of the rocks and fossils brought back from Franz Joseph

Land in the Arctic Ocean by the 1894 –96 Jackson –Harmsworth Expedition. This confirmed an earlier NHM determination of Oxfordian fossils and the existence of Jurassic rocks in Franz Joseph Land, but it was unclear whether these rocks were interbedded with the predominant basalts, which would therefore be Jurassic in age, or whether the basalts were later (Paleocene) as was more usual in the North Atlantic, as determined in Spitzbergen, Scotland and Ireland. The same problem re-emerged a year later on 22 June 1898, when Dr Reginald Kœttlitz’s (1861 – 1916) (1898) account of his observations on the geology of Franz Josef Land was read to the GSL by Edwin Tulley Newton (1840 –1930). Kœttlitz described the basaltic rocks, but thought that some of the voluminous lavas were interbedded with the Jurassic rocks, partly because an ammonite had been found embedded in a basaltic tuff, but Gregory expressed some doubt about whether this was adequate proof and thought that ‘there should be considerable hesitation before accepting the basalt as Jurassic’ (discussion in Kœttlitz 1898). All this interest, writing, lecturing and speaking about polar geology, when combined with his Arctic and East African expeditionary experience and reputation, was to make Gregory an obvious possible leader for any British Antarctic venture, which even by 1897 was being proposed.

References Blanford, W. T. 1896. Review of ‘The Great Rift Valley’ by J. W. Gregory. Nature, 54, 347– 350. Bonney, T. G. 1893. Do glaciers excavate? The Geographical Journal, 1, 481– 499. Clark, C. D., Sejrup, H. P., Bigg, G., Stoker, M., Lonergan, L., Raunholm, S. & Haflidason, H. 2004. Did the punctuated demise of glacial ice in the North Sea affect thermohaline circulation of the ocean? EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 85, 293. Conway, W. M. 1897. The First Crossing of Spitsbergen. J. M. Dent & Sons, London. Garwood, E. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1896. The geological work of the Conway Spitsbergen Expedition. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 3, 437– 439. Garwood, E. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1898. Contributions to the glacial geology of Spitsbergen. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 54, 197– 226. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, J. W. 1896. The Jurassic Bryozoa. Catalogues of Fossils in the British Museum (Natural History). Gregory, J. W. 1896a. The Conway Expedition to Spitsbergen. Nature, 54, 437– 438. Gregory, J. W. 1897. Across Spitsbergen. Transactions and Sixth Annual Report of the Council of the Liverpool Geographical Society for the year ending December 31st 1897, 41 –58. Gregory, J. W. 1897a. Some problems of Arctic Geology. Nature, 56, 301– 303, 361–352. Gregory, J. W. 1921. Note on the sequence across Central Spitsbergen from Advent Bay to Agardhs Bay. Geological Magazine, 58, 295– 296. Hobley, C. W. 1932. Obituary: Professor J. W. Gregory. The Geographical Journal, 80, 269– 272. Kœttlitz, R. 1898. Observations on the geology of Franz Josef Land. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 54, 620– 645. Newton, E. T. & Teall, J. J. H. 1897. Notes on a collection of rocks and fossils from Franz Josef Land, made by the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition during 1894– 96. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 53, 477– 519. Spath, L. F. 1921. On ammonites from Spitsbergen. Geological Magazine, 58, 297– 305; 347– 356. Strahan, A. 1897. On glacial phenomena of Palaeozoic age in the Varanger Fjord. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 53, 137– 156.

Chapter 9 1896 –9: Frustrations, further travel and publications

Disappointments and continued major echinoid and coral outputs, including the early use of statistics During 1896– 7, Gregory became dissatisfied with the bleak prospects of promotion at the NHM. He had been an Assistant for 10 years, during which he had achieved a DSc, RGS and GSL awards, and a phenomenal output of nearly 80 publications, a number of which were monographs in their own right. He had also gained international recognition for his work, especially in the fields of palaeontology and East African geology. However, he was still only a Second Class Assistant and not the most senior (NHM archives), earning just over £200 a year with an uncertain prospect of promotion to a more senior position. Dr Henry Woodward, the Keeper, was due to retire at the end of 1901, when Dr A. Smith Woodward became Keeper, opening the position of Assistant Keeper, but besides Gregory there were other Assistants who were more senior having spent longer at the NHM. Bather (who in fact became Assistant Keeper) also had a very good claim on the post as by 1900 he too had a prolific publication record, with for instance, about 50 papers on the Echinoderms alone (Lang 1934). Gregory was not a man to hang about awaiting dead men’s shoes, and his lack of an Oxbridge degree did not make an academic appointment certain. The Chair of Geology at Oxford was advertised on 10 November 1896; Gregory only decided to apply at the very last minute (27 January 1897), using Sir Archibald Geikie as a referee. It would, he thought, be a chance to re-organize the Oxford University Museum and also allow him to undertake more work on Palaeozoic rocks and fossils than he could at the NHM where, as an Assistant, he was still subject to direction. Initially he had decided not to apply because ‘I saw little chance of getting the support necessary for the proper arrangement of the [University] Museum. As I now see more chance of doing the work properly, if elected, I have decided to apply’ (Letters to Geikie, 26 & 27 January 1897; Edinburgh Univ. Archives). This suggests someone in the University was prompting him to apply and supplying inside information to encourage him when the deadline approached and he had still not applied. His application was unsuccessful; William Johnson Sollas (1849 –1936), already FRS and Professor of Geology at Trinity College, Dublin, (previously Professor of Geology and Zoology at Bristol) was appointed. Sollas was a publisher akin to Gregory (30 papers on fossil sponges alone etc; Vincent 1994) so his success was well-earned. Interestingly, Vincent (1994) recorded that one of Sollas’s first tasks was to reorganize the Museum, so the need was pressing. It seems that someone, whether on the Oxford appointing committee of five, which included Edwin Ray Lankester (1847 – 1929) FRS (Oxford Historical Register of 1900), or not, was sufficiently impressed with Gregory that he was appointed External Examiner in the Honours School of Natural Science for 1897 and 1898, but this might have been arranged before the interviews; the Oxford University non-financial administrative correspondence is not preserved before c. 1930 and the minutes of Boards of Electors before 1898. A contributory factor in Gregory’s delay in applying for the Oxford Chair may have been an intense concentration on

completing, a 51-page chapter on ‘The Echinoidea’ (Chapter 15) by the end of December 1896, which he achieved. He had already met a deadline of September 1896 for the 45-page Chapter 14 on ‘The Stelleroidea’, both chapters being for Part III of ‘A Treatise on Zoology’ although it was the first Part to be published. This was edited by Lankester, then Linacre Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford, but shortly, from 1898, to be Gregory’s boss as the Director of the NHM. Despite Gregory completing the manuscript by the end of 1896, the book did not appear until 1900 (Gregory 1900). Gregory did not receive his final proofs until the end of July 1899, presumably because of delays by one or both of the other contributors, F. A. Bather and Edwin Stephen Goodrich (1868 – 1946). Gregory was careful to insert, at this late stage, a note that the account was ‘closed at the end of 1896’ as evidently any later work, including his later discovery of a ‘missing link’ (see below) was not included (extant corrected final proofs). The review of this 344-page ‘Oxford Zoology’ as it was informally called (Nature, 62, pp. 545 –546 by ‘EAM’), was extremely complimentary: ‘the first part of the long-awaited Oxford Zoology’ dealing with the Echinodermata. ‘The intention of the authors is to give a systematic account of the Echinoderms, including every known genus, living or extinct . . . and to trace as far as possible the evolution and relationships of the forms comprised under each class or order, as inferred both from their structural affinities and from their succession in time’. The reviewer, an expert on the subject, pointed out three ‘errors or oversights’ in Gregory’s chapters, which suggested a degree of carelessness or work completed under great pressure of time. Shortly after this honourable rebuff over the Oxford Chair, sometime during 1898, Gregory suffered something of a personal crisis over his future career. In 1898, probably during the summer, his second child, a boy, died within days of being born (C. J. Gregory mss)1. Many parents suffering such a loss are dispirited and depressed. His son records (C. J. Gregory mss), presumably from what his mother had recorded before him, that Gregory seriously considered giving up his museum post and entering the legal profession, as a scientific lawyer, a specialism that engineering and scientific advances had created a need for but almost every trained lawyer had a non-scientific background. Exactly what generated this particular proposal is not clear. It is likely that Gregory had given evidence as an expert witness, as he certainly did later with great success, and had been struck by the lack of any basic scientific understanding in the legal profession, but identifying past expert witnesses is not easy. His son records that he first acted as an expert witness while at the NHM and that his first case involved arguments about whether china clay was a mineral. In the face of formidable opposition, he showed that china clay owes its character to ‘deep-seated activity, not to surface weathering like most clays and therefore for the disputed agreement, it was a mineral’ and the case was won (C. J. Gregory 1977). However, Gregory continued in the NHM but was positively looking for a promoted post outside the Museum. Some time in 1898, probably in the late summer when Audrey had at least partly recovered, Gregory visited Brittany (Gregory 1913), presumably on holiday with his wife, and it may have included some canoeing together, as C. J. Gregory (1977)

1

Close searching of the birth and death records in London, Chelmsford, Maldon and Leeds (see later) have not located any registrations to establish the precise date of birth or death. A letter of 11 February 1902 from Gregory to E. Chaplin refers to ’the mess Mrs Keith made of number 2’. C. J. Gregory (mss) refers to ‘Stephen’. B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 49–60. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.9

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records that Gregory’s 1893 African canoe training ‘was put to practical use when he packed a young wife and camping kit into a Canadian canoe, and the pair enjoyed delightful but economical holidays, touring English and French waterways.’ Although Gregory did not write about this visit in a specific paper (so it must have been a holiday!), he made observations of the sea coast that he was later to draw on and include in his 1913 book on fjords. Gregory’s growing interest in enlarging his knowledge of the Palaeozoic may have been initiated by wonderings about the ancestors of some of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic fossils he had worked on, but his broad interest in all things geological was also involved. He had recently published on the Palaeozoic Echinoderms of the Group Ophiuroidea (Gregory 1896), and at the end of 1896 must have worked for many weeks on his near 100-page Oxford Natural History contribution which involved digging back into the Lower Palaeozoic origins of the Echinoidea and Stelleroidea. Already, on 24 April 1895 at the GSL, he had shown great interest in the discovery, reported by Henry Meyners Bernard (1853 –1909) (1895), of the appendages of trilobites and Gregory commented that ‘the new facts confirmed the close alliance of the trilobites with the phyllopods which Bernard had contended but he doubted whether [Apus’s] descent from an annelid was sufficiently proved. The limbs of Apus seemed to him [JWG] more to resemble arthropod appendages than annelian parapodia’ (Abstracts of the Proceedings of the GSL, 641). On 2 December 1896 Gregory read two papers to GSL on the affinities of the Echinothuridae (Gregory 1897), and on Echinocystis and Palœdiscus (Gregory 1897a), the latter two genera being Silurian, which he revealed he had first studied as early as 1888. He was intrigued by the early appearance of the Phylum Echinoderma in the form of crinoids, cystids, and stellerids as early as Cambrian and being joined only shortly after, in the Ordovician, by echinoids already developed in the familiar form found much later and even today. The apparently primitive features of the Echinothuridae he concluded were secondarily acquired and not primeval, the recent genera being extremely specialized. This work provoked Bather (1897) to write to the Geological Magazine complaining about Gregory’s use of the name Echinocystis, the inadequate source reference given for Discocystis and other echinoid matters, to which Gregory (1897b) replied briefly. Other evidence of Gregory’s growing interest in Palaeozoic matters emerged from his short paper on ‘The age of the Morte Slate fossils’ (Gregory 1897c) in which he stated he had made two visits to North Devon and West Somerset and had formed the impression that there could well be pre-Devonian rocks hidden among the Devonian, but nevertheless when Dr Henry Hicks (1837 –99) (1896) had read a paper on the Morte Slates to the GSL (on 5 February 1896), Gregory’s examination of the exhibited lamellibranch and brachiopods (which showed he was fairly expert at the identification of these particular species) had led him to the conclusion that they were Devonian types, not Silurian as claimed by Hicks. A important feature that began to emerge in Gregory’s writings, for instance in the 36-page introduction to the Catalogue of Jurassic Bryozoa (Gregory 1896a; Fig. 9.1) and in the ‘Oxford Zoology’ articles, was a growing facility for explaining in simple language the workings and classification of the creatures he was describing. Of course his zoological training helped immensely, but this simplifying and generalizing ability fitted him well for the pedagogical role that he was moving towards and would later become a major strength in his university teaching and his wider public outreach in both journalism and lecturing. During early 1898 Gregory began working on 79 echinoid specimens in the first collection of Egyptian fossils sent to the NHM by Captain Henry George Lyons (1864 –1944), Director of the Egyptian Geological Survey. The echinoids came from the Cretaceous, the Lower, Middle and Upper Eocene, the Middle Miocene and the

Fig. 9.1. Simplified diagram of the structure of typical Bryozoa. From Catalogue of Jurassic Bryozoa (Gregory 1896a). With acknowledgements to the NHM. an, anus; ap, aperture; bc, body cavity; cp, communication pore; d, diaphragm; ect, ectoderm; end, endoderm; f, funiculi; n, nerve ganglion; o, orifice;oes, oesophagus; op, operculum; rm, retractor muscle; st, stomach; t, tentacles; ts, tentacle sheath.

Pleistocene and were referred to 15 genera and 30 species, of which three were new. The account (Gregory 1898), published in April 1898 was followed in June 1898 by a description of 40 specimens of Egyptian corals of similar derivation and ages (except the Middle Eocene was missing), which fell into 9 genera and 11 species, of which two species were new (Gregory 1898a). Precise measurements of critical characters of both the echinoids and the corals were published. During the study of these Egyptian corals, Gregory noticed one from the Cretaceous (Turonian) that he thought was the missing link, which he had looked for in his Oxford synthesis, between the Palaeozoic Milleporoid Stromatoporoids and the Cenozoic Milliporidae. This he assigned to a new genus Millestroma (Gregory 1898b). The description of the second set of Egyptian specimens, which came to Gregory in September 1899, was delayed a long time, with a preliminary report being given to the Survey in September or October 1899 and the full account only appearing in 1906. Gregory then showed that the corals from Abu Roash were Cretaceous, those from the Gulf of Suez were Pleistocene, mostly late Pleistocene, and with Red Sea, not Mediterranean, affinities, but those from Jebel Mellaba and Abu Sha’ar were Miocene and of Mediterranean and Sind type (Gregory 1906a). Presumably Gregory’s interest in trying to establish when the Mediterranean influence ceased and its implications for dating the rift valley movements, was responsible for him completing the NHM task that he could have left to a successor, but it is possible that Gregory’s friendship with Lyons was also a factor. The Egyptian echinoids, of which about 50 separate species were identified, enabled the Abu Roash rocks to be more precisely dated as Turonian, the Sinai ones as mainly Cenomanian but with three Turonian types. The most interesting specimen was a Miocene Echinolampas from Wadi Feiran, because the Pleistocene echinoids from both shores of the Gulf of Suez were identical with existing Red Sea species (Gregory 1906a). Shortly after the first Egyptian Survey work, Gregory examined five specimens of echinoids and 19 of corals from Miocene rocks at the northern extremity of Lake Urmi, NW Persia (then named Armenia) which Robert Theodore Gu¨nther (1869 –1940) (1899) of Magdalen College, Oxford, had obtained on an expedition. As

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William Kennet Loftus (1869 –1940) had already collected from this locality and presented the material to the NHM, Gregory had more material available than just Gu¨nther’s specimens, all five of which echinoids were Clypeasters. The account (Gregory 1899a in Gu¨nther 1899), written after the middle of 1898 and published in December 1899, is interesting as Gregory measured the sizes of several of the distinguishing features of the different Clypeaster species and those on published figures in H. Abich (1859 & 1882; references in Gregory 1899a) who had made a detailed study of the Clypeasters from this locality (‘Russischen Armenien’), and likewise those of H. Michelin (b. 1802) (1861) who had monographed the Clypeasters. This was an early attempt to use measurements to make more objective assessments of different echinoid species and was encouraged by work, described below, that had been ongoing for about eight years. The account also drew on, and expanded, the expertise Gregory (1891) had acquired in his DSc Maltese echinoid studies. The fossil corals from the Lake Urmi locality fell into eight species, all of Miocene age and all of which had been previously recorded or described from Lake Urmi by Abich. Again Gregory employed measurements as a guide to identification and he was able to draw on his work on Egyptian fossil corals, mentioned above, to identify for the first time in Asia Minor or Persia, Solenastraea turonensis (Michelin) 1847 which he thought Abich had seen in the Lake Urmi material, but probably identified as Solenastraea astroites. Gregory’s widening echinoid and coral expertise was enabling him to recognize provincialism of potentially great significance in reconstructing past environments and geographies. A major contributor to his growing ability to identify provincialism in echinoids and especially corals, was his work on The Jurassic Fauna of the Cutch [Western India], published in two parts, the first on the echinoids and the second, an extremely important account, on the corals (Gregory 1893, 1899a). As described in the introduction to each of the two parts, these studies came about because in 1890 the expert, P. M. Duncan, had agreed to identify collections of corals and echinoids from Cutch which the Director of the Geological Survey of India had sent to him (Fig. 9.2). Sadly, Duncan was mortally ill by the time the material arrived, and after unpacking the fossils and selecting some for first attention, he presented [some of?] the collection to the NHM. Just before he died in May 1891 he asked Gregory to undertake the work. The samples were collected from 1867 to 1869 during the survey of the Cutch Peninsula with additions in 1872, so most of the material had lain undescribed for over 20 years. The first part, written before Gregory went to Africa, appeared in two years, was comparatively brief (14 pages plus two plates; Gregory 1893) and dealt with the echinoids. The echinoids were identified as Callovian types which lived at slight depth in rock pools around coral reefs, but the small number of specimens did not allow any more detailed correlation with European successions. The second part, dealing with the corals, which did not appear until 1899, was massive (223 pages and 28 plates) and innovatory, a book in itself (Gregory 1899a; Figs 9.3 –9.5). ‘The great number of corals and their extreme variability raised problems, for in spite of the size of the collection, which numbers nearly 8000 specimens it is impossible to find many specimens that are the exact counterparts of one another. The delay in completion of the work was mainly due to reluctance to treat as mere individual variations differences which in the case of the corresponding European corals are regarded as of specific values. To that course, however, I was ultimately driven as the only alternative was the creation of some 3000 new species or varieties’ (Introduction, Part 2).

Basically the problem was how much variation could be allowed without changing the name? This problem prompted quantitative consideration of what variation there was and at what statistically defined points, as we would now write, were the cut-off points to be defined. Thus on p. 17 (Gregory 1899a): ‘I picked out specimens which seemed to belong to familiar European species of Montlivaltia of which there were about 2000 specimens but the typical European species. . . were found to be linked by a continuous series of intermediate forms’.

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The unusually large number of specimens was somewhat overwhelming but enabled ranges of variation to be established if the required sectioning could be obtained for measurement of a large number of specimens. Obtaining this data was partly the cause of the delay in completing the work. Gregory’s graph plots of the measured variations in heights and diameters of the Indian Montlivaltia cornutiformis and the group of species which it represents in Europe was an early pioneering effort in statistical palaeontology and was achieved by work spread over several years (Figs 9.3 –9.5). Indeed, he thanked a Mr [C. L.?] Griesbach for allowing the collection to stay in England so long. The description of the corals was preceded by a lengthy account of the principles of coral classification. Most of the material came from the Upper Putchum Beds, NW of Jumara, and they had been correlated with the Upper Bathonian, a correlation the massive study of the corals neither confirmed nor denied! This study spread over about 8 years made Gregory familiar with the Jurassic faunas of western India so that he was able to recognize and appraise similarities with, and differences from, the Jurassic palaeontology of eastern Africa, which knowledge would, as explained below, lead him to propose that eastern Africa and India could not then have been separated by an ocean basin, such as now exists.

The arrangement of the continents and oceans Gregory, who was elected a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) in 1894, had been a member of the BA ‘Structure of a Coral Reef Committee’ following his March 1892 article (Gregory 1892). This committee organized the drilling of a coral reef to determine its origin. It made interim reports to the September 1895 BA meeting at Ipswich, to the Liverpool meeting in 1896, when boring had started but had been choked at 20 m, to the Toronto meeting in 1897, when a new attempt was recorded, and then to the Bristol meeting in 1898. Boring into Funafuti Island, north of Fiji in the Pacific Ocean and now part of Tuvalu, was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Tannatt William Edgeworth David (1858 – 1934) of Sydney, Australia; and it reached 213 m when the equipment again broke down. Further boring was attempted in the same hole. Eventually, as summarized by Branagan (2005), it was not until the third expedition (funded by the Royal Society and the colony of New South Wales) had drilled the same hole deeper, in 1896 under W. J. Sollas, in 1897 under David and in 1898 under Alfred Edmund Finckh (1866 – 1961) at David’s instigation, that the final depth of 339.7 m was reached. It only penetrated shallow-water coral and sand deposits. Charles Robert Darwin (1809 –1882) (1842) had postulated that the volcanic rock would be reached at 600 ft (184 m). As the cores came to Judd at RSM, Gregory almost certainly saw some of the material and was asked for his opinion as a coral expert. He presumably agreed with the general consensus (if not the committee Chairman) that the sediments were of shallow-water origin from even the deepest parts of the borehole, thus supporting Darwin’s theory. In fact, it was not until geophysical work revealed the volcanic base to atolls, and deep post-World War II drilling confirmed this, that Darwin’s theory was indisputably proven. The BA committee, chaired by T. G. Bonney, included Geikie and presumably enlisted Gregory which gave both Bonney and Geikie (both FRSs) more contact with Gregory; this was later most advantageous to Gregory. The whole subject directed thoughts towards the reasons for deep and shallow-water oceanic areas and why they differed from continental dry land. Gregory attended the 1898 BA meeting and on 9 September he read a paper to the BA on ‘Theories on the distribution of the Oceans and Continents’ which was only published as a one page abstract (Gregory 1898c), presumably because the elaboration of the theories was reserved for the more ambitious ‘The plan of the Earth and its causes’ which appeared in March 1899

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Fig. 9.2. Four species of Jurassic echinoids from the Cutch. From Gregory (1893).

(Gregory 1899b). In the BA talk he stated that the ‘main objective of geomorphology is to explain the existing distribution of land and water on the globe’. Three facts suggest that this distribution had been determined by some general principle and not by local accidents: the antipodal position of the oceans and continents, the triangular shape of the geographic units and the greater proportion of water in the southern hemisphere. The antipodal argument was based on the fact that all Africa and most of Euro-Asia is antipodal to the Pacific and Southern Oceans, whereas North America and some of South America is antipodal to the Indian and west Pacific Oceans and Australia is antipodal to the southern North Atlantic Ocean [Greenland was ignored!]. Although he concluded that no convincing explanation could be formulated without knowing the distributions of land and sea in earlier geological periods, he thought the tetrahedral theory of William Lowthian Green (1819 – 1890) (1875) came nearest to explaining the present distribution. This theory supposed that the Earth was a spheroid, slightly flattened on four faces (hence tetrahedral-like)

giving depressions in which the oceans lie. The land masses occurred at the angles and along the edges, thus supposedly accounting for their general southward tapering in contrast to the oceans which were thought to have northward pointing terminations, with the Pacific and Indian Oceans being apparent from maps supporting this concept while the Atlantic was supposed to be similar if the shallow ridge across from Greenland to Scandinavia was taken into account. However, no causative mechanism to produce the flattening of the spheroid was proposed, other than shrinkage of the Earth. Some of Gregory’s thoughts on these matters had been revived in early 1898 by his reviewing ‘La Face de la Terre,’ an 1897 French translation by Emmanuel de Margerie (1862 –1953) of the 1885 Volume 1 of ‘Das Antlitz der Erde’ by E. Suess (Gregory 1898d). Gregory is unstinting in his praise and admiration for Suess’s work which, in Volume 1, is an attempt to describe the available facts about the surface of the Earth and includes one of the earliest syntheses of the world’s orogenic belts, depressions,

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Fig. 9.3. The coral Montlivaltia culullus from the Jurassic rocks of the Cutch (Gregory 1899a).

plateaux, etc as exploration revealed the topography of the Earth (Fig. 9.6). But in Gregory’s (1898d ) review of Suess’s Volume I, he seized on the fact that Suess had showed that the constancy of sea level, which was one of Lyell’s uniformitarian principles, whereby any change of the level of the sea on the land is ascribed to movement of the land, not the sea, was wrong. Both land and sea can vary in elevation; a most important deduction, but one that Gregory almost wrote the whole review around, mainly because this interested Gregory. He did make some reference to Suess’s sketch of the development of the existing continents, which was another of Gregory’s long held concerns. The significance of the existence of general sea level changes, combined with more local uplift or depression, was that these variations could help to explain the existence of former land or sea connections. Such connections would explain the faunal and floral fossil evidence, while maintaining the approximate permanence of the present

positions and distribution of the continents. The whole concept was clearly of great importance. Gregory (1899b) developed his thoughts on the arrangement of the land and water on the Earth in a paper read to the RGS on 23 January 1899. In this he showed his broadening speculative horizons about the Earth, and the influence of his reading of Suess’s book. The three points about the distribution of the oceans and continents were again emphasized. Although Gregory recognized Marcel Alexandre Bertrand (1847 –1907)’s identification of the (Armorican) trend across France as matching that in Newfoundland, he explained it by subsidence of the intervening North Atlantic (hence the shallow northernmost Atlantic), not by movement apart of the two continents. Gregory’s (1899b) paper was an elaborate attempt to develop, justify and propound Lothian Green’s Tetrahedral Theory of the Earth, based on the fact that a tetrahedron has the smallest volume for a given surface area of any

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Fig. 9.4. Four Jurassic coral species from the Jurassic rocks of the Cutch (Gregory 1899a).

regular geometrical body with approximate equal axes. Both proposed that as the spherical envelope of the Earth contracted under cooling, a tetrahedral shape would develop, the causative mechanism being the shrinking of the Earth as it cooled. Gregory argued that the degree of flattening of the faces of the Earth to give the tetrahedron would be so slight as to be un-noticeable compared with a sphere. In the discussion after the reading of the paper, everyone was circumspect and unwilling to commit themselves to supporting the theory. In an attempt to stimulate discussion, the RGS President called on the Geological Society President, William Whittaker (1836 –1925), to give his opinion, but Whittaker replied ‘I came to listen, not to speak . . . It is uncomfortable to think that instead of being on a comfortable globe, as we had imagined, one is placed on a tetrahedron’ (Gregory 1899b, p. 250). It was evident

that much of the audience was unconvinced about the theory. Gregory had not so much stepped outside his usual careful gathering of a mass of information as making a deduction that the audience instinctively felt was speculative, even if the geographical facts were correct. He was emulating Suess whose broad generalizations had so impressed Gregory. However, the cool reception did not cause Gregory to abandon the theory he had argued for. Indeed, as his long-time friend Percy George Hamnall Boswell (1886 –1960) commented in his 1936 obituary notice of Gregory, ‘he never lost sight of its implication of the general permanence of the oceans and continents, and from time to time he reviewed the evidence of the present distribution of groups of reptiles, insects, etc, in its relation to suppositional land-bridges in the past.’ Later it came to determine his view of continental drift. Such was Gregory’s enthusiasm, and

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Fig. 9.5. Some of the graph plots (figures as numbered by Gregory) showing the variations in the Indian Montlivaltia cornutiformis which overlapped with various Montlivaltica European species (denoted by differing letters) showing the difficulties of defining the Indian species. Figure 5. Actual height v. diameter; Figure 6. Height v. mean diameter; Figure 7. Relative frequency of occurrence of the same mean diameter in M. cornutiformis and in comparable European corals; Figure 8. Showing continuity in variation of the mean diameter; Figure 9. Variations in ellipticity; variation of mean from extreme diameter. All from Gregory (1899a).

presumably that of some Americans, for this theory that the RGS paper, complete with the discussion, was reprinted in its entirety in the Smithsonian Report for 1898, and then again in 1901 in The American Geologist (Volume 27). Hugh Rowland Mill (1861 –1950) asked him to contribute a summary of his theory as Chapter 4 (Gregory 1899c) in International Geography together with an account of Eastern Equatorial Africa (Gregory 1899d) which formed Chapter 50 in Mill (1899). In 1908 Gregory returned to review new evidence that supported his theory (Gregory 1908) when confirmation of Antarctica as a continent showed it was antipodal to the Arctic Ocean, just as his theory required. However, by this time Sollas (1903) had entered the discussion with a rival paper arguing that the Earth was pear-shaped with its stalk in the raised plateau of Africa and its flattened crown beneath the Pacific Ocean. Although there were several problems attached to Gregory’s espousal of the Tetrahedral Theory, a crucial one for Gregory’s

own views was that the Tetrahedral Theory implied permanence of the oceans and continents in their present positions, which was directly contradictory to his Barbados- and West Indianderived theory of the impermanence of the oceans. However, this matter did not come to a head, until the validity of Alfred Wegener (1880 – 1930)’s theory of continental drift was debated in the 1920s (see Chapter 20). Gregory was obviously aware of the paradox and the general lack of support for the Tetrahedral Theory so why did he continue to support it? The most likely reason was that no other theory explained both the shapes of the oceans and continents and their antipodal arrangement. Moreover, no conclusive disproof of the theory had been made, and combining it with Suess’s views seemed possible if the present oceans and continents were regarded as generally permanent but with temporary episodes of emergence and submergence. Gregory was not an easy man to argue with. He was not at all ill-tempered, but he seems to have had a slightly tentative and

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samples obtained (Globigerina ooze at 3356 m) but more importantly, the cruise was designed to test Professor Alexander Agassiz (1835 –1910)’s assertion that there was no life in the oceans between the uppermost 500 fathoms (914 m) and the lowest 100 fathoms (184 m). An ingenious deep sea tow net which could be closed at different depths was used and a mass of phosphorescent pelagic organisms, glowing in the dark when the nets were emptied, showed an abundance of life. As previous deep-sea collections off the British Isles had been made in summer, this winter collecting was especially valuable. Whether Gregory’s expertise was required in studying the organisms found is not clear (unusually for Gregory, no publication on the expedition by him has been found), nor is the exact reason for his participation, other than the general purposes mentioned above. Speculatively, that is, not supported by any documentary evidence, another reason might have been to gain experience in a new field, deep-sea collecting, which would be needed were he appointed Scientific Director of the Antarctic expedition (see below). This was an important part of the research programme, as had been made clear, at least nine months earlier in February 1898, at a meeting at the Royal Society (Nature, 57, pp. 420 –427).

Visit to the Caribbean Islands, March – May 1899

Fig. 9.6. Professor Eduard Suess of Vienna, Gregory’s hero. (Geological Magazine, Decade V, X, 1913.)

diffident way in conversation (but not lecturing) of suggesting something which could mislead those not familiar with him into thinking he was unsure about the matter, only to find, if they differed with him, that he was much more certain and full of the relevant evidence than he had given the impression. As John Smith Flett (1889 –1947) wrote in his 1932 obituary of Gregory ‘My experience of a very long friendship with Gregory was that it was very unwise to assume that you knew more of any subject than Gregory did: it was dangerous to differ from him in opinion, as in the quietest possible manner he would produce some devastating facts, well attested but not widely known, that would shatter premature hypotheses.’ Gregory had a very impressive memory for relevant facts culled from his very wide reading and correspondence (Boswell 1936). His interest in the oceans, the nature of their floors and the possible correlation between water depth and distinctive faunas characteristic of particular water depths, prompted him to take part in a little-known brief cruise in the North Atlantic under the NHM’s Mr George Robert Milne Murray (1858 – 1911) FRS in November 1898 (The Times, 2 December 1898). Murray and his NHM colleagues, Mr Lazarus Fletcher (1854 –1921) FRS, mineralogist, Mr Vernon Herbert Blackman (1872 –1967) and Dr J. W. Gregory, all experts in different fields, accompanied by three other scientists and using an ocean-going tug, Oceania, steamed due west from Dingle Bay in SW Ireland. Gregory had invited Rudyard Kipling to join the cruise for experience but Kipling declined on the grounds that he ‘couldn’t get away’ although his comment on a ‘merry swell . . . in November’ and that ‘the first few days . . . will be spent more in bringing up samples than in lowering trawls’ suggest there were also other considerations (letter of 30 October 1898). Previous deep-sea research had ignored this area, there being no dredgings below 1829 m (1000 fathoms) between Ushant (near Brest, in France) and Donegal. Soundings were taken, bottom

From March to May 1899, Gregory, accompanied by his wife, and using in part his annual vacation allowance, visited the West Indies, departing from Southampton on the Royal Mail Line’s steamer Atrato on 22 March for St Thomas in the West Indies (passenger archives). A brief unpublished report in the NHM archives (DF 120/6), from which the following summary is derived, states the visit was to study geological questions regarding the age and structure of the Caribbean islands, especially to determine the last date at which they might have been connected to each other or to the mainland, which had a direct bearing on the origins of the faunas and floras of the islands and their dates of introduction. He made brief geological studies of Antigua, which seems to have been his main base, Barbuda, Anguilla, St Kitts and Dominica and he made extensive palaeontological, botanical and zoological collections, especially in Antigua. Geologically at that time, Antigua was thought to have shallowwater or terrestrial deposits from the Lower Tertiary to the Present while Barbados, Cuba and Haiti were considered to have sunk to abyssal depths. But mapping of the critical area in Antigua and collecting 520 geological specimens removed this apparent contradiction. ‘No direct traces of pre-Cainozoic events were found in the structure of the island.’ On St Kitts and Dominica, no Miocene limestones were found (on which the pre-Miocene age of the islands was based), only Pleistocene limestones. He traversed Dominica, finding the central ridges to be trachytic volcanoes in the last stages of decay, with basic intrusions. Palaeontologically, Gregory collected the bones and teeth of the giant rodent Amblyrhiza (‘probably larger than a brown bear’) on Anguilla; from Barbuda a new extinct mammal, which Dr Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major (1843 –1923) identified as allied to the South American Aryzomys; and many invertebrate fossils, including over 1500 specimens of Pleistocene and Miocene fossil terrestrial mollusca, over 900 of which came from Anguilla limestones. A long drought on Anguilla hampered botanical collecting but he collected what he could, together with algal tubes from hot streams around the Boiling Lake etc. on Dominica. Zoologically, he obtained 50 lepidoptera from Anguilla, land shells, lizards and some 5000 marine mollusca, three cases of corals, echinoderms, sponges, hydroids, holothurians and especially variations in Madrepora which bore on the date of closure of Panama. These led him to reject G. L. Brook’s (1893) correlation of the Indo-Pacific and West Indian types. He did this both in his report and subsequently in a paper read to the Zoological Society, which declined to publish it, in June 1899

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(i.e. only a few weeks after his return to London; probably therefore at least in part written in the West Indies). It subsequently appeared elsewhere (Gregory 1900a) after J. E. Duerden of Jamaica had written to Gregory, stating he too had been unable to find any intermediate Madrepora specimens between cervicornis and palmate. The rejection of the Indo-Pacific and West Indian Madrepora correlation in present-day corals had implications for the date of closure of Panama. Gregory was not used to his papers being rejected and this may have contributed to his resignation from the Zoological Society in 1902. During this Caribbean venture, his son records that he chartered a small sloop (a single-masted sailing ship) to get from Antigua to Barbuda and Anguilla, as there was no regular boat service (Gregory 1977). The master and mate were excellent boatmen but navigated entirely by ‘rule of thumb’ without even a compass (or presumably a map). The course was northwards from Antigua to Barbuda, where a day was spent seeing the island, collecting and sheltering during the mid-day heat in a cool old stone shooting lodge. In the evening a start was made for Anguilla which lies NW of Barbuda. However, it transpired that the captain only knew the route to Anguilla from Antigua so they retraced the whole journey back to Antigua until, during the night, the lights of St John’s in Antigua were seen and the boat was turned round and the journey to Anguilla started. The ship was so small that its minature deck was only just wide enough to take a deck chair across it. Gregory normally wrote while travelling, being singularly indifferent to his surroundings whether in a crowded train or bus, although he loathed whistling and was irritated by the idle tapping of a foot on the floor. A chair and a steady table for writing and ‘what more could anyone want?’ he used to say. Part of the secret of his voluminous publication activity was the ability to use every possible moment writing. When the sun rose there was a very small sloop among very large waves and no prospect of port. Eventually Gregory’s chair was swept from under him by an extra large wave and he only narrowly escaped being washed overboard; his son did not record whether any writing was lost. Towards evening, Anguilla came into view, but the wind failed and countless tacks were necessary; land was only reached well after dark. The passengers landed sun-scorched, damp and excessively hungry. However, they had been enchanted by the colour and lighting effects, both day and night, and from viewing the sea and its waves at sea level rather than looking down from the high deck of an ocean-going steamer (C. J. Gregory 1977). Gregory was immune to sea sickness and became a keen yachtsman himself later, while in Glasgow, but his wife was a very poor sailor (C. J. Gregory mss). Her opinions of the Barbuda voyage may not have been so enthusiastic. Overall, a mass of material was collected for the NHM, Gregory obtained valuable experience of a region that had been of particular interest to him for many reasons, also for the first time he had the opportunity to examine as closely as one could at that time, tropical coral reefs. The ‘vacation’ was a success. No doubt Audrey made many watercolour sketches, as she usually did (SPRI Letters between Audrey & her mother).

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references in Gregory 1899e) extension of Walter Percy Sladen (1849 –1900)’s (1889) classification, with consequent revisions to the Asteroidea Orders of Phaerozonia and Cryptozonia. The highlight of the account was that Gregory obtained a loan of the type specimen of Asterias antiqua from Copenhagen, through the good offices of his colleague Bather and Professor Lindstro¨m, together with a magnificent drawing of it which Gregory reproduced (Fig. 9.7). The specimen, which came from the Silurian of Gotland, Sweden, was renamed by Gregory as Lindstromaster antiqua ‘To illustrate the affinities of Lindstromaster and to simplify its description it will be advisable to include diagnoses of the Palaeasteridae and Palaeasterinidae. The present opportunity is also taken for the description of two new species and the institution of three other genera’ (Gregory 1899e); so the account made a significant contribution to the study of Palaeozoic starfishes. Another collection, this time of 70 specimens of fossil corals, was brought to Gregory for identification in late 1898 or early 1899 by Charles William Andrews (1866 – 1924) of the NHM, who had spent 10 months in 189728 exploring Christmas Island

Numerous 1899 publications: Palaeozoic starfishes, corals, echinoids and bryozoa and Africa In August 1899, Gregory published a paper on Palaeozoic starfishes which he had evidently (Gregory 1899e, p. 343) largely written at least three years earlier when ‘I rashly undertook to prepare a synopsis of the known Asteroidea, which had to be completed by September 1896’ that is, extremely shortly after his return from Spitzbergen at the end of August 1896. The 1899e account starts with ‘The classification of the Palaeozoic starfishes has long been in chaos.’ Gregory had tried to bring some order into this by extending still further Benno Stu¨rtz’s (1890 & 1893;

Fig. 9.7. The starfish Lindstromaster antiqua, drawn by Georg Liljevall of Stockholm. From Gregory (1899e) with acknowledgements to the Geological Magazine, Dec. IV, 6, 340.

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(in the Indian Ocean, south of Indonesia; Long 1058340 E, Lat 108300 S) and was writing a monograph on the island’s topography, geology, zoology, botany and palaeontology. Gregory had been invited to accompany Andrews and had declined, but he was interested in the geology of the island and discussed the discoveries with Andrews (Audrey’s letter of 3 February 1902 to her mother). Andrews wished to date the limestones as previous visitors had not obtained any fossils from the island. The limestones constituted much of the island and a preliminary account was given by Andrews (1899). Gregory (1900b ) had difficulty identifying some of the fossils as they were mainly Astraens, which had not yet been classified in detail. In addition, although previous work had been reported on Miocene corals from Java and the modern Malaysian coral fauna was fairly well known, little was known about corals from the region with ages between the Miocene and the present. Nevertheless Gregory was able to identify 19 species, 8 of which were new; although most of the specimens could only be dated as between Miocene and the present and they all fell into the Indo-Pacific province. The first proofs came in July 1899, the final set arrived in November (extant proofs) and Henry Woodward only wrote the preface in February 1900, so the account appeared in early 1900 (Andrews 1900). Christmas Island was a valuable phosphate resource and an unpredicted spin-off from this study was drawn on much later by Gregory (1917) when he was writing about the sources of phosphate. In September 1899 the second set of fossils from the Egyptian Geological Survey came to Gregory (as already described), and he wrote a short preliminary unpublished account for the Survey of the horizons identified. However, he could not get the sectioning done quickly enough or find time to complete the examination before other priorities pressed in on his limited time. In particular, during October 1899 he redoubled his efforts to complete the Catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa, which attempted to include every recorded Cretaceous species, and was next in line after the Jurassic catalogue (Gregory 1896a). Gregory had started bryozoan studies on the British Palaeogene Bryozoa (Gregory 1893a), progressed to the Jurassic types in the first NHM catalogue, because, as explained in the author’s preface to that catalogue (Gregory 1896a), the two orders of Bryozoa that prevailed in the Palaeozoic became extinct or greatly reduced in importance, and it was among the Jurassic types that the ancestors of the existing Bryozoa were to be found. Also, the Jurassic types needed to be worked out before attempting the more complex Cretaceous forms. However, the Cretaceous bryozoa proved to be much more numerous than had been realized in planning the work, and in addition, many new species were being added to the NHM collections, so that the Cretaceous catalogue had to be split into two volumes. The first volume alone was immense, 457 pages. This Gregory (1899f ) completed with his author’s preface on 24 October 1899, the plates being drawn by Miss Gertrude M. Woodward (1861 – post1928) and Miss Drake, and the final words, the Keeper’s preface, were written on 20 November 1899 by Henry Woodward. Volume 1 contains the Tubulata, Cancellata and Dactylethrata. Although Gregory had completed much of Volume 2 before leaving the NHM, it was nearly 10 years before it appeared in the last part of 1909. It included the remainder of the Cyclostomata, the few Trepostomata and the single known extinct species of Phylactolaemata (Gregory 1909). This left the Cheilostomata to fill, after a further period of 12–13 years, two volumes (3 & 4) of the Cribrimorphs, both written by Gregory’s successor at the NHM, Dr William Dixon Lang (1878 –1966) (1921, 1922). Gregory’s eventual contribution to the Bryozoa catalogues was well over 1000 pages and when his Palaeogene (Gregory 1893a) work is included, about 1150 published pages were involved. In comparison, a short account of three new coral species has the appearance of being a ‘clearing-up’ operation and was probably only written towards the end of 1899. Gregory (1899g) described

Cladophyllia Burleyae, sp. n. from the Cretaceous Atherfield Clay of the Isle of Wight (which specimen Gregory had been lent for several years) Prionastraea vaughani, sp.n from the Eocene of Huntsville, Alabama, and Stylina collinsi, sp. n. from the Neocomian of La Trinidad, Guadalcazar, Mexico. Another short account which appeared in December 1899 was Gregory’s (1899h) brief description of rocks, collected by Dr Henry Ogg Forbes (1851 –1932) and Mr O. Grant, from the island of Socotra and its smaller neighbour, Abd-el-Kurl, both of which lie near the Horn of Africa, NE of the Somali Republic at the junction of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Socotra had been visited and reported on by several geologists (including T. G. Bonney), who had shown that the island was mainly ‘Archaean Gneiss’, unconformably overlain by Cenomanian, Eocene and perhaps Miocene limestones, plus some ‘comparatively recent’ volcanic rocks, mainly dykes of basalt and rhyolite with some trachyte. Presumably it was from the last rock that the type specimen of the amphibole riebeckite was collected by Emil Riebeck (1853 –1885) in 1880 (Sauer 1888). Gregory identified granitoid gneiss, granite, amphibolite and gneiss typical of the mainland Archaean rocks, so he correlated the basement with the East African Nyika Series and suggested Socotra was an outlier of the Somali Plateau, all grist to add to his knowledge of Somaliland and East Africa. He could not add to the dating of the limestones but described quartz felsite dykes, in one of which he thought the quartz was derived from original tridymite, a quite difficult identification, which suggests he was expert at microscopic mineral identification. He also described fluxionbanded rhyolite lava and suggested that the trachyte and felsite more resembled ‘those of the Aden Volcanic Series [he had looked at thin sections of these from the NHM] than those of the East African Volcanic group’. The Abd-el-Kurl rocks were largely Archaean gneisses, schists and amphibolites overlain by Cretaceous limestone with some of the basement rocks matching those found in the Ulu Mountains of British East Africa (Gregory 1899h).

Anthropology Almost certainly written before October 1899, when ‘clearing-up’ pressure developed, was Gregory’s contribution to the two volume account of ‘Living Races of Mankind: a Popular Illustrated Account of the Customs, Habits, Pursuits, Feasts and Ceremonies of the Races of Mankind throughout the World’ by Hutchinson et al. (1900), but ‘assisted by eminent specialists’. This included 648 photographs of humans and groups of humans from most parts of the world and was Gregory’s first major venture into the field of anthropology, since his initial start in The Great Rift Valley (Gregory 1896b). Gregory wrote the six chapters (XII to XVII) dealing with the African races, which since his experience of Africans was limited to a few in some of the eastern parts of the continent, showed how much of the subject he had absorbed from reading, a feature already evident in his Rift Valley book. These six chapters are entitled ‘Africa: Introductory – the Pygmy or Negrillo Races; the People of Madagascar’; ‘The Negro in general – the Bantu Negros’; ‘The Bantu of Eastern and Western Africa’; ‘The Equatorial and Nilotic Negros’; ‘The Soudanese and Guinea Negros, and the Abyssinian and Ethiopic Groups’; ‘The Hamitic and Semitic Races of North Africa’ and totalled 142 pages. Clearly, as Gregory acknowledged, most of the information had been culled from books written by experts, with the photographs from the same sources or, more often, contributed by donors, as none appear to have been taken by Gregory himself. As a popular book, almost no references are given. In general, the physical characteristics such as height of each race are described, then their customs, dwellings, dress,

1896–9: FRUSTRATIONS, FURTHER TRAVEL AND PUBLICATIONS

foods, weapons, methods of hunting and farming, industries if any, and some comments, heavily influenced by European values, on their natures and religions. There is almost no interpolation by Gregory of observations made personally or of incidents involving him, as nearly all the material is obtained from existing publications. The introduction to the book described it as being written primarily for ‘Englishmen and Englishwomen’ to acquaint them with the nature of the natives around the world. It was prompted by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, a reflection of the expansion of the British Empire which had brought Britons in contact with so many different races, most of which had been completely unknown to the British public. ‘If we are to maintain a great Imperial Policy and a lasting supremacy in trade, it must be through a better understanding of the needs and characteristics of the various peoples with whom we are brought in contact’. Clearly, in addition to anthropology, this was part of Gregory’s interest in, and support for, the British Empire, but no doubt earning an author’s fee was important to him.

References Andrews, C. W. 1899. A description of Christmas Island (Indian Ocean). Geographical Journal, 13, 20 –24. Andrews, C. W. 1900. A Monograph of Christmas Island (Indian Ocean). British Museum Publications, London. Bather, F. A. 1897. Scolocystis, Echinocystis, and Lysocystis: Discocystis, Echinodiscus and Agelacrinidae. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 4, 381– 382. Bernard, H. M. 1895. Supplementary notes on the systematic position of the Trilobites. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 51, 352– 360. Boswell, P. G. H. 1936. John Walter Gregory—1864– 1932. Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, 1, 53 –59. Branagan, D. F. 2005. John Walter Gregory (1864– 1932) Geologist and explorer. In: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 23, 677– 678. Brooks, G. L. 1893. The Genus Madrepora. Catalogues of Madrepora, British Museun, Natural History, 1, 23 –30. Darwin, C. R. 1842. Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. Smith, Elder, London. Flett, J. S. 1932. Prof. J. W. Gregory (Obituary Notice). Nature, 129, 930– 931. Green, W. L. 1875. Vestiges of the Molten Globe. Edward Stanford, London. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: a sketch. Privately printed. Based on an earlier account by his mother, Audrey Gregory, about her husband, J. W. Gregory. Gregory, J. W. 1891. The Maltese fossil Echinoidea, and their evidence on the correlation of the Maltese rocks. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 36, 585–640. Gregory, J. W. 1892. The exploration of coral reefs by boring. Natural Science, 1, 50 –52. Gregory, J. W. 1893. The Jurassic Fauna of Cutch. The Echinoidea of Cutch. Palaeontologica Indica, Series IX, 2, Part 1. Gregory, J. W. 1893a. The British Palaeogene Bryozoa. Transactions of the Zoological Society of London, 13, 216– 279. Gregory, J. W. 1896. On the classification of the Palaeozoic Echinoderms of the Group Ophiuroidea. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for 1896. 1028–1044. Gregory, J. W. 1896a. The Jurassic Bryozoa. Catalogues of Fossils in the British Museum (Natural History). Gregory, J. W. 1896b. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London. Reprinted in 1968 The Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1897. On the affinities of the Echinothuridae and on Pedinothuria and Helkodiadema, two new genera of Echinoidea. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 53, 112– 122.

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Gregory, J. W. 1897a. On Echinocystis and Palœodiscus – two Silurian genera of Echinoidea. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 53, 123– 134. Gregory, J. W. 1897b. Trespassers beware!. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 4, 427. Gregory, J. W. 1897c. On the age of the Morte Slate fossils. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 4, 59 –62. Gregory, J. W. 1898. A collection of Egyptian fossil echinoidea. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 5, 149– 161. Gregory, J. W. 1898a. A collection of Egyptian fossil Madreporaria. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 5, 241–251. Gregory, J. W. 1898b. Millestroma: a Cretaceous milleporoid coral from Egypt. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 5, 337–342. Gregory, J. W. 1898c. Theories on the distribution of the Oceans and Continents. Abstracts of Section E, Report of the 68th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. (Bristol). pp. 938– 939. Gregory, J. W. 1898d. Suess’s’theories of geographical evolution. Natural Science, 12, 117–122. Gregory, J. W. 1899. Reports on fossil echinoidea and corals. In: R. T. Gu¨nther (1899). Journal of the Linnean Society of London (Zoology), 27, 419– 424; 424– 430. Gregory, J. W. 1899a. The Jurassic Fauna of Cutch; the corals of Cutch. Palaeontologica Indica, Series IX, Vol. 2, Part 2. Gregory, J. W. 1899b. The plan of the Earth and its causes. The Geographical Journal, 13, 225–251. Gregory, J. W. 1899c. The Plan of the Earth. In: Mill, H. R. (ed.), International Geography, Chapter 4, 36– 45. Gregory, J. W. 1899d. Eastern Equatorial Africa. In: Mill, H. R. (ed.), International Geography, Chapter 50, 930– 940. Gregory, J. W. 1899e. On Lindstromaster and the classification of the Palaeasterids. Geological Magazine, December IV, 6, 340– 354. Gregory, J. W. 1899f. The Cretaceous Bryozoa, Volume 1. Catalogues of the Fossils in the Department of Geology British Museum (NH). Gregory, J. W. 1899g. New species of Cladophyllia, Prionastraea and Stylina. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 7, 4, 457– 461. Gregory, J. W. 1899h. A note on the geology of Socotra and Abd-el-Kurl. Geological Magazine, December IV, 6, 529– 532. Gregory, J. W. 1900. Class II Stelleroidea (Chapter 14) & Class III Echinoidea (Chapter 15). In: Lankester, E. R. (ed.) A Treatise on Zoology, Part III The Echinoderma by F. A. Bather, J. W. Gregory & E. S. Goodrich. A & C Black, London. Gregory, J. W. 1900a. On the West-Indian Species of Madrepora. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 7, 6, 20 –31. Gregory, J. W. 1900b. The fossil corals of Christmas Island. In: Andrews, C. W. (1900) 206– 225. Gregory, J. W. 1906. On a collection of fossil corals from Eastern Egypt, Abu Roash, and Sinai. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 3, 50 –58; 110– 118. Gregory, J. W. 1906a. Fossil echinoidea from Sinai and Egypt. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 3, 216– 227; 246– 256. Gregory, J. W. 1908. Recent literature on the Plan of the Earth. The Geographical Journal, 32, 151–156. Gregory, J. W. 1909. The Cretaceous Bryozoa, Volume 2. Catalogues of the Fossils in the Department of Geology British Museum (NH). Gregory, J. W. 1913. The Nature and Origin of Fiords. John Murray, London. Gregory, J. W. 1917. The geology of phosphates and their bearing on the conservation of mineral resources. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 16, 116– 163. Gu¨nther, R. T. 1899. Contributions to the Natural History of Lake Urmi, N. W. Persia and its neighbourhood. Journal of the Linnean Society, Zoology, 27, 346– 373. Hutchinson, H. N., Gregory, J. W. & Lydekker, R. 1900. Living Races of Mankind: A Popular Illustrated Account of the Customs, Habits, Pursuits, Feasts and Ceremonies of the Races of Mankind Throughout the World, Vols. 1 & 2. Hutchinson & Co, London.

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Lang, W. D. 1921. The Cretaceous Bryozoa: the Cribrimorphs, Volume 3, Part 1, Catalogues of the Fossils in the Department of Geology British Museum (NH). Lang, W. D. 1922. The Cretaceous Bryozoa: the Cribrimorphs, Volume 4, Part 2, Catalogues of the Fossils in the Department of Geology British Museum (NH). Lang, W. D. 1934. Francis Arthur Bather 1863–1934. Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 1932– 5, 1, 303– 314. Mill, H. R. (ed.) 1899. International Geography. Newnes, London.

Sauer, A. 1888. Ueber Riebeckit, ein neues Glied der Hornblendegruppe. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Geologischen Gesellschaft, 40, 138– 146. Sladen, W. P. 1889. Report on Asteroidea collected by ‘Challenger’. Reports of the Challenger Expedition, Zoology, 30, xxviii–xxxiv. Sollas, W. J. 1903. The figure of the Earth. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 59, 180– 187. Vincent, E. A. 1994. Geology and Mineralogy at Oxford 1860–1986. Published by the author, Oxford.

Chapter 10 The move to Melbourne University

According to E. Lim (1975), in a letter dated 15 August 1899, John Madden (1844 – 1918), Chancellor of the University of Melbourne wrote to the Agent General (in London) for the Colony of Victoria, asking him to invite applications for a new Chair in Geology and Mineralogy. This was necessitated by both the death of the previous holder of the Chair of Natural History (from 1854 –1899), Professor Sir Frederick McCoy (1817 –1899), and the creation of separate Chairs of both Chemistry and Biology, subjects that had previously been included in Natural History (Selleck 2003). This left geology teaching and research, including palaeontology, in abeyance. The emphasis was to be on ‘mineralogy so that the new Department may be brought into line with any future extensions of Mining and Engineering.’ The advertisement was placed in Nature on 28 September and applications had to be received in London by 20 October 1899. The London appointing committee consisted of four FRS’s: A. Geikie, Director General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland, J. W. Judd, Dean of the Royal College of Science, John Edward Marr (1857 –1933) Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge, and Charles Lapworth (1842– 1920), Professor of Geology at Birmingham. Gregory, who had (on 3 October 1899) asked for, and received from, Geikie a fine testimonial for the post, wrote to Geikie on 5 October stating that given that Geikie would be on the appointing committee in London, he would not submit the testimonial (Edinburgh University, Geikie Archives). The following day, 6 October he wrote to Lapworth asking if he would give him a testimonial, perhaps in place of Geikie’s, presumably because he did not realize Lapworth was also on the committee (Lapworth archives, H22). The committee considered ‘the claims of Dr Gregory are so far above those of any of the other candidates as to place him entirely apart. His distinguished academic career, and his subsequent wide and varied experience in many parts of the world, make him out as exceptionally qualified for a Professorial Chair in a University. His original researches have shown him to be a thoroughly equipped Geologist . . .’ Gregory had the highest testimonials including one from Clements Robert Markham (1830 –1916), President of the RGS, dated 14 October 1899, which stated that [Gregory was an] ‘excellent field geologist, gifted with a remarkable facility of generalization and is a valuable instructor, both as regards practical work and the speculative sides of his course . . . [and] . . . also possesses remarkable powers of exposition.’ Viewed dispassionately in view of Melbourne’s stated aims, the choice of a palaeontologist who had never published or worked on anything to do with mining, prospecting or engineering geology, might seem strange, and even his mineralogical and petrological publications were somewhat marginal compared with his main published output. Clearly, the committee knew enough of Gregory, his profoundly stimulating discourse, his multifarious interests and achievements and the tenacity of purpose that hid behind his apparent diffidence of manner, to paraphrase Boswell (1936), to know he was the right man. By 23 October 1899, only three days after the closing date for applications for the Melbourne post, the NHM Geology Keeper, Henry Woodward, was hastily trying to get approval to promote Gregory from being a Second Class Assistant to a First Class Assistant, listing his many achievements, of which only the following are reproduced: published works in excess of 80, being Examiner for the Geology Honours degree at Oxford 1897–8, an examiner in African physiography (Univ. of London), Instructor in Geology, RGS, and his studies of European geology in his

vacations, especially the Alps, plus his voluntary work at Toynbee Hall, including acting as Chairman for the last four years. ‘If promoted at once, it is reasonable to hope that his attachment to England might cause him to remain in the Museum. The loss of such an assistant would be severely felt by all connected with science in London’ (NHM archives, DF 106/29). This was emphasized the very next day (24 October 1899) when Gregory completed his author’s prefix and thus finished his massive 457page Volume 1 of the Catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa (Gregory 1899). But by 14 December 1899, Woodward had Gregory’s formal resignation to be effective from 15 January 1900 (NHM archives, DF 106/29) as Gregory had accepted the offer of the Chair, as confirmed to Gregory on 11 December, at the advertised salary of £1000 a year (Lim 1975). This was not only a considerable increase from the £242 a year he was earning at the NHM, but was a princely sum when even the Director-General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland was on a salary of £800 a year (Oldroyd & McKenna 2005). Presumably Melbourne University knew that only a substantial salary would induce a really good man to leave the UK for a Chair in Melbourne. And so Woodward wrote to the NHM Trustees on 2 January 1900, deploring the loss of Gregory whose ‘knowledge of the fossil invertebrate rendered him of very great service to the Musuem, whilst his extensive acquaintance with the literature of geology and palaeontology, both British and Foreign, proved of the greatest value’ (NHM archives DF 106/29). Of course the status then attached to being a University Professor when there were only a few hundred in the whole of the UK, compared with the thousands there are today, was very considerable, and most of the professors at that time lacked doctorates as the PhD was still a rarity, so that in an age that gave great respect to class and hierarchy, Gregory had truly moved up much more than such a promotion today would engender. Melbourne University is the oldest in Australia, being founded in 1853 when there were only just over 20 universities in existence. Among the congratulations on his new appointment was a letter from Geikie which Gregory answered from the ‘Natural History Museum’ on 16 December 1899 (Fig. 10.1). This contains significant insight into Gregory’s interests. After thanking Sir Archibald, Gregory continued ‘Australia certainly offers a wide & attractive field of geological work. And I shall there have the advantages of greater independence. The British Museum definition of geology is singularly narrow & palaeontology is not my favourite branch of geology’ (Edinburgh University Geikie Archives). So after thousands of pages of palaeontological documentation in scores of papers and several monumental memoirs or catalogues, Gregory was not going to Australia to continue concentrating on palaeontology as a coral, echinoid and bryozoan expert. He had wider interests which of course he had shown in the geological uses of his vacations and in the wide variety of non-NHM-directed geology that he had already published. Later he would mention that geomorphology, or the relation of geology to topography, was the cause of his initial attraction to geology, and there is no doubt that this remained a major, perhaps his favourite, interest throughout his scientific life (Gregory 1906). Part of his success in Australia was due to his wide interests and adaptability to what was needed there as well as his personality. Gregory also received a letter of congratulations from Lapworth, to which he replied on 14 December 1899 (Fig. 10.2). He wrote, ‘It

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 61–63. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.10

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Fig. 10.2. Professor Charles Lapworth, FRS. Portrait courtesy of the University of Birmingham, Lapworth Archives and J. Clatworthy, Curator.

Fig. 10.1. Sir Archibald Geikie FRS, a strong champion of Gregory (with acknowledgements to the Geological Magazine, Decade V, 4).

seems to be a fine field for work and the salary will enable me to drop the literary work which has eaten up much of my spare time during the past four years’ (Birmingham University Lapworth Museum archives, D16). So the prime motivation behind at least some of the articles and books that were outside the strictly geological and palaeontological publications, was to supplement his meagre salary. Many years later he said to his son, ‘It is a great thing to be able to do what you want in life’ (Gregory 1977). Gregory quickly set out to be in Melbourne for the new academic year that started in late February. He is thought to have left on the RMS P & O Britannia on 14 January 1900 arriving in Adelaide just over five weeks later, the fastest possible, on 20 February (Melbourne The Argus), from where he immediately took the express train to Melbourne. He had seriously considered travelling via the United States in order to see the most up-to-date geological laboratories, especially in Chicago, as he knew that it was essential that the new Geological Department in Melbourne had a new building, but the need to be there as soon as possible prevailed (NHM archives DF404/58). Wisely with such a distant venture in front of him, Gregory made a will before leaving. Curiously, Gregory’s will which left

everything to his wife, appointing his mother-in-law, Edith Elizabeth Chaplin and his brother-in-law, Henry Jarries Nicholson, a solicitor, as executors, and his sisters as guardians to Ursula and any other children, in the event of Audrey’s early death, was allegedly signed on 15 January 1900, suggesting it was hurriedly completed at the last moment whenever that was. He never revised it subsequently. The house in Aubrey Road was given up and Audrey and Ursula moved to Bassetts to be with Audrey’s parents because Audrey was pregnant. The loss of the previous baby in 1898 led to her staying behind to have the best possible medical attention, rather than going out with her husband. In order to assure this, before the baby was born, Audrey went to stay with her elder sister, Ursula Chaplin, who was by then medically qualified and practising in Leeds, so Gregory’s son, Christopher John Gregory was born a Yorkshireman on 11 July 1900, but baptised in Woodham Walter Church, Essex (C. J. Gregory mss). In characteristic fashion Gregory packed in as much as possible before he went, in addition to the numerous duties and burdens connected with the proposed Antarctic expedition, described later. At least some of the papers which appeared in December 1899 (e.g. Gregory 1899a, b) were probably written in November 1899. The Royal Society received a paper (Gregory 1900) on 21 November (read on 7 December) about ‘Polytremacis and the ancestry of Helioporidae’ which sprang from his examination of

THE MOVE TO MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY

Polytremacis specimens which he had identified in the NHM collections while engaged in preparing a description of a new species of Heliopora from Somaliland. The blue coral Heliopora caerula (Pall) is, he wrote, one of the most isolated of living animals being the only known species of its genus and its ancestry was unknown. Unlike Helioporids, some Palaeozoic Heliolitid corals have definite septal structures and lack calicular theca so hitherto most experts had opposed the view that these extinct Heliolitids were allied to the Helioporids. Gregory’s discovery of Polytremacis species that were truly intermediate between the Heliolitidae and the Helioporidae suggested that the latter were descended from the former. On 6 December 1899 he read a paper to the GSL on ‘The geology and fossil corals and echinoids of Somaliland’ (Gregory 1900a) which was based on specimens collected by several different travellers, and from which he was able to define more precisely the extent of the ‘Archaean’ rocks, the age and sequence of the marine limestones of ?Cenomanian and early Cenozoic age, and to show that the opening of the Gulf of Aden must have been postEocene. About this time he also described (Gregory 1900b) a new species, Zeuglopleurus rowei, n. sp. to add to the new Zeuglopleurus genus he had first described (Gregory 1889). The new species was from the English Chalk and published in Arthur Walton Rowe (1859 –1926)’s (1900) important paper on the zones in the English Chalk, hence its name. However, although he completed the writing up, no doubt under enormous pressure, he was not able to fit in the reading of the longdelayed Parts II and III of ‘Contributions to the Geology of British East Africa,’ which were read in title to the GSL on 24 January just after he had sailed for Australia, with no discussion being recorded. Part II, dealing with ‘The Geology of Mount Kenya’ (Gregory 1900c) may have been prompted to be produced (seven years after the specimens were collected) by the imminent arrival of more detailed information collected by Mackinder, who climbed the summit in 1899, which might have made Gregory’s imperfect collection not worth recording. Also, Gregory probably wanted to finish his studies of the BEA material, which was of course NHM property, before he started new ventures in Australia. He may have also felt that his new position, with its greater emphasis on mineralogy and petrology, rather than palaeontology, would be bolstered by the description of the most unusual alkaline rocks collected from Mount Kenya, for which he coined a new name ‘kenytes’. The central peak seemed to consist of olivine nepheline syenites with anorthoclase, augite, aegirine, sodalite and deep brown ‘barkevicite’ amphibole which formed a plug-like central core of the mountain. Overlying these plutonic rocks were black glassy lavas with white anorthoclase phenocrysts and augite, aegirine, olivine, and apatite in a groundmass of feldspar microliths and pyroxenes which Gregory named kenyte. Phonolites, basalts and dolerite dykes and an extensive lava succession of phonolites followed by kenytes, and finally olivine basalts and a pyroclastic series, were described, and the extensive geological history, with illustrative diagrammatic cross-sections, summarized. This was the earliest detailed description of the igneous rocks of Mount Kenya and an early one of the alkaline rocks of BEA. Part III is quite short and described some rocks that had been given to him: nepheline syenite and camptonitic dykes intrusive into the Coast Series of BEA. He also identified Jurassic rocks, so that the Coast Series then included Upper Carboniferous, possible Triassic, preJurassic, Jurassic and Pleistocene successions (Gregory 1900d ). Among the uncompleted work when Gregory left the NHM was Volume 2 of the Catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa, in which his contribution was not to appear for about 10 years, and a partially written account of the second tranche of Egyptian Survey fossils, which he finally finished six years later (Gregory 1906a, b). This showed remarkable dedication considering these were without doubt NHM tasks. So ended over 12 very fruitful and hard working years at the NHM. At the age of nearly 36, Gregory became Professor of

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Geology and Mineralogy and remained a professor for the rest of his life (another 32 years). Throughout, he continued his long working hours and purposeful concentration on producing research, in the way he had perfected both before and during his time at the NHM. Amidst all these activities was one additional non-trivial task. From 1892 until 1900, he contributed annually to the Royal Society’s attempt to catalogue the entire world’s scientific literature, a severely summarized account of which Gregory gave in 1902. Already, science was being overwhelmed by the quantity of publication. Seventeen annual subject volumes were involved and typically the first part of the annual botany volume, running to 378 pages, listed 1922 papers in 239 journals. Gregory, presumably using the NHM, the Geological, and perhaps especially the Zoological, Society libraries, contributed to the cataloguing in Geology and Palaeontology. His resignation from the Zoological Society in 1902 was probably in part because of his change of research emphasis from palaeontology, in part perhaps because of the rejection of a paper noted above, but also because he ceased to need to use the convenient Sunday opening of the Zoological library to abstract for the Royal Society. His resignation from abstracting prompted his 1902 account of the project.

References Boswell, P. G. H. 1936. John Walter Gregory—1864– 1932. Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, 1, 53 – 59. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s Possession. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: a sketch. Privately printed. Gregory, J. W. 1889. On Zeuglopleurus, a new genus of the family Temnopleuridae from the Upper Cretaceous. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 3, 490– 500. Gregory, J. W. 1899. The Cretaceous Bryozoa, Volume 1. Catalogues of the Fossils in the Department of Geology British Museum (NH). Gregory, J. W. 1899a. New species of Cladophyllia, Prionastraea and Stylina. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 7, 4, 457– 461. Gregory, J. W. 1899b. A note on the geology of Socotra and Abd-el-Kurl. Geological Magazine, December IV, 6, 529– 532. Gregory, J. W. 1900. Polytremacis and the ancestry of the Helioporidae. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 66, 291–305. Gregory, J. W. 1900a. The geology and fossil corals and echinoids of Somaliland. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 56, 26– 45. Gregory, J. W. 1900b. Appendix A in Rowe (1900) Zeuglopleurus rowei, n. sp. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 16, 353– 354. Gregory, J. W. 1900c. Contributions to the Geology of British East Africa—Part II. The Geology of Mount Kenya. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 56, 205–222. Gregory, J. W. 1900d. Contributions to the Geology of British East Africa—Part III. The nepheline-syenite and camptonitic dykes intrusive in the Coast Series. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 56, 205– 222. Gregory, J. W. 1902. Scientific Literature; the International Catalogue. The Age, 13 September 1902. Gregory, J. W. 1906. The Dead Heart of Australia. A Journey Around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 1901–2 with Some Account of the Lake Eyre Basin and the Flowing Wells of Central Australia. John Murray, London. Gregory, J. W. 1906a. On a collection of fossil corals from Eastern Egypt, Abu Roash, and Sinai. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 3, 110– 118. Gregory, J. W. 1906b. Fossil echinoidea from Sinai and Egypt. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 3, 246– 256. Lim, E. 1975. Biographical note on John Walter Gregory. MS thesis, University of Melbourne. Oldroyd, D. & Mckenna, G. 2005. Conditions of employment and work practices in the early years of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. Earth Sciences History, 24, 197–223. Rowe, A. W. 1900. The zones of the White Chalk of the English Coast. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 16, 289– 368. Selleck, R. J. W. 2003. The Shop: The University of Melbourne 1850– 1939. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

Chapter 11 The National Antarctic Expedition of 1901: a fiasco avoided

Background The aphorism ‘Anyone can make a mistake; a fool’s one who makes the same mistake twice’ could well be applied to this episode. Gregory had learnt from the disastrous Villiers expedition about the necessity of good organization and clear management for expedition success and avoided falling into what could well have been an equal, but much more public, debacle. This whole saga has been summarized elsewhere (Huntford 1989) so only the gist of the matters relevant to Gregory and the necessary background are given here. Clements Robert Markham FRS, knighted in 1896, became President of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in 1893. He was a former naval man and had accompanied Sir George Strong Nares’s (1831 –1915) Government promoted naval Arctic expedition in 1875– 6. For twenty years Markham had advocated Antarctic exploration, first as Honorary Secretary and then as President of the RGS, Britain’s leading society for promoting geographical discovery and exploration (Huntford 1989). As a member of the RGS, and indeed one quite friendly with Markham, all this and what follows would have been known to Gregory. As President, Markham began a serious campaign to mount an Antarctic expedition, initially raising funds through the RGS. However, by 1897, the response, although encouraging, was inadequate and it seemed that support would be needed from scientific fields other than geography, if the required funds were to be raised, especially if the Government was to be persuaded to give financial support. This meant inevitably involving the Royal Society of London, the Government-supported body of eminent scientists and the one that the Government turned to for scientific advice. There was enthusiastic support from Fellows of the Royal Society and other scientists to undertake a range of scientific work. At a meeting on the scientific advantages of an Antarctic Expedition, held at the Royal Society (RS), then in Burlington House, on 24 February 1898, a whole range of speakers, including Markham, A.Geikie, John Murray and Fridtjof Nansen (1861 –1930), recently returned from the Arctic voyage and traverse across the ice from the Fram, spoke favourably and with particular and general proposals (Nature, 57, pp. 420–427). These involved studies of the atmosphere, geography, meteorology, gravity, pelagic life, geology and other subjects including, the Earth’s magnetism which was of considerable practical importance in navigation. The position and exact behaviour of the South Magnetic Pole had implications for the accuracy with which the erraticallyvarying magnetic field could be interpolated and extrapolated on sea-charts for use with compasses and were therefore of some considerable interest both to the Royal and the Merchant Navy. Special stress was laid on the importance of landing a party to remain over at least one winter to obtain a continuous record of magnetic, meteorological and ice-sheet variation. A Joint Committee of the RGS and RS was formed and an appeal for funds was made nationally during 1898. In Nature 58 (on 20 October 1898), Sir John Murray (1841 –1914) pleaded for a rich man or men to fund £100 k to make the expedition possible, as much for the honour of Britain as for the science, because the Germans were mounting a Government-supported expedition in 1900 but ‘our Government has not lent any support’. This was followed by a renewed appeal for funds by the Joint Committee at the end of 1898 (Nature, 59, p. 102). Eventually, following the Prince of Wales becoming the expedition’s patron in April 1899, and a

deputation to Arthur James Balfour (1848 – 1930), First Lord of Treasury, in June 1899, in which the practical importance of studies of the magnetism, meteorology, geology and the extent of the ice sheets was stressed (Poulton 1901), the Government offered a grant of £47 000 if a similar sum was first raised privately, otherwise it might have appeared that the British Government was not taking the German challenge seriously. This encouraged wealthy private donors, including a munificent donation of £25 000 from Colonel Llewellyn Wood Longstaff (1841 –1918), and the expedition was funded. In the autumn of 1899, Captain Thomas Henry Tizard (1839 – 1924), FRS and Professor Edward Bagnall Poulton (1856 – 1943), FRS, Oxford zoologist and a friend of Gregory, were appointed the RS representatives on an Antarctica Executive Committee of four with Sir Clements Markham (Chairman) and Sir Richard Vesey Hamilton (1829 –1912), a retired Admiral who had served in the Arctic, as the RGS representatives. This committee was charged with planning the expedition, deciding the staff required and making the appointments, all subject to approval by the Joint Antarctic Committee which consisted of no fewer than 16 representatives of each of the two societies involved (Poulton 1901). A purpose-built vessel was ordered from a Dundee shipyard, albeit at about twice the cost of one from Norway (Huntford 1989), but it was necessary to be patriotic; the second Boer War, the 1897 Empire celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and the peak of British Imperialism coloured the atmosphere in which the expedition was planned. According to Poulton’s account (1901), the question of the leadership arose right from the start. Poulton asked whether the Scientific Leader was to be the Commander of the whole expedition (which was what he favoured), as was the case with the German expedition. The three other members, all naval experts, convinced Poulton that English law required the Captain to be supreme in all matters relating to the safety of the ship and crew. This of course did not make clear who would be in charge on land, and it was envisaged that in order to accumulate more than a year’s continuous recording of the magnetic field, and meteorology, and in order to make some long journeys of exploration, overwintering would be required, meaning perhaps 15 or more months ashore.

Gregory’s involvement The Antarctic Executive Committee probably decided to offer the post of Scientific Leader to Gregory in November 1899, before his appointment in Melbourne. According to Poulton, he nominated Gregory (Nature, 64, p. 83), but Markham also claimed to have selected him (see below). Gregory ‘consented to consider the offer favourably’, even though he would not have the full powers that the German scientific leader would have, but wished for a more definite statement of his position and powers, and for a programme of the Expedition (Poulton 1901). He did not get these before he left for Melbourne on 14 January 1900 but it is clear from a letter Gregory wrote to Poulton on 21 December 1899 (NHM; DF404/58) that he was working on the assumption that the details would be sorted out and he was already enthusiastically planning on the assumption that he would be the Leader, and the expedition’s southern base would be Melbourne. Thus ‘Men should get training on the ice in Switzerland next summer’; ‘the importation of dogs into Victoria [is] hampered by regulations to

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 65–71. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.11

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exclude drophobia’ [rabies]; ‘£45 000 for the ship is expensive – £30 000 in my estimate’. On the voyage out to Australia, Gregory gave priority over completing papers and preparing lectures to make a long summary of how he thought the Expedition should proceed. When the ship docked in Port Said, he posted a letter back to Poulton, which had been written on 19 January 1900. In it he sketched out a fairly detailed plan of exploratory cruises for geographical mapping and sampling for the Expedition’s vessel off Wilkes Land, both in summer and winter and how they should fit in with landing and picking up the land-based party. The latter was to be provided with a house, observing huts, dog stables, etc. with the ‘Scientific Leader [having] the opportunity of controlling a small independent party on land’ and what he proposed it should do (NHM, DF404/ 58). Clearly he needed to know in some detail the plans and dates in order to apply for permission for leave of absence from Melbourne University. On 14 February 1900 he was appointed Scientific Head by the Joint Committee and a few days later Markham cabled him ‘Formally appointed, wire when fully able to decide.’ Gregory must have decided to ask for permission from the university before he had endorsement for the plans he had sent to Poulton (for the Antarctic Executive to approve) as they did not approve them until 15 June 1900 (Poulton 1901) but on 2 April 1900 Gregory again wrote to Poulton (NHM, op. cit.) to tell him the university had granted him leave on half pay. Gregory had applied on the basis that a second set of the extensive collections to be made would come to the University; in addition it would ensure that the base for the southern ship and magnetic reference would be Melbourne. He also hoped that considerable kudos would come to the university through one of its Professors being the Scientific Leader of the National Antarctic Expedition. Half pay would allow for the employment of a temporary lecturer to cover essential teaching while Gregory was away during term; Gregory would also be paid by the Expedition and presumably agreed to donate or hand over any pay received from the Expedition while he was still on full pay from the university. Thus Lim (1975) records him as donating ‘several hundred pounds’ to the university, which was in the midst of a financial crisis. The RS archives (MS 547) record that on 2 January 1901, the monthly sums due to Gregory as Scientific Leader were £31 before 31 December 1900 and £35-7-6 [£35.37] after that date. So financially, the university probably gained from the agreement. Gregory recorded (NHM, op.cit.) that he had applied to be away from November 1901 to March 1902 and from November 1902 to March 1904 (i.e. overwintering in 1903) and he had already promised to return to Britain after the end of the university session in late 1900 until the new session in 1901 in order to ensure the scientific and other equipment were obtained and to agree the final plans. However, Gregory had unwittingly become embroiled in a series of overlapping machinations, contradictory aims and outright controversy. First, Markham was dedicated to ensuring the Expedition was a naval one, with an almost missionary fervour for the Navy: ‘The Navy needs some action to wake it up from the canker of prolonged peace. Polar exploration is more wholesome for it, in a moral as well as a sanitary point of view, than any more petty wars with savages’ (Markham 1899). The earlier Arctic expeditions had had naval involvement because of the importance of finding the NW passage to the Pacific Ocean. No such navigational consideration existed for the Antarctic, especially for a mainly land-based venture. Despite Markham’s pleas, the Admiralty refused to lend a naval vessel and only with considerable reluctance was prepared to second a few naval staff, not nearly enough without an additional substantial Merchant Navy contribution. Although Markham brazenly claimed that the seconded staff were entirely the Navy’s choice, it was revealed by Sir William Wharton (1843 –1905), the Hydrographer – chief surveyor of the Navy – who worked at the Admiralty, that Markham had actually specified who he wanted and had asked

for ‘Lieut. Robert F[alcon] Scott . . . to command the expedition’ (Huntford 1979). So on 25 May 1900 Scott was appointed Commander of the Expedition by the Joint Committee and by some unascertained process Gregory, whose appointment preceded that of Scott, became transmuted into ‘Head of the Civilian Scientific Staff’, with the implication that the Commander was Head of the Naval Scientific Staff. Gregory’s position was now unclear. Secondly, during 1900 –1, it became apparent that there was a strong element in the RGS, led by Markham, who regarded the chief aim of the expedition to get a British party to the South Pole before any other nation (rather than scientific research). This meant disregarding any research which might hinder getting to the Pole first, even though the raising of the expedition’s funding had been based on the clear brief of scientific research. The conflict that this engendered split the Joint Committee. In simple terms the RS stood for the research, but did not defend it with any spirit, and the RGS for the exploration that would require reaching the Pole. In fact there was severe dissension within the RGS itself, which almost provoked a catastrophic split of the RGS Council (Mill 1930, pp. 163–164) and for a time Markham became ill with strain and worry. Scott, who had no scientific training or expertise, had never led any expedition anywhere, had no experience of polar travel or skiing, had been chosen primarily to lead the race to the Pole and bring glory to the navy and the nation. Gregory continued planning and working hard on various expeditionary matters, but with increasing concern about what his position was relative to Scott, and who would decide what research would be done. Of course, having the Scientific Leader on the other side of the world may have exacerbated problems that might not have arisen had he been in London, but the main issues would still have existed. At the end of October 1900 Gregory started back to Britain, as planned, arriving at Liverpool on 5 December 1900. He immediately went to Dundee where Scott was overseeing the completion of the vessel, the woodenhulled Discovery, in order to try to sort out their respective roles. Gregory presented Scott with a copy of the programme, approved by the Joint Committee, that he had sent to Poulton dated 19 January 1900 in which Gregory’s role as Scientific Leader was implicit and explicit. The following day Scott gave it back without comment, which Gregory erroneously assumed signified Scott’s agreement (Poulton 1901). The next two and half months produced no decisive settlement between Scott and Gregory or between Poulton, who supported Gregory’s position, and Markham, who supported Scott’s. The Committees disagreed and prevaricated despite, or more likely because of, Gregory’s limited time in Britain. Although no documentary evidence has been uncovered, it seems likely that Gregory, who had not seen his family for 11 months, would have gone to Bassetts from Dundee to see his wife, his new son, Christopher (known as Kit), and his daughter. However, this must have been for little more than a week or ten days, and almost certainly did not include spending Christmas together. His son (C. J. Gregory mss) records that ‘late in 1900 [Mother] set out from Bassetts with Ursula and me for Melbourne. Douglas Forbes, a niece of Miss Kirwan, came to help with us children on the journey. To save time and avoid winter in the Bay of Biscay – for Mother was as bad a sailor as Father was a good one – we took train across France’. C. J. Gregory makes clear that Audrey was keen to get to Australia as soon as possible and had only delayed as long as medical opinion had forced her to. Audrey probably reached Melbourne on 29 January 1901 in the Aberdeen Line’s Australasian having suffered dreadful headaches on the journey (letters from E. Chaplin to Audrey dated 27 February, 13 & 21 March 1901). So Gregory did not travel back with his family to Melbourne. Neither did he spend Christmas with them, presumably because he had already arranged to make a quick visit to the United States to examine the facilities and

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training of mining engineers in which the United States was considered to be the world-leader. This visit was recorded in Gregory’s (1906, p. 509) comment ‘At the end of 1900, the writer paid a visit to several mining schools in America.’ In effect in a typical fashion, Gregory was making good use of the slack time he knew would occur around Christmas and the New Year, when no meetings about the Antarctic Expedition would be held. Most likely, also in typical Gregory fashion, during the travelling to and from and within the USA, he would have pushed on with writing his book on The Foundation of British East Africa (Gregory 1901), which required much reading of geographical and expeditionary books unlikely to be available in Melbourne, and probably borrowed from the RGS. With the exception of the preface, the proofs of the book were finished by early April 1901, so he was trying to complete it during his stay in London. By Monday 17 December 1900, Gregory was temporarily at 6 Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, a lodging house near Oxford Circus (1901 Census) from where, on Thursday 3 January 1901 he wrote to H. R. Mill about the meteorological instruments required and expressing surprise that a letter from Mills had intimated that hourly meteorological measurements would be required (letter in NHM archives). Gregory also inquired about flying a kite to make measurements ‘but there is some [opposition] to kiteflying’ (MS 100/41 SPRI). Clearly the visit to America took place sometime between 17 December 1900 and early 1901, perhaps 3 January unless he wrote letters on the ship using his lodging house address for the replies to go to, which is quite possible. Cavendish Square was convenient for walking to the NHM, where he worked in his usual way trying to complete the magnum opus on the Cretaceous Bryozoa, or the Geological Society Library at Burlington House, and in both of which he would have had access to literature not available in Melbourne. The Royal Society in Burlington House, the RGS, and the London headquarters of the National Antarctic Expedition, in University Building, Burlington Gardens, were also accessible. Gregory wrote to Markham from Bassetts on 12 January 1901 asking, unsuccessfully, on how to resolve the leadership dilemma (NHM; DF404/58). As this was a Saturday, it suggests that he spent some weekends at Bassetts, remaining in town during the week to maximize his work. He wrote (SPRI; Ms 1329, D) to Poulton on Monday 21 January 1901 from another address, 60 Linthorpe Road, Stamford Hill, London, which, according to the 1901 census, was that of his elder sister, Anne Nicholson, and her husband, ‘I do not think Scott at all a good man for the [-?] task; I think he is a poor organizer, his departments are in arrears and he is casual in all his plans. He appears to trust to luck things which ought to be a matter of precise calculation; he has no experience of expeditionary equipment; instead of looking after his own work he has apparently devoted most of his time to making himself acquainted with mine . . . buy[ing] a microscope [and] chemicals and not tell[ing] even that it had come; on the question of furs, food, sledges, ski, etc. [i.e.] things in his department, his ignorance is appalling.’ All these observations would be subsequently confirmed by the desperate race for life, with nearest possible avoidance of disaster, by Scott in January – February 1903, from which he learnt so little that for the very same reasons the complete disaster of 1912 followed. Very surprisingly, Gregory went on in his letter to Poulton to add ‘Personally I like Scott . . .’ This is confirmed by a letter (in A. Mendall’s possession) sent to his mother-in-law, Edith Chaplin, from 60 Linthorpe Road, on 28 January 1901, and there is further evidence given below, that this may well have been true. Gregory had no personal grudge against Scott, but had become disillusioned with Markham, as correspondence between Audrey Gregory and her mother, Edith Chaplin, confirms (SPRI; letters between A. Gregory & E. E. Chaplin). Gregory probably recognized that Scott could not be blamed for his appointment; those who had changed strategy and appointed another leader were responsible.

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On 23 January 1901 Gregory was due to make a communication to the GSL on the Glacial Geology of Victoria, illustrated by lantern-slides (Abstracts of Proceedings of GSL, 735), but due to the death of Queen Victoria on the 22nd, the GSL meeting on the 23rd was ‘adjourned’ (but actually cancelled) without any papers being read, and it seems Gregory’s talk was never given to the GSL. On 28 January 1901 Gregory wrote to the RS representatives on the Joint Committee summarizing events since 5 December 1900, and continuing with his efforts to break the deadlock. He told the Committee that on 7 January 1901 when Gregory submitted to Scott ‘a draft of the instructions I expected to receive from the Joint Committee . . . to my surprise Sir Clements Markham and Captain Scott expressed disapproval . . . on the grounds that there could be only one leader of the expedition . . . Captain Scott.’ ‘My colleagues and myself were characterized as civilian scientific experts, accompanying the expedition to undertake investigations in those branches of science with which the ships officers were unfamiliar . . . and [under] Captain Scott’s complete control . . . the scientific staff [are] accessory and subordinate . . . which would completely alter the position which I was invited to take and which alone I am prepared to accept’. Surprisingly, Gregory did not then resign – later Poulton commented to the effect that anyone with less than the enormous patience which Gregory displayed would have. Another problem was that Gregory had carefully budgeted for the essential equipment needed only to find his plans not followed. Thus on 6 February 1901 (a Wednesday; perhaps because around this time he had a brief bout of illness mentioned in a letter in the SPRI archives; malaria?), he wrote from Bassetts to Alfred Bray Kempe (1849 – 1922), RS Treasurer, who was overseeing the expedition’s finances: ‘A week or so after my return to England in December and to my annoyance, a £25 microscope was ordered by Captain Scott whereas the instrument I regard as more suitable and a better instrument could have been bought for £15, the amount I had allowed for in my estimate. I protested but it was too late. I thought the matter an act of thoughtlessness in Captain Scott’s part and I contented myself with his promise that I should see and initial all orders for scientific equipment . . . I write to tell you [that all orders must be approved] by me or my Deputy [George Robert Milne Murray (1858 –1911) FRS, Keeper of the Department of Botany, NHM] after my departure . . . That I should have a considerable influence on the scientific equipment was one of my earliest stipulations’ (RS archives, MS547). A further serious problem is revealed in a letter from Audrey Gregory to her mother, dated 28 October 1901 (SPRI archives) ‘Jack constantly tried to ascertain from Scott the exact cubic capacity of the ship [Discovery] . . . which is being packed full with deck cases’. Gregory realized the need to know the exact capacity of the ship in planning what to take and thus how much extra coal could be carried. The lack of coal was later found to be the crucial factor in the abandonment of some of the scientific work. Omitting tedious details of a series of meetings and new committees outlined by Poulton (1901), eventually on the day before Gregory sailed back to Australia, on 12 February 1901, with Gregory waiting outside the meeting of the Joint Committee, agreement was reached that Gregory ‘was to be landed in control of a small party, if a safe and suitable place could be found’ and Gregory signified his willingness to accept these conditions (Poulton 1901). Gregory then left for Melbourne still planning the expedition’s scientific activities. During the voyage back he wrote a provisional plan (provisional because the Joint Committee had not yet agreed the precise plan) which was published in Nature (Gregory 1901a) in order that any further suggestions could be considered while there was still time to incorporate them. This account illustrates the breadth of the science to be undertaken and shows why he

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was such an excellent choice as leader. Only the barest outline follows. It begins with a clear statement which in itself summarizes the crux of the problem: ‘It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to remark that it is not the object of the expedition to reach the South Pole, but to investigate the Antarctic regions; . . . if [reaching the Pole had] been one of the main objects . . . the expedition would have been provided with greater sledge-hauling power’[a prophetic statement that only Roald Amundsen (1872 –1928) was to take seriously] . . . ‘Of primary importance is the study of terrestrial magnetism [which was why] a new ship [was provided] and a station on shore in Southern Victoria Land to act as a secondary magnetic base . . . to secure a continuous magnetic record for . . . twelve months’[is necessary] . . . ‘Topographic exploration is the second important branch of work with two main problems . . . the first is whether the known lands to the south of Australia . . . are all part of one great continent or are members of an Antarctic archipelago.’

This reminds us how little was known about the geography. The second problem was where the line of volcanoes in Victoria Land, went when it bent abruptly to the east at 778S. (They had been regarded as a continuation of the New Zealand volcanic line.) Gregory postulated a continuation across Antarctica or through an island arc, to the Andes of South America, being influenced by Suess’s tectonic line from New Zealand (Fig. 11.1). The geodetic work was to be ‘the continuation of the line of gravity determinations that has now been carried out from California across the Pacific to Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania and New Zealand.’ ‘A seismographic observatory will be established;’ ‘A complete year’s observations [of the meteorology will be made]’. As for oceanography, a continuation of mapping the contours of the Antarctic ocean floor will be made and collections of the bottom deposits, and determinations of oceanic circulation by temperature, salinity, specific gravity and refractive index of the seawater, and tidal observations made. The biological work would be mainly at sea, dredging both deep and shallow water so as to make an extensive collection of the flora and fauna. The geology would involve collecting rocks and fossils where possible but also studying the ice and glacial matters, including the physics of glaciers. This account was published in Nature on 25 April 1901.

Fig. 11.1. Sketch map of Antarctic area, showing Gregory’s proposed connection of the tectonic line of New Zealand with that of the Andes through the Antarctic, the extent of which was then almost totally unknown. The arrows indicate probable directions of ice movement (Gregory 1901a).

Gregory’s resignation As soon as Gregory had left for Australia, moves were made to reduce still further the scientific priorities in favour of the race to the Pole. Gregory had expected this would happen for on 21 January 1901 he wrote to Poulton (SPRI, Ms 1329 D) ‘they are climbing down until I leave. Then they will stiffen up again and oust me as far as possible’. On 19 February, only six days after Gregory sailed, at an adjourned meeting of the Committee from 12 February the contentious issue of whether the Discovery should overwinter in the ice was discussed and not resolved. Then Major Leonard Darwin (1850 – 1943) proposed a modification of the conditions accepted by Gregory by adding to them the stipulation ‘that he should only be landed if the time of the ship should not be too greatly diverted from geographical exploration’ (Poulton 1901). Eventually after several more indecisive meetings, the RS representatives caved in and agreed that landing a party for overwintering would be left to the discretion of the Commander. The RS gave way largely because the RGS had raised the major financial contributions, the impasse seemed unbridgeable, and no-one at the RS had the determination to match that shown by Markham. As Gregory put it later, ‘the RS was so sick of the whole affair that it was glad of peace at any price’ (Letter to Lapworth, 23 June 1901; Lapworth archives). Moreover, there was by now such a lobby in the RGS Council for the race to the Pole that the RGS Council itself was riven with disagreements. On 26 April the Joint Committee approved the amendment to the conditions which left it up to the Commander whether or not there should be an overwintering party. These were cabled to Gregory during the committee meeting. He had been kept informed of developments by Poulton and was asked if he would accept the changed conditions. Gregory cabled back ‘No decline accepting responsibility for scientific work of Expedition under altered conditions.’ This he confirmed in a later cable and in a letter dated 5 May 1901 (Minutes of Council RS, 13 June 1901). Clearly, unless he had a guarantee of being landed and able to overwinter, it would not be possible to record one year of magnetic and meteorological measurements, or carry out the other lines of research. As he later put it in his 24 September 1901 letter to Kempe: ‘As soon as the essential requirements of the magnetic and meteorological subcommittees were disregarded and the topographical work [a euphemism for the race to the Pole] made supreme, there was nothing to justify so long an absence for me’ . . . Whether I was in England or not I would have still resigned] (RS Archives, Ms 547). Also, as expressed in a letter (in A. Mendell’s possession) to (Jehu) Jethro H. Teall (1849 – 1924) as early as 2 February 1901, Melbourne University had given him leave of absence to be the ‘Scientific Director of the National Antarctic Expedition’ and not in any other capacity. Moreover, in the same letter he makes clear that already there were indications that some in the University regretted supporting his leave of absence as the realities of the absence of such a key educator sank in, so the success of a revised application for leave was uncertain. Teall considered ‘The Royal Society have made an ass of themselves’ (letter of 14 May 1901, with A. Mendell, from E. Chaplin to Audrey). His decision was greeted with relief by the RGS Council, especially Markham, as it avoided a serious internal rift:, ‘the [RGS] Council nearly split like the Joint Committee but managed to avoid a catastrophic split, then, at the 11th hour, the crisis passed as Gregory resigned and the centre of gravity of the expedition shifted from research to adventure’ (Mill 1930). The RS and Nature received the resignation with consternation for they had no comparable substitute available. ‘Professor Gregory possessed unique qualifications for the post of Scientific Leader of an expedition in which many branches of Science required study’ (Nature, 64, 16 May 1901); ‘The expedition is to leave our shores without a man on board who has had any

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experience in the conduct of a scientific expedition of any importance; and without a Commander who has had any experience in the control of a ship’ (Nature, 64, 6 June 1901), while on 20 June 1901, a letter from Gregory was in part printed . . . ‘the instructions have been greatly altered . . . the Head of the Civilian Staff nominally responsible for most of the scientific work [has] no power to secure the performance of the scientific part of the programme.’ ‘The position gives no power to secure a fair opportunity for work to the man who would have to bear the blame for scientific failure’ (Nature, 64, 20 June 1901). Later Gregory revealed privately why he had not resigned earlier but this has not been previously published. In a letter to Lapworth of 23 June 1901 he wrote: ‘I hear I am being blamed for resigning at the 11th hour. But that hardly explains the facts. I was persuaded by some of the RS representatives not to resign in Feb. as that would play into Markham’s hands. I agreed to accept certain terms on Feb. 12th. In May the Cttee cables me utterly different terms. My bargain is therefore off. The Jt Cttee having withdrawn from its agreement, mine also lapses. That it comes so late is the fault of those who have delayed. I urged that all the questions recently discussed should be settled 16 months ago. A cable to me last June from the Committee told me it had accepted my conditions; but that cable is now repudiated. Had I any conception of how the Expedition was to be run I would not have entertained the idea of joining it for a moment. I don’t like military picnics and should [word?] like naval ones even less’ (Lapworth archives, M33).

The long letter sent to all Fellows of the Royal Society by Poulton detailing the events that forced Gregory’s resignation and the serious relegation of what had been originally a scientific project, was printed in full in both Nature and Science (Poulton 1901) and contains more information than set out here (Fig. 11.2). Gregory’s withdrawal was certainly a wise one. Considering the 1902– 3 failure to reach the Pole even when this was made top priority, a failure under Gregory would have been directly blamed on him for putting science before ‘exploration’. He had seemingly ‘wasted’ one long vacation of fieldwork in Australia whilst he was in England in 1900– 1901 If he had also lost 1901 –1902, 1902– 1903 and possibly 1903– 1904, he could never have achieved what he did in Australia on the mainland and in Tasmania. His prolonged absence would not have endeared him to his Australian colleagues, and might well have left Gregory himself wondering whether it was the root cause of his unsuccessful attempts to house his department adequately. Even his absence from November 1900 to March 1901 must have lessened the pressure for action that he was able to exert. The Antarctic magnetic and meteorological work, over which he had resigned, were not his forte and the geological opportunities in the Antarctic which were his main interest, were much more limited than in Australia, especially over the winter of 1903. The Discovery turned out to be enormously more extravagant in its coal consumption than had been estimated while its carrying capacity was more limited, both of which severely restricted the range of steaming and prevented most of the planned biological bottom sampling and seawater studies, especially as the ship lurched alarmingly in swell (Huntford 1989). The failure of this part of the scientific programme would no doubt have added to the obloquy Gregory would have received. Gregory’s fruitless attempts to obtain from Scott the precise carrying capacity of the ship were shown to be a crucial piece of information that Scott had not taken seriously enough. So the Discovery left grossly overloaded with the decks piled high with cases. Once the RGS pressure put adventure first, the newspaper interest in the UK had irresistibly shifted the main public aim of the expedition to getting as close to, or reaching, the Pole as possible and ‘boring’ scientific research, however successful, would not have been greeted with the same acclaim. All these facts plus imponderable relations with Scott, which predictably would not have been good, because of the different approaches and aims of the two men, meant that with hindsight, Gregory ought to have resigned earlier, as he wanted. Gregory resigned primarily because the functions of the post had been changed unacceptably. It is also clear that with Gregory ‘the

Fig. 11.2. E. B. Poulton who staunchly supported Gregory & the Royal Society in wanting the British Antarctic Expedition of 1901 to be primarily a research expedition (Neave 1933).

expedition would have been provided with greater sledge-hauling power’. He would never have used ponies, but skis and dogs and minimized man-hauling; he had learnt from Spitzbergen and had no admiration of either the ‘manly’ role of sledge-pulling or the use of horses. No doubt Audrey, new to Australia, who would have faced a long period without Gregory, was immensely relieved because she missed him on even his short forays in Australia, but there is no evidence that she tried to hold him back or else it seems unlikely that she would have gone to Australia as soon as she did, for she knew what was envisaged before she left England. Among the many archives studied, a few further uncovered matters regarding Gregory and the Antarctic are noted. The first concerns a letter from Markham, dated 2 April 1901, to Sir William Huggins (1824 –1910), President of the RS, and a spectroscopic astronomer, [presumably in reply to a letter from Huggins to Markham asking why he was so opposed to Gregory having overall command]: ‘I am well aware of Dr Gregory’s scientific attainments . . . Indeed it was to me that he applied for a testimonial to the Agent General when he was a candidate for the Melbourne Professorship. I selected him as Director of the Civilian Staff on board the ship and . . . hoped he would accompany important land journeys . . . he is not suited for a separate command . . . Dr Gregory is very reckless and impulsive and of an exceedingly nervous temperament . . . [he suffers] from tropical fevers. [All these are] ‘the worst qualities for a Polar leader’ (RS archives, MS 548).

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Clearly this later opinion is completely at odds with the appointment of Gregory to the position as Scientific Leader in February 1900 and shows Markham’s changed views on Gregory. The second and third show that even months after Gregory had resigned, he was still trying to clear up outstanding matters. Thus on 24 September 1901 Gregory wrote from Melbourne to Arthur Bray Kempe (1849 –1922) FRS, Treasurer of the RS, ‘that having on behalf of the Royal Society asked the Victoria Government Astronomer to loan their standardized pendulum to the expedition [for gravity measurements which Gregory himself was going to undertake], the Astronomer agreed but also asked the Victoria Government to provide the money for a new set, which they did and the Astronomer then standardized it at considerable effort only for Markham, in his recent Presidential address to repudiate the arrangement he authorized himself and declare that a British instrument will be used. If this leaks out over here, the Royal Society’s good name will be impugned and the waste of money be debited to the Observatory’s research’. Kempe, after making inquiries, replied to Gregory on 31 December 1901, ‘Scott told Markham that it was decided to take out the pendulum at Kew and that’s why Markham said ‘this country’ in his address. Markham admits he forgot to mention the agreed pendulum matter with Scott, leading to the misunderstanding. . .’ The third item is further evidence that Gregory did not wash his hands of the Expedition and retreat in a huff or a pique, as he helped to ensure that the sledge dogs would not be held in quarantine in Australasia (letter of 15 October 1901, from Audrey to her mother; SPRI archives). The fourth to sixth items show that despite the problems summarized above, Scott and Gregory did not fall out personally although it is unlikely they could have worked together amicably. George Murray of the NHM, who went on the Discovery from Britain as far as Cape Town, wrote to Gregory in Melbourne on 2 October 1901, the day before they reached Cape Town, asking Gregory to forward, to Lyttleton in New Zealand, all the stores sent in advance to Melbourne, as delays en route meant they would not now stop at Melbourne. He also begged Gregory to send his own copy of ‘Drygalski’s Ice book’ as they had overlooked taking a copy. Gregory must have done this as in the SPRI Archives is a letter written to Gregory by Scott on 5 March 1904 on the return voyage of the Discovery as it left the Antarctic included ‘The ship’s copy of Drygalsky was discovered between Cape Town and New Zealand in my cabin . . . In New Zealand I knew that you had sent your copy but was also quite certain I hadn’t received it . . . Koeltlitz snapped it up from the mess room . . . I have [told him] to send you your property back immediately we get back to Lyttleton’. Clearly Gregory had responded to the request with the loan of his own book. [Prof. Erich von Drygalski (1865 – 1949) was a leading expert on glacial geology and participated in the German South Polar Expedition of 1901– 3; he and Gregory corresponded and a postcard from Drygalski dated 4 January 1902 is with A. Mendell]. The fifth item is from a letter to Audrey Gregory from her mother, E. Chaplin, dated 15 December 1901: ‘Jack had no quarrel with Scott 2 it was Markham and the RGS’ (SPRI archives). This is corroborated by the final item, another letter (with A. Mendell) from E. Chaplin to Audrey, dated 9 October 1901, in which she notes that her nephew, Arthur Grenfell ‘has met Scott two or three times & thinks Scott is sorry Jack is not going’. The end of the story is the tragedy of 1912. Gregory’s direct involvement is best ended with his astonishingly generous review (Gregory 1906a) in Nature of the nearly 1100-page, two volume account by Scott (1905) on the progress of the expedition, although most of the scientific material collected had then still to be described and evaluated. ‘Captain Scott is warmly to be congratulated on the two interesting volumes . . . a most valuable contribution . . . written in a charmingly easy and fluent style; the narrative is modest and frank; and the story is always pleasant

reading, from its evidence of uniform good temper which prevailed throughout the expedition, of Captain Scott’s capacity for handling his men, of his sympathetic appreciation of their high endeavour, and of his keen interest in all branches of the work.’ This is not a review by someone at loggerheads with Scott, or nursing a grievance for being displaced, and tends to confirm Gregory’s stated liking for Scott, mentioned above. It also follows the public mood at the time before the full truth caused re-evaluation of Scott’s performance (Huntford 1979). The geological results of the expedition were summarized by Hartley Travers Ferrar (1879 –1932) and the virtual confirmation that Antarctica was a continent was an important part of the geographical results. Gregory showed great interest in the nature of the ice-sheets, their formation and how they moved when there seemed to be no gradient (a measured c. 500 m of movement a year in one place). He shrewdly noticed, solely from the photographs in the two volumes, that at least some of the ‘Ross ice-sheet’ had formed by accumulation of layers of snow, not by glacier flow of ice or by growth from below by freezing of seawater. He was pleased that his prediction (Gregory 1901a), following an unreferenced suggestion by ‘Ritter’, that the volcanic line of New Zealand would be found to extend across Victoria Land, was confirmed. The results obtained by sea from the Discovery were derisory compared to what Gregory had planned but the required magnetic and meteorological measurements were made. By the time this review was written, Gregory was Professor in Glasgow, and perhaps he felt really glad he had resigned, had had a wonderful time in Australia and had obtained the Glasgow Chair and so he could review Scott’s account without any bitterness at all. Finally, in the typical Gregory fashion of not dropping an interest once aroused, he continued to keep up-to-date with polar work, especially work in the southern polar regions, and continued to be consulted on a range of such matters. Thus by the end of 1901 he had written, admittedly for payment, a wide-ranging article in the American Popular Science Monthly on ‘Antarctic Exploration’ (Gregory 1902) summarizing the state of knowledge then. In 1906 he outlined the results obtained by the expedition he had resigned from (Gregory 1906a). In 1908 he reviewed some of the published scientific results, although incomplete, of four expeditions: the British National Antarctic Expedition, 1901–4, the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition 1902 –4 (including investigations on Gough Island, the South Orkneys and the Falkland Islands), the German South Polar Expedition 1901–3 and the Swedish South Polar Expedition of 1901–3 (Gregory 1908). This was something of a tour de force in summarizing in 20 pages over 1000 pages of new results across the geological, biological, meteorological, tidal and magnetic fields involving a multitude of life forms from fishes, molluscs, birds, arthropods, mosses, algae, echinoderms, parasitic worms etc to seals and yet retaining sufficient overall perspective to inquire as to whether Sir John Murray’s ‘theory of bipolarity’ had been demonstrated or refuted. This theory predicted close relationships between the fauna and flora of the North and South Polar regions despite the penguin –polar bear dichotomy. Overall, the new evidence did not seem to favour the theory. Significant for the geology was the recognition by H. T. Ferrar in South Victoria Land of an Archaean-type basement unconformably overlain by flat sandstones, containing plant remains. These were cut by dolerite sills that would later characterize a petrological type named after Ferrar; others identified alkaline igneous rocks, including phonolites and kenytes, as first described by Gregory.

References Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, J. W. 1901. The Foundation of British East Africa. Horace Marshall & Son, London.

THE NATIONAL ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION OF 1901: A FIASCO AVOIDED

Gregory, J. W. 1901a. The work of the National Antarctic Expedition. Nature, 63, 609– 612. Gregory, J. W. 1902. Antarctic exploration. Popular Science Monthly, 60, 209– 217. Gregory, J. W. 1906. The education of mining engineers. Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers, 31, 502–525. Gregory, J. W. 1906a. The work of the National Antarctic expedition. Nature, 73, 297– 300. Gregory, J. W. 1908. Some scientific results of the Antarctic expeditions, 1901– 1904. The Geographical Journal, 32, 25 –47. Huntford, R. 1979. Scott and Amundsen. Hodder & Stoughton, London. Huntford, R. 1989. Shackleton. Cardinal by Sphere Books Ltd, London.

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Lim, E. 1975. Biographical note on John Walter Gregory. MS thesis, University of Melbourne. Markham, C. R. 1899. Address to the Royal Geographical Society. The Geographical Journal, 14, 12. Mill, H. R. 1930. The record of the Royal Geographical Society 1830– 1930. Royal Geographical Society, London. Neave, S. A. 1933. The History of the Entomological Society of London 1833–1933. The Entomological Society of London, London. Poulton, E. B. 1901. The British National Antarctic Expedition. Nature, 64, 83– 86; also Science, New Series, 13, 890– 887. Scott, R. F. 1905. The Voyage of the Discovery. Vols 1 & II. Smith, Elder & Co., London.

Chapter 12 The ultimate accolade: election to FRS

Election to FRS Exactly one week after Gregory sailed for Melbourne, on 21 February 1901, an election proposal was delivered to the Royal Society for Gregory to be made a Fellow. Gregory and Poulton, with some assistance from Captain Tizard, had seemingly been fighting alone for the Royal Society’s position of retaining scientific research as the principal aim of the Antarctic Expedition; and Gregory had not even been a Fellow! However, it was not on these grounds that the candidate’s qualifications for election were based; indeed they were not even mentioned and to underline the fact that Gregory’s published work alone was the justification, neither Tizard nor Poulton were included in the 12 supporting Fellows who were, in order and as they signed themselves: T. G. Bonney, John W. Judd, W. T. Blanford, C. A. McMahon [1830 –1904], Arch. Geikie, William R. Gowers [1845 – 1915], Henry Woodward, Lazarus Fletcher [1854 – 1921], E. Ray Lankester, E. T. Newton [1840– 1930], Horace B. Woodward and George J. Hinde [1839 –1918]. (RS archives, GB 117, Cert. XII, 125). It seems too much of a coincidence that the particular timing of this proposal was not intended by the proposers to signify the public support of the RS for Gregory’s stand and perhaps a desire to have some of the reflected glory that the proposers felt would come to the Society from his proposed Antarctic explorations. Two of the proposers, Geikie and Judd, would have had copies of Gregory’s application for the Melbourne Chair, with its list of his publications, only 16 months earlier; or Gregory might have been asked for an up-to-date listing as the list included papers published in 1900. The citation stated: ‘Professor of Geology in the University of Melbourne. Explorer of Mount Kenya and author of ‘The Great Rift Valley’. Has contributed a large number of papers to scientific publications on Palaeontological, Petrological and Physiographical questions; for example, on the Maltese fossil Echinoidea (Trans. Roy Soc Edin); on British Palaeogene Bryozoa (Trans Zoo. Soc); on the Echinoidea of Cutch and on the Corals of Cutch (Palaeot. Indica); on Pseudodiadema Jessoni; on Archoeodiadema; on Echinocystis, &c, besides the volumes in the British Museum Catalogue on the Jurassic and the Cretaceous Bryozoa. In Petrology he has written in the Quarterly Journal Geol Soc on the Tudor specimen of Eozoon, the Variolites of the Fichtelgebirge, the Waldensian Gneisses, the Schistes Lustre´es of Mont Jovet, the Geology of British East Africa (three parts), and (in collaboration) the variolites of the Mont Gene`vre, the Geology of Monte Chaberton, the Eozoonal structure of ejected blocks, Monte Somma, &c, and among several papers in Physical Geology, the Glacial Geology of Mount Kenya, and (in collaboration) Contributions to the Glacial Geology of Spitsbergen.’ (RS archives, op. cit.; Nature, 64, p. 36).

Gregory was selected by the Council at the beginning of May, as one of the 15 Fellows elected in 1901. The names made public in Nature on 9 May 1901, although the formality of the election did not take place until 6 June 1901, following his resignation from the Antarctic Expedition. The citation made clear that Gregory earned the honour as a result of his publication record, and from the quality of the man as known to many of those voting. Among the group of Fellows elected that year was Arthur Smith Woodward, Assistant Keeper of Geology, NHM. His candidature may have been a factor in the delaying of Gregory being proposed because there was well-known resistance to honouring subordinates over their managerial superiors, and so any delay in the recognition of Woodward might have delayed Gregory’s recognition.

Although not one of the proposers, Lapworth wrote to tell Gregory and congratulate him that his name had been selected for election in 1901, and Gregory replied from Melbourne on 23 June 1901 that he ‘valued much more highly the opinion of original thinkers in geology than that of a Committee of experts in other subjects. The only praise worth having is that of men in one’s own line. Of course there is no [one] in England – or elsewhere – whose geological opinion I value more highly. You have done so much to [wean?] English geology from a torpid satisfaction with the results up to the death of Lyell.’ (Lapworth archives, M33). This appears to be blatant flattery; however, there is very good evidence that this was Gregory’s true feeling, as in his 1931 BA Presidential address, long after Lapworth’s death in 1920, he named Lapworth as one of the four most important British geologists of the preceding 100 years (Gregory 1932).

Assessment of research achieved before Australian input Although election to FRS set the seal of approval on Gregory’s early work, the citation did not examine his contributions critically, nor did it stress that nearly all Gregory’s papers, totalling over 100, were single-authored, to a degree almost unknown today. Clearly, his election was approved because enough of the electing committee knew of him, his work and its quality, in addition to its listed quantity. Although he continued to publish on corals (e.g. Gregory 1906), bryozoa (e.g. Gregory 1909) and on echinoids (e.g. Gregory 1911), the study of these fossils now became a minor intermittent activity, overshadowed by Australian studies, mining geology, geographical matters, glacial problems, tectonics (e.g. fjords, the African Rift Valley, Scandinavian overthrusts), past and present climate change, racial matters, underground water, aspects of Australian, Scottish, Irish and English geology and geomorphology, textbooks of various types, reviews of the contributions of deceased scientists and explorers, invited addresses and eventually his two broad-sweeping GSL Presidential addresses on the histories of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with their inherent opposition to continental drift. Gregory’s scientific contributions by the early 1900s can be considered under ten headings. 1.

The enormous volume of work on the classification and description of corals, echinoids and bryozoa. On corals he published over 300 pages, on echinoids some 250 pages and on Palaeogene, Jurassic and Cretaceous bryozoa, he published over 800 pages before 1900, and c. 1150 pages if the delayed 1909 NHM catalogue, which was nearly completed before he left the NHM, is included. Much of this is routine careful description. It was a massive single-authored contribution to fossil systematic studies and included significant advances such as sorting out the extant and fossil West Indian corals (40 synonyms identified), the Maltese fossil echinoids and the difficult Mesozoic bryozoa. In all three fossil groups he identified crucial evolutionary developments. Although today most of these advances have long been overtaken, some reference to Gregory’s work in these fields is still made, for example, the importance of exocylism as an important taxonomic character which placed the irregular echinoids in a unique category (Sauce´de et al. 2007).

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 73–75. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.12

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Throughout his whole career he did not subsequently reach the depths and breadth of expert knowledge in any one field, or publish so much, as he achieved in the field of coral, echinoid and bryozoan studies. Quantitative methods in palaeontology. Dr Brian R. Rosen of the NHM has written:

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‘Gregory was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, to not only appreciate that variability was important in understanding coral species but that variability could be treated morphometrically and statistically . . .. Gregory’s methods themselves are outmoded, but the principle was essentially correct’ (pers. comm. December 2004). ‘Gregory pioneered a statistical approach to determining species boundaries in fossils, by using Jurassic corals from India [Gregory 1899] as his examples. This was required reading for Stuart McKerrow (1922– 2004)’s palaeo. tutorials when I was [in Oxford]. Gregory produced numerous papers on living and fossil scleractinian corals, some directly relevant to my own work in Egypt, Somalia, SE Asia, etc. etc., so I use them frequently. Some of his papers are still the only accounts of the corals of that particular region . . . He is the author of quite a few still-valid names of important or unusual corals’ (pers. comm. February 2005).

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Part of this palaeontological work was the recognition of geographical variation in the distribution of species of these fossils in past times, mainly among the Palaeogene and Mesozoic faunas, found in the West Indies, with clearly appreciated implications for the Panama closing of the Atlantic –Pacific join, the Mediterranean, Egypt, East Africa and the Kutch of western India with the deduction for the latter that the Indian Ocean was not in existence in Jurassic times (e.g. Gregory 1896). The early recognition (Gregory 1889) of the deep-water echinoid in the radiolarian marls of Barbados, now uplifted to 350 m above sea-level, was to influence his thinking throughout his career. The main casualty of Gregory’s declining study of corals, echinoids and bryozoa was that the detailed knowledge he had accumulated, and was able to use, in identifying palaeogeographic provinces was not extended and was little used. The demonstration that the African Rift Valley was an extensional structure with downward block faulting of the valley, accompanied by volcanism, and preceded by a period of uplift (which, at that time was not clearly understood although it was correct) and followed by extensive volcanism. This was a major structural advance, the significance of which would not be fully understood until plate tectonics showed that continents could be split apart and oceans develop in the opening gap. Petrologically the description of the igneous rocks of Mount Kenya with their unusual kenyte lavas and other alkaline rocks including nepheline syenites, was part of a slowly recognized pattern of alkaline igneous activity associated with the African rift system. Gregory’s contributions, with Garwood, to understanding better the role of ice movement and its effects from their Spitzbergen work, which added to the gradual appreciation of what had happened during the Pleistocene glaciation of Britain and Europe. Early on, he identified the existence of the Arctic Ocean, before this was universally recognized (Gregory 1897). His recognition that, although virtually on the equator, the former extent of the glaciers emanating from Mounts Kenya and Ruwenzori was much greater than it had been in c. 1900; he could not ascertain whether this was because previously these mountains were higher, or whether the Pleistocene Ice age climate was alone responsible. Gregory’s minor contributions to the unravelling of the complex history of the Cottian Alps, mainly the identification of the Waldensian Gneisses as intrusive (Gregory 1894), thus adding to the debunking of the dogma that gneisses were always the oldest part of any succession, and the recognition (Davies & Gregory 1894), of the Cretaceous

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age of the Monte Chaberton limestone and its thrust-in tectonic emplacement. His views on the reasons for the distribution of the continents and oceans (‘The Plan of the Earth’) were totally wrong and held back, rather than advanced, science but his world-wide geographical and geomorphological overview of the Earth, although largely following Suess, did draw attention to the differences between Atlantic-type coasts, with discordant geology to coastline, now understood as due to splitting apart of continents to develop the Atlantic Ocean, and Pacific coasts, with fold mountains and geology parallel to the coastline, now understood as due to subduction under the continents. Gregory’s ‘Plan of the Earth’ views are more understandable if it is recalled that radioactive heat was unknown and it was thought that the Earth was cooling from an early molten state, as firmly held by the leading physicists, such as Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, 1824 –1907). However, it was not to his credit that Gregory did not change his views when the significance of radioactive heat was generally appreciated. His recognition that much of the drainage of the Midlands and southern England was initiated by Cenozoic uplift to the west of England. This had direct implications for the geology and the geological map of England and Wales, with the older rocks generally to the west, the youngest in the east and an overall eastward dip, especially of the Mesozoic strata, although he did not explicitly point this out.

The breadth of Gregory’s scientific work, from palaeontology to petrology and mineralogy (Gregory 1893), through geomorphology and glacial geology to tectonics and the global distribution of the continents and oceans, was most unusual even for those times. When combined with his prolific output, and the early demonstration of his ability to write in a popular, easy to understand way, that characterized both his book on the Rift Valley (Gregory 1896) and the later Foundation of British East Africa (Gregory 1901), the three characteristics marked him out as someone who had already made a quite exceptional contribution, and would go on to do much more, but also to make some significant blunders of interpretation. In general, the careful meticulous NHM work was replaced by more superficial, quickly done work with less factual content. Finally his astonishing range of other activities – journalism, abstracting for the Royal Society, Toynbee Hall and examining, all confirm his prodigious energy and dedication to useful activity.

References Davies, A. M. & Gregory, J. W. 1894. The geology of Monte Chaberton. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 303– 310. Gregory, J. W. 1889. On Cystechinus crassus from the Radiolarian Marls of Barbados. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 45, 640– 650. Gregory, J. W. 1893. Tables for the Determination of the Rock-forming Minerals by F. Loewinson-Lessing. Translated from the Russian by Gregory, J. W. Macmillan, London. Gregory, J. W. 1894. The Waldensian Gneisses and their place in the Cottian sequence. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 232– 277. Gregory, J. W. 1896. A note on the geology of Somali-land, based on collections made by Mrs E. Lort-Phillips, Miss Edith Cole, and Mr G. P. V. Aylmer. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 3, 289– 294. Gregory, J. W. 1897. Some problems of Arctic Geology. Nature, 56, 301– 303, 361–352. Gregory, J. W. 1899. The Jurassic fauna of Cutch; the corals of Cutch. Palaeontologica Indica, Series IX, Vol. 2, Part 2. Gregory, J. W. 1901. The Foundation of British East Africa. Horace Marshall & Son, London.

THE ULTIMATE ACCOLADE: ELECTION TO FRS

Gregory, J. W. 1906. On a collection of fossil corals from Eastern Egypt, Abu Roash, and Sinai. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 3, 50– 58; 110– 118. Gregory, J. W. 1909. The Cretaceous Bryozoa, Volume 2. Catalogues of the Fossils in the Department of Geology British Museum (NH). Gregory, J. W. 1911. The fossil Echinoidea of Cyrenaica. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 67, 661– 680.

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Gregory, J. W. 1932. Problems of geology contemporary with the British Association. British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Centenary Meeting, London 1931. London, 51– 70. Sauce´de, T., Mooi, R. & David, B. 2007. Phylogeny and origin of Jurassic irregular echinoids (Echinodermata: Echinodea). Geological Magazine, 144, 333– 359.

Chapter 13 The Australian years: Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at Melbourne 1900–1904

Settling into the university Gregory arrived in Melbourne, without his family, and was welcomed by the Professorial Board on 23 February 1900. He probably stayed initially with the Professor of Biology, Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860 –1929), an enthusiast for fieldwork, who had written to him offering the use of his house as his wife and children were away (letter with A. Mendell). He must have made a favourable impression amongst the academic community because he was awarded a Melbourne University DSc almost immediately by ‘ad eundem gradum’ (Univ. Melb. Archives). This was not an honorary degree but recognition that he had achieved the same degree in another university of repute, in this instance, London. Of course, since his 1893 London DSc, he had published more than enough to gain another DSc if he had chosen to apply. According to Lim (1975), his duties were to devote the whole of his time to the work of his department; to conduct and mark examinations and to deliver two courses of lectures of three hours a week each and associated fieldwork instruction. According to the newspaper The Age of 26 February 1900, Gregory’s predecessor at Melbourne (who had come from a Chair at Queen’s University, Belfast to the Chair in 1854, initially taught almost all the science in the university), ‘the late Sir Frederick McCoy never took his students into the field at all so they had no such practical work or contact with mining in the colony whereas Dr Gregory intends to promote field work, mineralogy, links with mining and palaeontology teaching in geology, especially as regards the sequence of beds’ (Fig. 13.1). Although he had been led to believe that the university had a ‘very fair collection in palaeontology and mineralogy’, the first major blow was receiving a letter on his voyage out that allegedly told him the whole collection had been removed to the new National Museum of Victoria building leaving one solitary specimen, which presumably had been overlooked. (In pencil in the margin of Lim’s (1975) thesis is added, ‘1 specimen of Glossopteris’.) Although it was true that most of the specimens had been removed, Branagan & Lim (1984) have pointed out that a number were left, if only the Krantz collection, purchased in the 1850s. His second serious blow was discovering on his arrival that the Geology Department was almost non-existent, being largely confined to one room in the old museum building. These two major handicaps were recorded in the Fink (1904) Royal Commission on the University of Melbourne, 1902–4, from which Lim obtained these facts. Gregory reacted promptly and immediately started work on planning a new building. Less than two weeks later, on 3 March 1900, he wrote to the University Council vigorously putting the case for a new building with laboratories, museum, mason’s shop, and lecture rooms plus collections for teaching, etc. Based on the cost of Sydney University’s new building, Gregory costed the project at £8000, and indicated that a site west of the old museum would be suitable. More precise estimates and designs followed the very next day (Figs 13.2 –13.4). However, it was to no avail. The university was already operating in the red and the city was in the depths of economic depression. The following year, the university faced an acute financial crisis, when in August 1901 it was discovered that the university’s accountant, Frederick Dickson, had been embezzling funds for 15 years. The total losses amounted to £23 839, a figure well in excess of the university’s annual grant from the Victoria Government of £14 833. Cuts were made all round,

including salaries (Selleck 2003), but Gregory’s salary was unlikely to have been reduced because he was bringing in substantial outside income. Gregory only managed to achieve trivial relief for his department’s predicament (£70! Selleck 2003), despite eventually contributing all of his salary to the university, amounting to several hundred pounds, that he earned while (Civilian) Director of the British Antarctic Expedition. Edward Fisher Pittman (1849 –1932), the Government Geologist of New South Wales and an old RSM man, presented a collection of a thousand specimen rocks, minerals and fossils, and the Secretary for Lands 49 maps and geodetic sheets and we know from much later correspondence to Geikie, that the Royal Society of London presented some maps of the world, in addition to which Gregory himself collected voraciously. Gregory did however manage to get an assistant to help him. Henry Joseph Grayson (c. 1856– 1918) was a technically able man who invented a rock-slicing machine, made thin sections, took photomicrographs, separated minerals and determined their specific gravity, organized field camps and was Gregory’s ‘righthand man’ and later went onto to achieve much. Daniel James Mahony (1878 –1944), a student (later Director of the National Museum of Victoria) also helped, for example drawing maps for publications. He was paid £75 per annum, probably from Geological Survey income. Grayson’s salary was met by the retirement of Arthur Bartholomew (1859– 1909), McCoy’s loyal assistant, who decided that he could not keep up with the pace at which Gregory worked, including the practical work that had not been undertaken at all by McCoy. The geology students complained that under McCoy ‘they never saw a hammer’ and the botany students that ‘the only flowers exhibited in his lectures were the flowers of rhetoric’ (Selleck 2003). On 27 February 1902, the day Dickson was sentenced, a Royal Commission to inquire into the financial position, administration, teaching and government of the University of Melbourne was established, chaired by Theodore Fink (1855 –1942), who was already involved in chairing another Royal Commission, into technical education (Selleck 2003). According to Lim (1975) on 30 April 1903, Gregory gave evidence to the Fink Royal University Commission, detailing his teaching duties as 6 hours lectures per week in terms 1 and 2, and 9 hours per week in term 3, plus 4 hours practical work in the laboratory per week and excursions on alternate weeks of 112 days plus two 4-day excursions. In addition in 1902 and 1903 he took survey camps. He taught civil engineering and mining engineering students in addition to geology. The total student numbers (first, second and third year) in geology were 17 in 1900 and 1901 but only 14 in 1902. Two years was an inadequate time to establish a reputation that would attract students, especially as he was away in the austral summer of 1900–1. When asked why the student numbers had fallen compared to pre-1900, he replied that this was because the course had been removed from the arts side (presumably during the interregnum before Gregory’s arrival) so no geography teaching took place in the university, and that this should be introduced to the arts students ‘as in Sydney’. He pressed for the inclusion of geology in the training of mine managers. Although Lim does not give any numbers for the engineering students, these must have increased markedly during Gregory’s time if Charles James Martin’s (1866 –1955) reference (given later) was true. Gregory’s aim of establishing a Melbourne School of Mines, along the lines of the Royal School of Mines (whose teachers had had so much influence

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 77–98. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.13

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Fig. 13.1. Professor Frederick McCoy, later knighted (Selleck 2003). With permission of the University of Melbourne Archives.

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on Gregory) never came to fruition, despite some limited progress at Gregory’s instigation and the example set in Sydney University. This was surprising because one of the reasons why the Melbourne University Council had endeavoured to appoint a Professor of Geology with mineralogical interests was to obtain someone who would assist in the teaching of mining in the Engineering School, which introduced a bachelor’s degree in mining engineering in 1901. No one could have been keener to supply this than Gregory, despite his almost total lack of experience in that field. The university’s financial crisis prevented progress. In Gregory’s evidence to the Commission on technical education, he wanted to establish ‘a first-rate school, capable of training mining engineers’ and carrying out original scientific work (the university), and a number of second-grade schools to train mining managers [there was no proper state secondary school system but there were several Schools of Mines in Victoria]. The two types of school were totally distinct’ and supplementary, not competitive. The ‘first rate school’ did not need to be in a mining district, Gregory said, pointing to the London School of Mines and similar urban institutions in the United States and Europe (Selleck 2003). Others supported Gregory who said that what was needed was a properly equipped building and, of more immediate importance, a metallurgy laboratory in which the future mining engineer could study the extraction of minerals and their structure and properties. A laboratory for mining was established in 1902, after a donation of £1000 was received, but no supporting building was provided, nor anything for geology, because the university was in such a severe financial crisis that in October 1902 even established lectureships in engineering were under threat (Selleck 2003). Gregory argued for a form of affiliation through which the university recognized external mining school courses towards a degree or diploma and soon, on payment of a fee, students who had studied at an approved School of Mines, such as those at Bendigo and Ballarat, could sit appropriate university examinations (Selleck 2003). Gregory himself was acutely aware of his lack of mining geology experience and his lack of knowledge of the geology of Victoria, and set about remedying this deficiency with vigorous enthusiasm. He travelled all over the state, collecting specimens

Fig. 13.2. Melbourne University in 1889 (Selleck 2003). With permission of the University of Melbourne Archives & the State Library of Melbourne.

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Fig. 13.3. Plan of Melbourne University grounds in 1891 with the Museum, in which the Geology Laboratory was located, near the lake. Madeline Street, in which the Gregorys lived, is on the right (Selleck 2003). With permission of the University of Melbourne Archives.

Fig. 13.4. The old Melbourne museum building which contained the Geology Laboratory (Selleck 2003). With permission of the University of Melbourne Archives.

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and acquiring knowledge of the geology. Right from his arrival, he commenced visiting mines, such as those at Ballarat East, which he first visited in 1900 (Gregory 1907). Motivating these visits was not just an eagerness to learn about the minefield geology and ore formation, but also to document as much geological, mineralogical and mining information as possible, since much of this was destroyed by the mining itself. He believed this would be of use in locating new mining prospects in the future (Gregory 1907). It was Gregory who first instituted regular field excursions in geology at Melbourne University with one every fortnight in term (Fig. 13.5). No doubt collecting teaching specimens was always on his mind whatever fieldwork he undertook. Although Australians were good walkers, Gregory could outwalk most of the students and the Melbourne students used to sing (Gregory 1977): Here’s to Prof. Greg’ry who walks at his ease, While all his pore students go bung at the knees.

To join Gregory on his way to or from work was to be sure of a burst of vigorous exercise. Initially there was talk in the university of chaperons for the lady students on excursions, but such a proposal would never have occurred to Gregory, experienced as he was with Toynbee excursions, while Mrs Gregory thought and roundly asserted that the Professor was perfectly competent to chaperon any number of young women. The subject faded out and mixed excursions continued (Gregory 1977). Gregory made a marked impression on the university. He was, even if slightly exaggerated, as Morrison (2003) put it, ‘not your average “Prof”. He was a radical and inspiring teacher, and he

Fig. 13.5. Professor Gregory in his late thirties in Australia (Selleck 2003). With permission of the University of Melbourne Archives.

put a million volts through the stuffy little imitation Oxford he found in Victoria’s fragile metropolis’. At the end of Gregory’s academic duties in late October, Gregory returned to Britain in connection with the Antarctic Expedition and his wife and children arrived in late January 1901 before Gregory’s return in mid-March.

Appointment as Director of the Geological Survey of Victoria At the end of March 1901, almost as soon as he returned from England, he began work with Alfred William Howitt (1830 – 1908), who was in the Mines department, and Reginald Augustus Frederick Murray (1846 –1925), President of the Victorian Chamber of Mines, a geologist. Together, they prepared a report requested by the Victorian Government under the Premier Sir Alexander James Peacock (1861 –1933), who was in office from 12 February 1901 until 10 June 1902. This report detailed a scheme for the reorganization of the Geological Survey of Victoria, which had limped along since being largely disbanded in 1868 (Branagan & Lim 1984; Darragh 1987). The report, presented on 3 July 1901, recommended many reforms, which the Minister for Mines and Water Supply, John Balfour Burton (1842 –1918) (in office 19 November 1900 to 10 June 1902) and the Victorian Cabinet accepted. The report was never published and obtaining a copy proved extremely difficult as it was not even listed in the State Archives. Nevertheless, Tom Darragh located and supplied the very copy which went to the Minister and has on it his comments. The only newspaper accounts are a few lines in The Age of 8 April 1902 and then, almost a year later, in The Argus of 7 March 1903, by which time the Minister was Ewen Hugh Cameron (1831 –1915) (in office 10 June 1902 to 16 February 1904). In brief, the Survey, consisting of 21 staff, lacked clear direction. The Chief, (the Government Geologist) Mr James Stirling (1852 – 05), was effectively long-term absent representing the Mines Department in London. Murray had resigned from the Survey so he had ‘inside’ knowledge which was no doubt invaluable. Survey publications were years in arrears, the work carried out and the subsequent reports were often ‘slovenly’, of a low standard and poorly edited. The fieldwork was seriously delayed by the lack of topographic maps on which to work, so that much of the geologists’ time was spent in topographic surveying, which was slow, especially in heavily wooded country. In general, staff were untrained; only one had a university degree and one other had taken a course of training in Geology! The survey lacked a proper reference library with systematic mining records, adequate rock specimen curation and laboratory equipment for studying specimens. The absence of permanent appointments made retaining good staff difficult. The report made specific recommendations to deal with all these points, and by reducing field allowances even managed to enable permanent incremental posts to be established without increasing the overall cost of running the Survey. Shrewdly, these permanent appointments would only be made to those who passed by examination courses of study, the syllabuses of which were specified in the report, and were almost certainly largely written by Gregory. The existing staff had a year from implementation of the reforms to study to pass these examinations. Failure would open the posts to those from outside who could pass. Overall, it is clear from the Minister’s hand-written comments on the report, that he was immensely impressed by it, if only because the report repeatedly emphasized the economic advantages to the State that the various recommendations would ensure, rather than the academic ‘spin-off’. Since the start of drawing up the report, Gregory had resigned his Antarctic Expeditionary Directorship, and quite unexpectedly, the Minister asked Gregory to accept the post of Director of the

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Geological Survey of the Mines and Water Supply Department, on a temporary basis, to implement the reforms. Gregory agreed, probably because it would enable him to see quickly much more of the geology of Victoria, and give him access to many mines and contacts with the mining industry, including free travel on all the railways in Victoria (letter from Audrey to her mother of 21 January 1902). Again, the university agreed to this invitation and Gregory took up the position on 26 November 1901, appropriately the same night that he addressed the Chamber of Mines on the origin of gold (Branagan & Lim 1984). The appointment meant undertaking a second practically fulltime job, and in view of his total lack of any geological survey or pre-1900 mining experience, might be regarded as surprising, but appointments in new countries like Australia and America relied much more on assessment of potential than they did in Britain, and Gregory had clearly impressed the Minister for Mines. It was agreed that the Survey would assist with the teaching of geology in the university, to compensate for Gregory’s time spent on Survey matters. However, this did not happen and instead, Gregory did all the teaching and the Survey paid the Department £600 a year, which Gregory used to buy equipment for the department and to employ Mahoney on £75 per annum as a student demonstrator or assistant (letter of 21 January op. cit). Gregory also managed to get a typewriter and a shorthand writer to work for him. According to C. J. Gregory (1977), undertaking the Directorship was made possible without encroaching on university teaching by careful adjustment of teaching times and by Gregory’s phenomenal powers of work. The duties of the Survey led him all over Victoria, rapidly adding to his geological and geographical knowledge and enriching his lectures. Thus immediately after returning from his Lake Eyre expedition (described later) in late January 1902 he visited all the Survey parties in the field. He wrote a report to the Minister on 20 March 1902 detailing his actual final implementation of the July 1901 proposals and getting the Minister’s approval for a number of decisions. A regular stream of confidential reports to the Minister kept the latter fully informed of progress. These show that Gregory ascertained the strengths and weaknesses of the staff and endeavoured to place men in the most appropriate posts from which they were able to give their best (Report of 20 March 1902). A selection of students further benefited by staffing a survey camp during a month in the long vacation of 1902 –3 and 1903–4, the maps made being afterwards printed by the Geological Survey as their ordinary sheets. In 1903, the mapping was carried out near the decaying gold rush town of Maldon, and Gregory one night dined with George McArthur (1842 –1903), a retired baker and extraordinary autodidact, who was immensely impressed by Gregory (Morrison 2003). Gregory would have preferred that the students not only mapped a goldfield, but carried out laboratory work on the prospect, but there were no laboratory facilities for such work (Selleck 2003). Although Gregory’s position as Director of the Geological Survey of Victoria was a temporary appointment, he held the position almost until he left Victoria, successfully applying to the university for three monthly extensions on 3 March 1904 and on 16 May 1904 (Lim 1975). He also became a member of the joint committee of the Mines Department and the Agricultural Department regarding the preparation of a series of soil maps for Victoria (Lim 1975). Without going into details, almost all of the recommendations of the July 1901 report were implemented by Gregory, although completing the duties of the recommended new Survey petrologist was only accomplished by Gregory acting unpaid in this third role (presumably to stay within budget). He probably also set and marked the staff examinations. Topographic surveying was reduced in detail, particularly in wooded areas. Staff morale and Gregory’s popularity improved immensely while the output of geological maps and reports increased markedly, with Gregory himself, despite all his manifold duties and activities, leading the way.

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Despite the serious problems of the Survey before Gregory took over, he somehow managed to effect improvements without generating rancour which must have been difficult. Thus Gregory’s letter of 25 February 1902 to E. Chaplin, written on the train from Ballarat, instances two serious Survey errors that he had discovered: ‘I found one horrid blunder. One of the geological laughing stocks in Victoria is a spiritualistically inspired bore for coal in some Silurian rocks near Melbourne. Starting far below the level at which coal ever occurs, they bored 3000 ft. [c. 990 m] through hopeless country before giving up. In 1900 –1 the Mines Dept. was doing the same thing. The cores were sent up to Melbourne, & identified by the Geol. Surv. Officers as Coal Measures & therefore likely to contain coal; whereas the beds were all Silurian’. [I had] ‘another unpleasant morning’s work. After inspecting last sheet of Geol. Surv. Work sent in for publication, I am going to recommend the Minister to suppress the Geol. part & issue it as a simple topographical map. The officer in charge will be beastly sick’.

Among his other activities while in Melbourne, he was on the Council of the Australian Institute of Mining Engineers from 1902, he was a very active member of the Royal Society of Victoria, reading and publishing papers, being a Councillor from 1902, Vice-President in 1903 (and a Life Member from 1912), and he was also interested in the affairs of the Victorian Chamber of Mines, an offshoot of the Geological Society of Australasia (Fig. 13.6) (Branagan & Lim 1984). He became a member of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, but seems to have had little to do with the Geological Society of Australasia, which operated from Melbourne (Branagan & Lim 1984). In Gregory (1916, p. 130), he revealed that he was ‘once appointed chairman of the Wages Board’ (which had equal numbers of employers and union representatives with an independent voting chairman) ‘in the wood-working trade; but I did not serve, as at that time the positions of these boards was giving rise to some political controversy, and it was thought inexpedient

Fig. 13.6. Gregory in his prime (c. 38) in his Australian days (courtesy of the School of Earth Sciences, University of Tasmania).

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for a member of the university staff to take part in their administration.’ His impartiality was evidently recognized more widely than just in the university and Survey.

Life in Victoria The family did not live in the row of professors’ houses on university grounds but in Sefton House, 376 Madeline St, Carlton, Melbourne, a street bounding the east side of the university campus, which has since been re-named Swanston Street (pers. comm. Andrew Gleadow 2008) (Fig. 13.3). They had a telephone and the usual Australian veranda on the house. At times to avoid dust storms (roads were untarred in those days) Audrey and the children travelled 50 miles (80 km) to the SE either by train or 75 miles (120 km) by steamer to a bungalow at San Remo, on Westernport Bay, facing Philip Island (Fig. 13.7), and Gregory joined them at the weekends when he was in Melbourne (C. J. Gregory mss). According to Selleck (2003), Gregory was one who ‘swept students into his scientific world. His passionate absorption in geology flooding over them in the lecture room, the room that passed for a laboratory, and the tents in which they camped while on field trips’. He and Audrey began what she called ‘the cultivation of students, inviting them to tea parties and then to dinner at their home’. They spent some weekends in the country, arriving late on Friday night, driving on roads without a light except for the stars. This and what follows is abstracted from letters between Audrey and her mother Edith Chaplin, who usually wrote weekly or fortnightly to each other. Some of these letters are preserved in the SPRI archives, mainly because of their comments on the National Antarctic Expedition, but most are with A. Mendell. The British mail usually took about 5 or 6 weeks to Melbourne so they each were answering letters written long before their previous letter, or even the ones before that had been received, so that it took a minimum of 10 weeks to get an answer. In emergency a cable at nearly 25p (4s 10d) a word was possible but prohibitively expensive. Audrey sent photographs and many landscape sketches, she made of Australia home to her mother, who encouraged her to

go with Gregory whenever possible and to continue her landscape paintings of the places visited, and even to hold a small exhibition in their home. Edith inquired about the cost of land in the Melbourne Parkville neighbourhood with the idea of her buying a plot on which to build a house that Audrey and Jack ‘could rent, or ultimately buy’ (letter of 6 August 1901), a proposal that was never implemented. On 8 October 1901, Audrey wrote to her mother that ‘Jack and I had a delightful and successful weekend at Flinders’ ‘Jack is going round the coast on the SS Zachy which takes lighthouse stores to see a new volcano said to have broken out in one of the islands. . .’ ‘I have engaged rooms at Flinders (at the boarding house where Jack and I stayed) [and] will go down with Douglas [Forbes; nursemaid] and the infants on 17th for 2–3 weeks. . . We come home [i.e. England] in 1904’. On 15 October 1901, Audrey wrote ‘colds all round. I’ve lost my voice and am in bed. We had three students and Mr Grayson, who are going with Jack to Lake Eyre, round to tea . . . their names are Mahony, Smith and Dow [Mahony did not actually go]. Jack has found a boat which will take the dogs [for pulling sledges on the Antarctic Expedition] and refuse all other animals so it will be alright about quarantine . . . I don’t think Jack will have more to do with the affair’. By 28 October 1901, Audrey was writing from Katoomba, Ocean Cliffs, Flinders [Island], ‘Jack comes down at the weekend. The volcano on Curtis Island turned out not to be – perhaps mistaken mist. Jack has been asked to give expert evidence on Bernacchi’s experiences. . . A letter from Conway [Sir Martin Conway] . . . he has formed a company in South America and wants a ‘Viceroy’ and wished Jack were free . . . but we won’t be going. [Audrey] and the children expect to return to the U.K. about April 1904, Jack in the long vacation following, that is, home in November. In Melbourne next week the only notable item is a garden party at Government House on the 6th’. Clearly Audrey’s return on ‘home leave’ was planned long in advance. These letters make it clear that at least originally Audrey had expected to spend about 10 years in Australia before Gregory would obtain a senior chair such as the one Judd held at the Royal School of Mines, but this does not mean that Gregory

Fig. 13.7. Ocean Beach, San Remo, Victoria, Australia, painted by Audrey Gregory. Courtesy of A. Mendell.

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himself necessarily thought the same as all the indications are that he was happy in Australia, enjoyed the freedom, and despite the lack of university support for his department, would probably have stayed for many years, except for one factor, his wife’s health. Thus he wrote to Lapworth in Birmingham on 23 June 1901, ‘I have keen students, they are eager to work on new lines; and I need only suggest [to] them fields of enquiry, help to keep them on right lines, and let them do the detail. I am fitting up a wagon so as to be independent of inns, and can thus work in the backbush with sufficient comfort to have my wife always with me’ (Lapworth archives, M33). Audrey did not always accompany him, and it is clear from Edith Chaplin’s letters (of 23 September and 3 October 1901) that ‘fitting up a wagon’ had been accomplished by then. Gregory was often away from home and Gregory (1977) records that on some visits to Survey camps and other geological journeys (presumably for speed), he travelled by a postman’s cart, a light two-wheeled trap and single horse, the competent driver and horse doing a 40-mile (64 km) stage in the day and back the next day; then the horse had two days rest while a second one was taken out. Some settlements were served by coaches, and during one such journey he took his wife with him as he had arranged to spend three days at a gold-mine to work out the geology. However, night brought no slackening in the thunder of the batteries of stamps which continued throughout it, smashing the ore, making the ground shake, and rendering night hideous for one light sleeper, who by morning was a wreck. Regretfully Gregory broke it to the management that owing to an unexpected – and unexplained – change in plan he would have to finish his work there that day and push on to his next port of call. The manager was deeply disappointed. Shortly he returned to ask, ‘Would it affect your decision if we stopped the stamps for tonight?’ That night blissful silence fell, the stamp-mills lost a night’s output, and a wife slept like the dead. The fact that Gregory felt that three days would be adequate to ‘work out the geology’ of the surface and the underground, indicates the quick, inevitably superficial examination, that characterized much of Gregory’s fieldwork, which was generally of an expeditionary nature – in and out quickly – and fine when no other information was previously known, but liable to serious error where detailed work was required. Gregory (1977) comments that the homogeneity of Victoria’s population, its ideals and standards of conduct and education which embraced (almost) the whole community, the friendly, family feeling, perhaps only possible where numbers are still small, and the remarkable honesty, all delighted Gregory and satisfied his strong sense of citizenship. His ability to make friends easily across the social spectrum became an asset on the road, and he acknowledged the help and comradeship he had received from ‘the many swagsmen and prospectors, who while we have shared a billy of tea on the roadside or on a mountain track, have given me the benefit of their intimate acquaintance with the back blocks of Victoria’ (quoted in Gregory 1977). The common language and, for many British or Irish far from home, being strangers in a foreign land also drew them together. At first he wondered whether on long geological walks to burden himself with a camera – a weight in those days – with probably a heavy bag of specimens to carry home too; or whether to take photographs early in the excursion, park the camera by the wayside, and collect it on his return. He decided to risk the camera, expecting to lose it but hoping to get good work out of it first. He always left a note on it saying it would be called for, to ensure some well intentioned person would not escort it as a stray to the police station. Sometimes he would notice the footprints of a passer-by who had walked up to it. It was never lost (Gregory 1977). On one visit up country, with an early train to catch, he had arranged to leave at some unearthly hour of the morning. The boots (junior porter who also cleaned one’s boots) was in charge and served his breakfast, but when Gregory wished to settle the

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bill, neither knew the amount owing, and the boots entirely declined any financial dealings as outside his province. It seemed a deadlock. There were several Melbourne visitors in the hotel. And the boots asked was there no one among them whom he knew. Well, there was Mr. X., said Gregory, he knew him slightly. ‘Oh,’ said the boots, much pleased with so simple a solution, ‘He can settle the bill, and you’ll meet him in Melbourne and pay him back.’ Gregory had doubts, but being new to the country thought boots might know best. Also he wanted to catch his train. On returning to Melbourne, Gregory asked X. what he owed him for that hotel bill. ‘Oh,’ exclaimed Mr X., ‘It was you whose hotel bill I paid. The boots couldn’t remember the name, but I thought I’d better pay it, and that the man, whoever he was, would remember mine.’ After that, before an early start, Gregory settled the bill the night before (Gregory 1977). Although Gregory made several friends while in Melbourne, he and Audrey were particularly close to Charles James Martin, the physiologist and pathologist (Fig. 13.8) and his wife. Gregory and Martin both came from similar backgrounds with Martin being born in Hackney, London and having studied at night school in London, then Birkbeck College and King’s College, London, before continuing at Leipzig. Both became FRS in 1901 and the charismatic Martin taught in Melbourne 1897–1903, leaving for the Directorship of the Lister Institute in London (1903 –30) shortly before Gregory left Melbourne. The departure of the Martins was keenly felt by the Gregorys (e.g. letter of 11 February 1902 from Gregory to E. Chaplin). Gregory kept in touch with Martin and he was later to go with Gregory to Angola. He even allowed Grayson to transfer to geology when Gregory wanted him.

Fig. 13.8. Professor Charles Martin FRS while in Australia (Selleck 2003). With permission of the University of Melbourne Archives.

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As could be predicted from Gregory’s support of the British Empire and Australia, the Official Directory of invited guests shows that Gregory and Audrey were invited and probably attended the first opening by the Duke of York (later George V) of the Federal Australian Parliament in Melbourne on 9 May 1901 (pers. comm. C. Smith 2008), an occasion of great splendour in perhaps the greatest of Melbourne’s public buildings. More usually when Gregory was home he would return to have tea with Audrey, taken in his study despite it being a badly ventilated and therefore very hot room. He worked there, sometimes taking a break and going for a walk with Audrey in the cool of the evening (various letters).

Gregory’s work in Melbourne including visits to Tasmania and New Zealand In what follows, Gregory’s publications are summarized more or less in the order in which the work was carried out so far as can be established, rather than in the order that they appeared. So that the sequence of his work is not lost in the more extended accounts of the five largest projects, these are described in chronological order at the end. It is evident from the very wide range of topics of his publications that any reputation as a polymath that preceded him to Australia, must have been rapidly confirmed: from Ordovician and Silurian trilobites, to a Cretaceous ammonite, to an extinct giant kangaroo, to petrography of igneous and metamorphic rocks, to sorting out the fundamental age relations of Victorian stratigraphy, to a range of mining topics, to the geography of Victoria, the teaching of geography, the geomorphology and glacial history of NW Tasmania, Geological Survey reports, Antarctic exploration, and a whole series of newspaper articles, of which the serial account of his Lake Eyre expedition was most widely appreciated. All this was achieved in only a few years in Australia, and this does not mention his second book on British East Africa (Kenya), which appeared in 1901, just over a year after he first arrived in Melbourne. During his first year, 1900, in Melbourne, Gregory set about visiting as many of the mines in Victoria as he could, in addition to collecting samples for his department, familiarizing himself with the geology of Victoria, and choosing instructive locations for student field excursions. As part of this learning activity, and long before his subsequent involvement with the Geological Survey of Victoria was envisaged, he set about compiling as complete a list as possible of the published work on the geology of Victoria, with emphasis on the economic geology, in order to familiarize himself with what had been established about the geology and economic geology, and to provide a bibliography, not only for his own use, but also for the ‘Geological Laboratory’ of the University of Melbourne (Gregory 1907a). It would also be a key resource in the mining school he wanted to establish. Gregory had nearly completed the compilation of the bibliography to the end of 1900, and it was ready for the press, when other activities intervened and he was unable to finish it. He had intended to issue supplements at the end of each decade, which incidentally shows his long-term commitment at that time to staying in Victoria. Later, when he was involved with the Survey, others took it over, completed it to the end of 1903, and saw it through to publication as the second of the ‘Records’ series of the Survey. It was another mammoth task, reaching 122 pages plus indexes and contains between 2000 and 3000 references, finally being published in 1907. It excludes newspaper articles and pamphlets but he did give a long list of the newspapers which published articles on the subject (Gregory 1907a). Another big project that Gregory started in 1900, using the information he gives in Gregory (1907), was the detailed examination of the East Ballarat Goldfield. This was carried out over a period of time, continuing with further fieldwork in 1901, and certainly

still collecting information after September 1902, and making several visits to the goldfield, although the precise dates are unknown, so that the miners became sufficiently familiar with him to term him ‘Our Professor’ (Gregory 1907). Although by chance Gregory had already published on fossils from Victoria (Gregory 1889, 1892) and South Australia (Gregory 1890), Gregory’s first identified publication deriving from Australian material collected during his stay in Melbourne concerned the identification of a new species of Silurian trilobite, Cyphaspis spryi, from some excavations near Government House, South Yarra, Melbourne. He read this account (Gregory 1901) to the Royal Society of Victoria (RSV) on 4 October 1900, and named the trilobite after the discoverer, F. P. Spry. One of Gregory’s earliest studies while in Australia, begun in 1900, was the petrographical examination of the prominent (c. 1018 m) Mount Macedon, about 65 km from Melbourne. He collected samples, had thin sections and photomicrographs of them made by Grayson, obtained chemical analyses of some of the rocks and took some of the puzzling thin sections back with him when he returned to England in December 1900, in order to get the opinions of George Thurland Prior (1862 –1936), mineralogist in the NHM, on some of the minerals that were difficult to identify. Although Gregory ‘lost’ the long vacation of 1900–1 dealing with the Antarctic expedition, he finished his book on British East Africa, almost certainly worked in the NHM on the incomplete catalogue of Cretaceous bryozoa, and probably did other work. After Gregory’s return to Melbourne in March 1901, he completed the Macedon study and read the paper (Gregory 1902) to the RSV on 18 July 1901. The main discoveries were the alkaline nature of the rocks and that it was not a plutonic, but a volcanic complex, of comparatively recent age. Trachy-phonolites with nosean, alkaline hypersthene dacites, trachy-phonolites with nosean, so¨lvsbergite with Na-sanidine or anorthoclase, riebeckite, aegirine, and cossyrite, alkaline andesite with nosean, olivine and anorthoclase, agglomerates and ashes were all identified. Because of the alteration of many of the minerals, identifying some of the minerals (e.g. cossyrite) was tricky for a non-expert. Gregory appreciated that this eruption was but one of a series of such volcanoes in Eastern Australia. Among the first year’s fieldwork was a study, with photographs, of the glacial phenomena he had encountered in Victoria and he had enough material to prepare a demonstration on this subject to present to the GSL in January 1901, but this was cancelled at the last minute. The material was subsequently drawn on in his geography texts on Victoria. On 11 July 1901 Gregory (1902a) gave an account to the RSV of the fossil bones of an extinct giant kangaroo, Palorchestes azael, found on the Sorrento Peninsula south of Westernport Bay, which had been urgently brought to his attention in March 1901 after his return from Britain (presumably while he was visiting Westernport Bay with his family), by T. W. Fowler, who had found it on the seashore being eroded by the sea. Gregory seems to have started writing for the Melbourne and South Australian newspapers in December 1901 with his series of articles on the Lake Eyre expedition, that appeared between January and March 1902. Subsequently he wrote a long article which appeared in The Argus on 7 June 1902 dealing with the May 1902 Mt Pele´e (Martinique) eruption under the title ‘The West Indian eruptions: The whole world trembled; the crust we live on; Australia’s safety (Gregory 1902b). Later articles include: 5 July 1902 in The Argus, (Gregory 1902c) dealing with the possibility of flooding Lake Eyre with seawater (which was dismissed); an account of the documentation of the scientific literature by the Royal Society of London in The Age of 13 September 1902 (Gregory 1902d ); ‘Artesian water in Victoria’ in The Argus of 8 January 1903 (Gregory 1903); ‘Note on the desiccation of the world’ in The Argus of 1 May 1904, in which he discussed Prince Kropotkin’s view, just published in the June Geographical Journal, that the Earth is drying up (Gregory 1904). Although he

THE AUSTRALIAN YEARS: PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AND MINERALOGY AT MELBOURNE 1900–1904

dismissed the last proposal, it is clear that the evidence cited by Kropotkin from Asia, plus Gregory’s own observations from Australia of former wetter times than now, held a certain attraction for Gregory (‘there is much evidence in his favour’; ‘there is a Dead Heart of Asia, just as there is a Dead Heart of Australia’ he wrote in Gregory (1904)), and was one to which he later returned. On 10 June 1904 he wrote in the The Argus, stressing the need for professors in subjects like engineering to gain practical experience in industry which would strengthen their teaching and research (Gregory 1904a). Finally, he fired off a volley of letters as he departed from Australia in September 1904. All this served to make Gregory better known in Melbourne, both inside and outside the university, than he would otherwise have been. On 5 March 1902 there was a special meeting of the Australian Institute of Mining Engineers in Bendigo on the occasion of the Victorian Gold Jubilee Exhibition, held in conjunction with the Bendigo Mining Science Society. A special express train left Melbourne and arrived at Bendigo just before noon. At 8.30pm Gregory (1902e), lectured on ‘The factors that control the depth of ore deposits’ (Proceedings of the Aus. I. M. E., pp. 5 –6). This was the first summary of his work and thoughts on mining and ore deposits arising from what he had studied and seen in Australia, and it influenced much of what he wrote about, and lectured on, regarding ore deposits for many years. Gregory concentrated on gold deposits, which of course he knew was the primary interest of his listeners and readers. The account described the sources of ores, the theory of lateral secretion, the agencies of gold transport, surface enrichment and the depths of ore formation. He went to some length to defend McCoy’s statement that gold enrichment tends to decline below the surface enrichment layer. Gregory’s views on the source of metal ores were first given in this lecture in Bendigo. He supposed that the source of most metals was magmatic and the metals were carried upwards in ascending plutonic fluids from which they were deposited in veins etc. Later downward percolation of meteoric-derived surface waters could remobilize certain metals and re-deposit them in a zone of enrichment not far from the surface, or lateral secretion might sometimes be activated by these surface-derived waters. These views influenced his later opinion that artesian water in western Queensland had a plutonic, not meteoric origin, as detailed below. Although a new geological map of Victoria appeared in 1902, being almost the first publication of the revived Geological Survey of Victoria to appear after Gregory’s appointment in November 1901, the compilation had been effectively concluded before his appointment, but no doubt its appearance boosted the image of Gregory as one to achieve output from the Survey. As Director, Gregory instituted three new Survey publication series: the Bulletin, Records and Memoir Series, all of which have survived to today (Branagan & Lim 1984). He personally contributed to all three series. In between his undergraduate teaching and his university extension lectures, Gregory completed Geological Survey Bulletin number 1 (Gregory 1903a), which he submitted on 21 August 1902. It had occupied him for several weeks. His first draft had been submitted to the new Minister of Mines on 4 July. The Bulletin identified a series of previously-called ‘hydrothermal deposits,’ as lake sediments. The topic concerned a whole series of boreholes, expensively drilled over several years in 1882, 1886, 1887 and 1894, but never properly recorded or evaluated, to establish locations of the old river channels (known as ‘leads’) now buried under recent basalt flows, because these channels had yielded rich alluvial gold deposits. This was Survey ‘backlog’ and Gregory’s investigations were at the direct request of the Minister of Mines, who on receiving the unexpected identification of some lake sediments in the bored material, wisely requested Gregory spend more time and clarify and explain the matter in more detail before publication. In addition, Gregory realized the importance of establishing the exact height above sea level of the

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channels encountered in the boreholes to help predict the positions of the channels between the boreholes, and he got these measured or worked out where the data could be obtained. The identification and interpretation were crucial, as the lake deposits would not yield the alluvially-concentrated gold that the river channels did. Gregory was responsible for definitively identifying the lake deposits and deducing the origin of the lakes as being the result of subsidence during the volcanism. On 11 September 1902, Gregory (1903b) was reading a paper to the RSV on the age of the metamorphic rocks of NE Victoria that was probably prompted by his need as Director of the Geological Survey to understand the age relationships of the various groups of rocks that occurred in Victoria, and had so recently been shown on the new geological map. After being frustrated by snow cover during one vacation, and hindered by it on his second attempt during the following vacation, he managed to find sufficient outcrop that when the collected rocks were examined under the microscope, his suspicions, and field observations, that the Ordovician slates and gritty quartzites of NE Victoria did not lithologically grade into the schists and gneisses, were correct. The Ordovician rocks were much less metamorphosed, indicating that the schists and gneisses were pre-Ordovician, and probably Precambrian (‘Archaean’), because the supposed Cambrian of the Heathcote area (about 118 km north of Melbourne, on the Bendigo road) was not as highly metamorphosed as the schists and gneisses. This conclusion, although not correct, was an important step towards unravelling the geological history of Victoria and establishing the nature and age of the basement rocks. One month later, on 9 October 1902, Gregory & F. Voss Smith (1903) presented an entirely different subject to the RSV of a new Cretaceous ammonite, Desmoceras jonesi, from the Mitchell River of Queensland, which they had discovered in the Robert O’Hara Burke (1821 –61) Museum in Beechworth, Victoria. By now Gregory was a regular contributor to the RSV meetings and his next account (Gregory 1903c), read one month later on 13 November 1902, concerned the Heathcotian, mentioned above, which with the help of ‘recent’ student class mapping, and the discovery of a new genus of trilobite, Notasaphus fergusoni, by William H. Ferguson (1882 –1950) of the Victorian Survey, enabled Gregory to conclude that Lower Ordovician rocks were present and that not only was there an unconformity between the Ordovician and Silurian rocks, but there was also one below the Ordovician and above the Heathcotian, which was either Cambrian or older. During the autumn of 1902 and extending into 1903, Gregory must have been at work on his six geography textbooks, which first appeared in 1903. Almost certainly these would have occupied his evening to night work at least until he first went to Tasmania in late January 1903. The last was completed in May and early June 1903. Survey Bulletin 8 is also by Gregory (1903d) and concerned the correct use of the aneroid barometer to determine altitudes as accurately as possible by this relatively poor method. Using aneroid barometers instead of the laborious level and staff, to determine heights in unsurveyed country greatly speeded up geological mapping. The problems were first brought home to Gregory when his aneroid-determined heights in BEA in 1893 came to be compared with the accurately determined railway heights. There is no date of submission of this Bulletin, but judging by its number and the date of submission of Bulletin 1, it was probably submitted in late 1902 or in 1903. Having seen most of the Victorian gold mines, Gregory went to Tasmania from January to March 1903 to extend his knowledge of base metal mining. C. J. Gregory (1977) records that the study of the Mount Lyell Mines and the adjacent country, which was the main purpose of Gregory’s visits to Tasmania, nearly cost him his life. ‘While rock climbing he grazed the ball of his thumb, the scratch must have become infected and in a couple of days the right arm was affected to the elbow. Fortunately the mine

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doctors were practised surgeons and, in days before antibiotics, operated at once, while a director of the company rushed up by special train from Hobart to ensure that everything possible was being done. By the time his wife could reach that remote spot in the mountains, Gregory looked like a wraith, and his arm to the elbow was nothing but an elaborate system of drainage tubes; but the poison was under control, and though the tubes and painful dressings continued for weeks, good surgery combined with his recuperative powers and sound constitution triumphed. His arm and health made a perfect recovery, and the stiffened thumb responded to massage and was also finally restored’ (Gregory 1977). The date of the operation must have been quite some time before The Times of 3 March 1903 recorded that he had ‘met with an accident necessitating an operation under chloroform. He was conducting scientific investigations in Tasmania’ because The Argus of 7 March 1903 reported that Gregory returned to Melbourne and had ‘a long consultation with the Premier (Mr Irvine) yesterday with regard to the reorganization of the geological branch of the Mines department.’ The accident had repercussions on Gregory’s planned 1903 extension lecture series. Following the success of a 1902 lecture series on geography, he had been requested to give a 1903 series on ‘Victorian Mining Geology’, but as he explained on 30 April 1903 to the Fink University Commission, ‘I was ill a couple of months ago and the doctors told me that I must not do any evening work that I could avoid, so I postponed it until next year’. This was not an injunction against evening work as such, but the lectures of course would not only have been given in the evenings but their preparation would have also involved evening work, whereas completing his other projects had already unavoidably committed his evening work. After a further visit to Tasmania in May 1903, he began to prepare a book on the Mount Lyell Mining Field, but the first paper to be read after these visits to Tasmania was on 4 July 1903 to the RSV, and was an account of the geomorphology of NW Tasmania (Gregory 1903e) in which he pointed out the evidence for substantial recent, though pre-glacial, uplift. This was followed by his account to the GSL of the glacial geology of Tasmania (Gregory 1904b) which was read for him in London on 2 December 1903. Shortly after the paper was published, he found (Gregory 1904c) that his reference to Pleistocene glaciation in Tasmania being first recognized by Charles Gould (1834 – 93), but never published, was incorrect, as Gregory had since found an 1860 published account of the terminal moraine in the Cuvier Valley (west of Lake St Clair) by Gould. According to Morrison (2003), during the winter of 1903, Gregory again visited McArthur in Maldon. McArthur had amassed some 2500 carefully selected books, pamphlets, newspapers and miscellaneous ephemera, together with a substantial collection of coins, weaponry and other artefacts. Gregory and McArthur obviously got along splendidly and had many mutual interests, such as in mineral exploration and mining technology. ‘If that was the sort of men the university professors were’ McArthur told his bank manager, they should have [my] books’ and he revised his will accordingly, leaving his books to the University of Melbourne. In October 1903 he killed himself for reasons that were never established, but it was Gregory who was responsible for the book bequest to Melbourne University, which increased their then holdings by 10%. As recorded by Gregory (1977), during the long vacation of 1903–4, he and Audrey spent December to February in New Zealand, attending the meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science and travelling the length of the islands from the Bluffs (southern South Island) to Auckland. Gregory’s field notebooks in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, record the collection of samples from Waiki Mine, Whakarewarewa, Portobello, Invercargill, Andersons Bay, Saunders Peninsula, Reefton, and Dunedin. An excursion was made to the west coast of South Island where the fjord coastline, glaciers, mountain scenery

and unique vegetation were all of interest and noted for future use. The visit would have been very much to Audrey’s liking because of the cooler, less dusty climate than near Melbourne in summer, and the spectacular scenery which would have inspired her landscape painting (Fig. 13.9). Gregory’s philosophy of what should be taught in university science courses was first summarized in the initial parts of his Presidential address to Section E, Geography, of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, delivered in Dunedin, New Zealand on 7 January 1904, hidden under the title of ‘The Southern Ocean and its climatic control over Australasia’ (Gregory 1905). Here he argued in a most forward looking way that so much was now known in science no student could master but a fraction of it, so that methods of thinking and working were most important, with a training that would enable some to go onto theoretical studies and basic research, while most should acquire from the same training expertise in applied (‘useful’) aspects. He was opposed to technical training without the basic theory or to subjects ‘which, so far as we can judge, are at present as purely academic as the classics’. The title of his address was then turned to and he argued that if we could understand the climatic cycles which govern rainfall, droughts and

Fig. 13.9. Franz Joseph Glacier (in 1904), west coast South Island New Zealand painted by Audrey Gregory. Courtesy of A. Mendell.

THE AUSTRALIAN YEARS: PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AND MINERALOGY AT MELBOURNE 1900–1904

temperature etc, we could usefully plan agriculture and other human activities to better human advantage. He outlined which cycles were already known and some of those not known, and the possible role of the Southern Ocean in determining these cycles, thus demonstrating his point about theoretical knowledge that had a useful application. The part of the Presidential address which actually dealt with climatic matters was only a summary of a much more extended account which appeared as a separate book under the title ‘The Climate of Australasia in reference to its control by the Southern Ocean’ (Gregory 1904d). This interest in the importance of climate to man was continued for many years and is amplified below; it is of course a major topic of present day Earth science research. After returning from New Zealand, probably in February 1904 (a letter to Audrey from her mother, received in Melbourne on 2 February 1904 was re-directed to Wellington, N.Z.; SPRI archives), Gregory’s next excursion was to Western Australia (mentioned by him in Campbell 1910), in February –March 1904. Audrey and the children also left Melbourne in late February or March 1904, returning to England for a visit that had been planned since at least 1901 (letter of 8 October 1901 from Audrey; SPRI, Ms 1329;D). As this visit pre-dated the advertising of the Glasgow chair in May 1904, it was fortuitous that Audrey was back in Britain when Gregory applied for the Glasgow Chair, and she and the children never returned to Australia, apart from Ursula, who visited with Gregory in 1914. There is no exact record of where Gregory went to in Western Australia in 1904. He may have travelled on the same ship as his family as far as Fremantle, but he certainly visited the Kalgoorlie gold mines. In a 1910 discussion of the origin of laterite in the Institute of Mining & Metallurgy, London, Gregory agreed that some laterites in East Africa and Australia were formed by downward penetrating solutions with organic matter in them, but not all, for ‘the laterite to the north of the Great Boulder Mine, Kalgoorlie is due to ascending solutions [which] was quite clear to me when I was there in 1904’ (in Campbell 1910). The basis for the identification of the source of the solutions is not given, but the conclusion would have strengthened his ‘plutonic water’ concept. In late May or early June 1904, Gregory was requested to examine the Mount Cudgewa tin-field in Benambra, Victoria and submit a quick report, which he did (Gregory 1907b). The fourpage report was submitted on 7 June 1904 but was not published until 1907. The area contained tin lodes which had been worked in 1873 and 1874. Shortage of water had prevented its continuation and also limited the exploitation of nearby alluvial deposits of tin. The quartz – cassiterite veins, with some wolfram, were mostly in a granite near to, or sometimes within, the country-rock schist, along a contact that was over 2 km in length. Gregory recommended that serious prospecting, with implied drilling, was justified. Whether the delay in publication was normal, or whether the increase in the price of tin from £125 to £180 per ton since Gregory had written his report, had spurred publication that would otherwise have been shelved, is not known; the latter seems more likely. Two days after submitting the above account, on 9 June 1904, Gregory (1904e) read his last paper to the RSV on ‘The antiquity of Man in Victoria’. After 24 pages of considering the sparse evidence then available, he concluded that, however ancient the Australian aborigines may be, there was no evidence of the long occupation of Victoria by man.

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Gold-Field, although some of these did not actually appear until he was in Glasgow.

‘The Foundation of British East Africa’ Just over a month after Gregory’s return to Melbourne from the UK in March 1901, the proofs of his second single-authored book, the 267-page ‘The Foundation of British East Africa’ (Gregory 1901a) were received in Melbourne. Gregory wrote the Preface in May 1901, which suggests he left the main text with the publisher before he left London on 12 February 1901, presumably having written it on the voyages from Australia, to and from the United States, and while he was in England. This book is a summary of the geography, political and administrative development of BEA, in which are included the ‘Protectorates’ of Uganda, British East Africa and Zanzibar. It has no more than a few paragraphs on the geology, lacks any references and is stated to be (and is) a popular, rather than an academic, account. It includes a coloured map of localities on the scale of c.1:7 600 000 (c. 100 km ¼ 1.32 cm). It is an easy, informative, read and was most likely prompted by Gregory’s background reading for his Rift Valley book (Gregory 1896). When Gregory had undertaken a literature study of a topic, he sometimes made a publication out of the material gleaned (e.g. Gregory 1895, 1907a), mainly as an outlet for his journalistic impulses and probably to earn royalties, but with this book, he probably also hoped to add pressure for more responsible administration and development of the country. The book summarizes: the characteristics of the different indigenous races (a subject that fascinated Gregory); what the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Portuguese knew about the country; attempts to find the source of the River Nile; missionary work and exploration starting with Ludwig Krapf (1810 –81), whose biography Gregory had read, and from which he quoted; the establishment of British control; H. M. Stanley’s role; F. J. D. Lugard’s heroic efforts to ensure Uganda remained under British control; and a fairly detailed outline of the late 19th century happenings and development of the country. He deplored the scandalous in-fighting between the Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries, and their meddling in politics, but at this stage he certainly approved of the presence of missionaries who ‘are the one section of Europeans in an uncivilized community whose interests are at one with the natives’ (p. 249). Gregory’s description of the coastal strip with its rich vegetable and fruit crops, excellent soil and general fertility, is almost lyrical and shows a talent for writing popular material that was later used in many books. Thus pages 6 to 7:

Major publications

‘The coastal plain appears the most interesting and promising district to a visitor from the temperate zone. The soil is rich, the rainfall, though irregular, is generally ample, and most of this belt, thanks to its damp, warm climate, could be tilled to a garden, growing all the fruits of the tropics, and supporting a dense population. The scenery, moreover, especially if seen from a dhow sailing along the coast, is pleasing and varied. Surf-beaten coral reefs occur at intervals along the shore, and behind the breakers is a shore passage, where boats lie in peace, safe from the heavy swell that rolls in from the Indian Ocean. Beyond the boat channel lies a beach of white, glistening, coral sand, backed by soft blue mud, passing into green forests of mangrove and jungles of screw pines; while elsewhere, straight above the white broken waters of the reef belt, stand grey cliffs of raised coral rock, weathered into caves and crags, and capped by a bright red soil. Beyond the cliffs, and along the valleys, there are palm groves, fruit orchards, rice fields, banana plantations, well-tilled fields of yams, maize, earth-nuts and beans; and, nestling in the hollows, are villages of oblong huts made of interlaced palm leaves or of wattle and daub. Between the cultivated areas are wide tracts of acacia scrub, and forests of branching palms, and of native teak, ebony, and other tropical trees; these forests are generally rendered almost impenetrable by vines and creepers and thick tropical undergrowth.’

The larger publications completed, or largely completed, during Gregory’s tenure of the Melbourne Chair are described below. These include his books on British East Africa; the Lake Eyre expedition; Victorian and Australian Geographies; the Mount Lyell Mining Field; and the major account of the Ballarat East

The most pressing need, he thought, was for white immigration to develop the country and he ended by considering what this needed to be sustained, emphasizing the need for consistent administration by the Foreign Office. To achieve this, the equivalent of the Indian Civil service was required, specially trained for work

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in East Africa and dedicated to serving and staying in that region, and not moved away capriciously as was then the case, plus more cooperation with the ‘best’ of the native rulers to help the country. The final words of the book, on page 267, are that ‘the country needs a tolerant missionary enterprise working in accordance with Christ’s command ‘Into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house’. He evidently had not yet turned his back on religion in 1901. Such a book by Gregory was almost a pastime relaxation from science and was driven by his genuine interest in the country he had explored. As with Australia, Gregory’s interests were not just limited to the geology, he was keen to understand the geography, the history of development, the economic possibilities and the characteristics and history (including archaeology) of the indigenous races, and for both countries he remained actively interested in these, and geological matters, all his life. The contrast between the level of development in BEA and Australia fed his unashamed support for White colonialism and the British Empire. He was, after all, a thorough late Victorian in such matters.

The Lake Eyre expedition of 1901 – 2: ‘The Dead Heart of Australia’ On 12 December 1901, Gregory left Melbourne for Adelaide, and then Lake Eyre in central Australia, in an expedition that took just over five weeks, returning to Adelaide on 23 January 1902, having missed Christmas with his family. As part of Gregory’s background reading before the expedition, he learnt that Lake Eyre had originally been named Lake Gregory by the explorer Benjamin Herschel Babbage (1815 –78) but Babbage became unpopular and his names were disregarded (letter of 25 February 1902 to E. Chaplin). The progress of the expedition was described serially in articles sent to the newspapers the Melbourne Leader, and the Melbourne The Age in January and February 1902, and appeared in January 1902 in the South Australian Register, with the last chapter appearing in the Melbourne The Argus in July 1902 (details given by Branagan & Lim 1984). The account subsequently appeared in book form (Gregory 1906) and, despite the very limited exploration undertaken, became a classic of Australian exploration, particularly as the title coined the phrase that became embedded in the Australian view of the centre of the continent: ‘The Dead Heart of Australia.’ This was largely because nearly all the Australian population was, and is, around the coast and most have never been to the generally dry, flat, dusty centre. Branagan & Lim (1984) assessed the impact of the book and made useful observations, criticisms and supplied background information, such as estimating the distance covered by the expedition as 400 km. Many said it was madness to go in summer –too hot at 118–125 8F (50 8C) in the shade, but compared with the dangers of East Africa, the expedition was relatively simple. The purpose was to explore a region very little known by making a great anticlockwise circle from the railway station at Hergott Springs (now included in Maree), to Warina (Fig. 13.10) which lay to the NW, where they would pick up the southbound fortnightly train back to Adelaide. This seemed extremely easy compared to Gregory’s previous expeditions, as he wrote in letters to Audrey which make it clear that dust storms were the main difficulty. (The letters were taken by Aborigine runners to the nearest postal collection.). Gregory’s account brought out his journalistic traits; it was well written, humorous in places and described the journey with little acknowledgement of what must have been appalling day time heat although it was cool, or even cold, at nights. He sent some of the published accounts to Audrey to ‘lick into shape’ for the newspapers (e.g. letter of 26 December 1901). If the

account had been that of a typical scientific report on what had happened, it is unlikely to have been published in full by newspapers, or read by so many, either in the newspaper accounts, or in the subsequent book, which was largely derived from the newspaper accounts. The detailed purposes of the expedition were: (1) to obtain fossils from the Lake Eyre basin; (2) to determine more precisely the age of the giant marsupials that once lived in the area; (3) to determine more about the geological history of central Australia; (4) to find what light geology could throw on the Aboriginal legends. As shown by Branagan & Lim (1984), only the first aim was even remotely achieved, so the expedition is remembered for Gregory’s written account, rather than its factual achievements. However, the expedition was Gregory’s way of examining the little-known centre of Australia, and showed some of his better students how to run an expedition, a skill Gregory himself had had to acquire with no training. Branagan & Lim (1984) have also pointed out that such was the success of the expedition in terms of the impression made on the students, that all of them were subsequently involved with the arid regions of the Australian bush in different ways. Lake Eyre has no outlet; it drains an enormous basin of c. 500 000 square miles, shown recently by DeVogel et al. (2004) to be the largest lake basin in Australia. It is a shallow widespread lake after rains but contracts markedly in dry periods, which is the normal situation. Gregory stated that the whole area was covered by sea in Jurassic times, that the Upper Marsupial Beds were Pliocene and that the current great period of desiccation began early in the Pleistocene. Gregory was accompanied by his assistant, H. J. Grayson (who acted as deputy leader and storekeeper and who studied the fauna in pools and waterholes) and five students, four of whom were fully trained geologists but were allocated other specialities, in part from need and in part to broaden their training: A. J. Donaldson (botanist), Edward Barnett Dow (1880 – 1944) (studied sand dunes and collected animals), C. M. Lyons (ornithologist), Percival Guy Smith (d. 1928) (entomology and determined altitudes) and his brother Fergus Voss Smith (d. 1928) (crustacean and other invertebrates). In addition, there was a cook, Mr Laycock, and a camel-driver, making a party of nine, plus Aboriginal guides from time to time. ‘The men paid for their own rations at Lake Eyre, but Jack paid all the transport –the camels & driver & the cook and such like. The governments gave them free passes’ [on the trains] (letter of 18 February 1902 from Audrey to her mother). The camel-driver and camels were met at Hergott Springs, 440 miles (704 km) north of Adelaide, after a two-day rail journey, with an overnight stop at Quora, by the fortnightly train from Adelaide, which left on 13 December 1901. Hergott Springs was then a leading caravan centre in Australia with an Afghan camp of turbaned inhabitants and their camels. Gregory described them as friendly and heat tolerant. They left blistering hot Hergott Springs on 15 December with 9 camels going ahead with loads to be caught up with by two buggies on the banks of the Frome, the first night’s camp. No alcohol was taken, and the party settled into a routine of early breakfast at 5.30– 6.30, a few biscuits and fruit during the morning, lunch at 12–1 pm, and supper just after sundown. Only the sugar ran out as the amount needed was underestimated. Before going, Gregory had inquired about taking camels, but there was widespread prejudice against them and he was recommended to take horses. Gregory wrote that he found out that camels were first imported in Australia in 1846 and several thousand were then in the country. Camels carried 6 cwt (c. 305 kg) each easily (c. 3 times as much as a horse) and needed 3 gallons (13.5 litres) of water a day whereas a horse needed 30 gallons (135 litres). So he decided to take camels. The actual journey, apart from the heat (‘January 8 left at 8 am with 86 8F [30 8C] in the shade’) was largely without incident and quite unlike Gregory’s Rift Valley expedition. Everyone came back uninjured

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Fig 13.10. Map showing the route of the Lake Eyre expedition. Drawn by Alun Rogers, Cardiff.

and on time. A bogged camel that was dug out safely made an incident to record. Indeed it was something of a journalistic coup to have made such an interesting story out of a slog around the largely flat ground surrounding the partly dried up lake. Nowhere did he complain about the heat, presumably because, having disregarded most advice about not going in the middle of summer, he was determined to show that it was perfectly feasible. Gregory was struck by how dry the country was compared with only a few years previously when grazing for cattle had been available. Boreholes gushing water, most of which went to waste, had horrified him as he did not believe the flow would continue indefinitely. Thus a bore near Kopperamanna, said to discharge 800 000 gallons of water a day, which was so hot, tea could be made directly from it, was nearly all spilling to waste. (This high temperature may well have supported his already formed opinion on a deep primary source of some of the artesian water.) His comments on the aborigines at the Kilalpaninna Mission Station, where the party stayed briefly, would be considered condescending today: ‘The aborigine has the kind heartedness of the negro [and] given a fair chance, kind treatment and a suitable education . . . will develop into an intelligent, industrious and useful member of society’ (p. 61). His sharp eyes took in masses of man-made

stone flakes scattered over the ground near an abandoned cattle station of Cannatalkinna. Following up pioneer discoveries by the remarkable South Australian geologist Henry Yorke Lyell Brown (1843– 1928), bones were collected at two sites, Kadimakara in the Lower Diamantina Valley and in the Lower Cooper Valley. The expedition uncovered the bones of a mammal in association with those of giant marsupials and of carnivorous marsupials, but it was more than 20 years before the vertebrates found were described. Errol Ivor White (1901 – 1985) (1925) identified two new species of lungfish (Epiceratodus) from material referred to rather casually by Gregory (on p. 81 of his book) as ‘teeth of Mudfish (Ceratodus).’ The new species were named by White after Gregory and Lake Eyre, being Neoceratodus gregoryi and Neoceratodus eyrensis. In the White (1925) account, Gregory summarized in two pages (pages 144 & 145) the other bones from the two sites as being those of the ‘extinct giant marsupials Diprotodon australis, Owen and Macropus anak, Owen and the Tasmanian wolf Thylacinus and fossils which William Elgin Swinton (1900 –1994) identified as the giant lizard Megalania prisca, Owen and Crocodilus porosus’. In addition, ‘numerous bird remains were found from which De Vis described 18 new species, including three new

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genera.’ Altogether, a substantial collection and one which caught the media attention in due course (The Times, 2 March 1925). According to Rich & van Tets (1985), the assemblage was earliest Pleistocene or Late Pliocene, and provided the first good glimpse of the Quaternary vertebrate history of Australia’s arid centre, and established Gregory as one of Australia’s pioneer vertebrate palaeontology collectors. Interestingly, Gregory’s life-long friend Dr A. S. Woodward had already described both extinct reptilians, including Megalania Owen, and fossil fish, from Australia as early as 1888 and 1890. The anthropological highlight of the journey was a night-time attendance at part of a Corroboree at the Peak, very close to the Warina. Gregory’s book includes a long chapter on the ‘Aborigines of Lake Eyre’ whom he claimed are ‘Caucasian’ other than in colour, and not negro in disposition or temperament, nor were they savages with low mental ability and barbaric customs. He also commented on their ‘physical uniformity over the whole continent and their pure bredness’, something of a wild generalization from the limited contact he had had with aborigines. Branagan & Lim (1984) pointed out that the reviewer of Gregory’s book in The Age of 7 July 1906 was critical of the sections on aborigines as being ‘the least satisfactory portion of the book’ and ‘a little premature’ in view of a ‘few months intercourse with one section of the natives of this continent’; then again this was a combination of Gregory’s wide range of interests and his strong journalistic outpourings in which speculation is presented as though it were fact, in a way that was incompatible with the lengthy meticulous scientific work with which he had made his mark in the NHM. His earlier books (Gregory 1896, 1901a; Hutchinson et al. 1900) had already demonstrated his fascination with, and almost wild generalizations about, anthropology, which have no apparent scientific basis; this account does not examine this subject in detail as the writer is not qualified to do so. Towards the end of January 1902, Gregory and Audrey were looking forward to meeting in Adelaide for a break on Gregory’s way home from the expedition by train but Audrey’s doctor, (Hannah Mary) Helen Sexton (1861 –1950) forbade her to travel to their mutual disappointment (letter of 21 January 1902 from Audrey to her mother). The ‘Dead Heart’ book became such an iconic publication of Australian exploration that it inspired another popular publication. Nearly 70 years after the publication of Gregory’s book, initially in 1973, but reprinted seven times by 1984 alone, was one of the most popular of Australian children’s story books ‘The Super-Roo of Mungalongaloo’ by Osmar White (1978), memorably illustrated by Jeff Hook, all very loosely based on Gregory’s Lake Eyre expedition. Gregory was inaccurately represented by the Scotsman Dr Alastair Angus Archibald McGurk M.D., who alone, except for a solitary camel, bagpipes and baggage, explores central Australia and meets a giant kangaroo. Such was the success of the story that further adventures followed in a later account. There aren’t many children’s storybooks based on student geological expeditions. Gregory’s erroneous supposed origin as a Scotsman is repeated in several learned publications. The source of artesian water in central Australia. In his long newspaper article in The Argus of 8 January 1903 on ‘Artesian water in Victoria’ Gregory (1903) did not mention plutonic water and went to considerable lengths to show that the source of the Victorian artesian water, and that of the numerous coastal, and even submarine, springs along the Australian Bight, was derived from rainfall, his Lake Eyre expedition book (Gregory 1906) has a 68-page section on ‘The flowing wells of Central Australia.’ In this, Gregory formulated his theory of the source of the artesian well water as being in part meteoric but mostly ‘juvenile’ (a Suess term), that is, of primary magmatic origin. This latter source seems to have been originally espoused by Gregory on the basis of the number of mines and mining fields in Australia in which he deduced ‘the ores [were] brought up by deep waters’ (1902e), the waters were often charged with salts

and very hot. Gregory could not understand how such voluminous outpourings could originate by deep permeation of meteoric water, especially as the supposed source of the central Australian well water was 600 miles (960 km) away to the east, the depth of supposed penetration was so deep ‘the pores would be closed’ by the pressure, the salts in the water were of a type more compatible with a plutonic origin, and the highly saline nature would have caused the crystallization of salts, thus further impeding the flow. As ably summarized by Branagan & Lim (1984), this view was opposed by T. W. Edgeworth David (1858 – 1934), S. Murray (1837 –1919), R. L. Jack (1845 –1921) and E. F. Pittman, the last being the Government Geologist for NSW and an acknowledged authority on the Great Artesian Basin, and who rapidly sought to disprove Gregory’s theory and show that the water was mostly meteoric in origin (Pittman 1907). As could be predicted, Gregory never changed his views. Following his 1909 visit to Australia and in the light of his earlier visits to the ‘Dead Heart’ of the continent, Gregory (1911) wrote an extended account of ‘The Flowing Wells of Central Australia’ which he read to the RGS. In this, which might be regarded as his attempt to rebut Pittman (1907), he accepted that some connate water might be involved, but re-iterated that he considered, from some rather dubious calculations, that it was impossible for the artesian water to be significantly derived from meteoric water flowing underground from the mountains of eastern Australia, and he still considered that the water was primary magmatic water from inside the earth, although he did not produce any convincing evidence for this view. The matter came to a head in the 1914 BA meeting in Australia where Pittman had printed a booklet putting forward his views under the title ‘The Great Australian Artesian Basin and the Source of its Waters’ but without resolution as neither side could change the other’s views. Almost as soon as Gregory returned to Glasgow in early October 1914, he submitted a paper detailing the results of borings for water around Kynuna, western Queensland (1428E, 21238S) which had been published by the Queensland Water Supply Department (Gregory 1914). Gregory pointed out that the very different heights to which water rose in nearby boreholes, plus the erratic life of some water-bearing layers, indicating that they were thin discontinuous lenses, and the lack of any consistent trend of height to which the water rose in a direction away from the supposed Blythesdale Braystone, (a sandstone) source, argued against this being the source. In addition, he noted that the water had an abnormally high temperature for a modern meteoric source as a temperature gradient of 18F for 28 ft (c. 9 m) of depth was needed to explain the high temperatures. This was unrealistic, whereas the ‘high temperature is easily understood if the well water is discharged from an ancient store and contains some plutonic water’ (Gregory 1914). Gregory (1916a) subsequently elaborated on these 1914 arguments as regards the flowing wells of western Queensland, in the Queensland Geographical Journal rather than the BA proceedings, keeping the argument where it was relevant. He returned to the subject in his article to the 1923 Pan-American Science Congress held in Australia (Gregory 1923). He was still arguing for magmatic water in 1927, when at the summer meeting of the Institution of Water Engineers, held at Glasgow on 10 September, he gave the source of underground water as meteoric, connate and plutonic (Gregory 1927). Following the more recent use of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes to identify the source of artesian waters, almost every instance examined has turned out to be of local meteoric origin, so Gregory was mistaken. Characteristically, Gregory did not allow this difference of scientific interpretation to sour his personal relationships with those who disagreed with him. For instance, he and David were still writing to each other in 1929 (Branagan 2005) and David paid for Gregory’s accommodation in Sydney during the 1914 BA Meeting (Branagan, pers. comm. 2009).

THE AUSTRALIAN YEARS: PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AND MINERALOGY AT MELBOURNE 1900–1904

The start of geography textbook writing According to Lim (1975), Gregory was approached by the Director of Education in Victoria and asked if he would write some geography texts for school use dealing with the geography of Australasia, as the only texts available, and therefore those used, were British based, with most emphasis on the British Isles and Europe, which most of the pupils had never seen, and hardly dealt with local geography. Gregory responded by producing five booklets entitled The Austral Geographies; Classes ii, iii, iv, v and vi. (Gregory 1903f) and also a book on The Teaching of Geography (Gregory 1903g) that summarized for teachers the considerations which had guided the production of the five booklets, which were intended for primary school use. These were the first of a number of geography texts that he continued to produce almost until his death. It seems probable that the request to write The Austral Geographies came partly as result of the glowing feedback from school teachers who had attended Gregory’s 1902 series of university extension lectures on the subject. However, it is clear from letters between Gregory and Edith Chaplin that Gregory was working on the geography books in 1901 before he gave the extension lectures and he almost certainly tailored the lectures, which he used as the basis for the books, to the school geography curricula in Victoria. Edith Chaplin seems to have encouraged Gregory to earn royalties by writing such books and even participated in some of the writing to the extent of referring to ‘my first Australian geography book’ (letter to Audrey dated 20 November 1901). Gregory must have submitted some of the drafts to Audrey’s parents for improvement and comment because a letter from Audrey’s mother to Audrey dated 13 October 1901, records ‘Father has been helping me over Jack’s Geographical notes, he dictating, while I write a fair copy . . . but I have used up all my nice writing paper in the cause’. The 59-year old Ayrton Chaplin, was an experienced professional school teacher and his wife may well have taught when they had their own schools, whereas Gregory had no school teaching experience. It was wise of Gregory to consult them and ensure that the level of presentation was appropriate; no doubt it was partly responsible for their long continued success. Another letter, from Gregory to Edith Chaplin, dated 25 February 1902 and written on the train from Ballarrat to Castlemaine states

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‘That reminds me of the Geogr. Textbooks. I am tinkering at them at intervals & have got the Education Dept schedules in Geogr. The present Minister of Education is crusading against school books not printed in Victoria. That may give ours a chance when they are ready’. So Gregory either offered to write the books or engineered an invitation to write them having deduced that a ready market existed. Andrew John Herbertson (1865 –1915) (1903) who reviewed the six volumes for Nature was mildly complimentary of the scheme in general, although he criticized the absence of a description of the climate of the countries concerned thereby ‘losing more than half the educational value through this neglect. Professor Gregory’s scheme, as developed in the ‘Austral Geographies,’ is to begin with a plan of table, schoolroom, school. &c., leading to a map, directions, seasons, clouds, rivers, land forms . . . a brief description of Victoria, and a few lines about other Australian States and the continents. In each succeeding book some sections of physiography are discussed, and are followed by a description of (a) Australasia in Class iii., (b) the continents ending with Australia in Class iv., (c) the British Empire in Class v., (d) Europe, U.S.A., Japan, Pacific Archipelagoes, and world trade routes in Class vi.’

What riled Herbertson (1903) most was Gregory’s statement that ‘geography is not a science, but a branch of knowledge which may be taught scientifically . . . its subject matter is description drawn from observation; it is not a search for underlying principles, nor a discovery of ultimate causes.’ This Herbertson totally disagreed with and accused Gregory of excluding scientific geography from his descriptive pages. However, it seems that the books were a significant improvement on those available before in the schools of Victoria. They went into a second edition within a year, and their adoption encouraged Gregory to continue writing in this field and even as late as the 1920s he revised them for continued use in schools. He also became an external examiner in geography at secondary level (Lim 1975), presumably at private schools, as no state secondary school system then existed in Victoria (Selleck 2003). Scarcely had the above six books or booklets appeared than the 290-page ‘The Geography of Victoria: Historical, Physical and Political’ was published (Gregory 1903h). This was a masterly summary, written in an engagingly simple style with all the important names needed to be remembered printed bold, and with 116 illustrations. It again drew on the course of university extension lectures that he had given in Melbourne in

Fig 13.11. Reproduction of Audrey Gregory’s sketch over the volcanic plains of Western Victoria, made from Gnotuk, near Camperdown, Victoria, being the frontispiece of ‘The Geography of Victoria’ (Gregory 1903h).

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Fig. 13.12. Address (original 41  59 cm) presented to Gregory by over 30 staff and the Minister of Mines upon his resignation from the Directorship of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 12 September 1904. Hand painted by the renowned Melbourne artist, Herbert Woodhouse (1855–1920) with inset scenes of Victoria and photographs of the subscribers and Gregory. By permission of the School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne.

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Fig. 13.12. Continued.

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1902 and the Preface, dated June 1903, and a late insertion in proof on page 91, dated 18 May 1903, shows that the bulk of the book was written before May 1903, possibly the last parts of it while convalescing from his operation in Tasmania, although the infection was in his right hand. How he managed to produce seven geography books in one year, plus all his other publications and activities, is a wonder of midnight oil, dedicated persistent hard work, and, as noted above, much writing done before 1902. Imaginative thinking about geography teaching so as to interest the pupils, were features of both these books and his own teaching. Audrey must have accompanied her husband on the occasion of the painting of Figure 13.11, although in the Preface Gregory excuses his lack of travelling throughout Victoria during any of the preceding summer vacations. This book was an outstanding success, with a second edition printed in 1913 and was a prescribed secondary school text in Victoria until the 1930s (Lim 1975). It probably made significant royalties for Gregory. In Part I, Historical Geography, four chapters deal with the situation, discovery and colonization of Victoria. In Part II, Physical Geography, nine chapters deal with the Victorian coast, land forms, mountains, plateaus, basins and plains, evolution of the river systems, one of the longest accounts that continues into the lakes, earthquakes, extinct volcanoes and the weather of Victoria and its causes. In Part III, Political Geography, eight chapters concern the establishment of the state, the aborigines, the colonists, the pastoral occupation, the mines, the railways, irrigation and water supply and future development. This is a thoroughly good textbook, dedicated to ‘E.E.C. who taught me—among much else—to realize the educational value of geography’. E.E.C. was Edith Elizabeth Chaplin, Audrey’s mother and the dedication shows the warm and rather unusual relationship, including much intellectual discussion by letter, that existed between Gregory and his mother-in-law. Possibly as a spin-off from the geography textbook writing, Gregory also managed to find the time to write a simple account of how geysers work (Gregory 1903i). In Martin Conway’s 1919 nomination of Gregory for an RGS award, Conway listed the Austral Geographies and, in addition, a series of Geographical primers for New Zealand schools, namely, The Imperial Geography for New Zealand Schools (Gregory 1905a) with Standard II, 63 pp, Standards III–IV, 128 pp, Standards V –VI, 148 pp and Geographical Readers, Standard III, 152 pp, Standard IV, 234 pp and Standard V – VI, 322 pp, making a total of well over 1000 pages of New Zealand geography text alone. These have not been examined but are presumably slightly modified versions, for New Zealand use, of their Australian counterparts. Their later date indicates preparation during 1904 or 1905, probably following Gregory’s visit to New Zealand in early 1904, and the books acknowledge the assistance of ‘prominent members of the local teaching profession’. Although (Gregory’s 1902) series of extension lectures in Geography at Melbourne, and his subsequent production of the above books in 1903, predated the moves made by David in Sydney in 1903 when David devoted one of his Sydney University extension lectures to the theme of the teaching of geography, it should be appreciated that David had included some geography in his 1900–1 undergraduate lectures (Branagan 2005) and Sydney University clearly taught geography to its undergraduates before Melbourne. Geography was not a traditionally-recognized subject in the classics-oriented British education and had to fight for recognition. However, Gregory’s activities in Melbourne may well have triggered the moves in its rival Sydney to produce the nearly identically named and equally successful Geography of New South Wales – Historical, Physiographical and Economic (David et al. 1912) to match Melbourne’s Geography of Victoria, but it took several authors and nine years for Sydney to equal Gregory’s (1903h) output (Branagan 2005).

‘The Mount Lyell Mining Field, Tasmania’ This 172-page comprehensive account of the pyritous Mount Lyell deposit in western Tasmania, with its typical 4% Cu and minor gold and silver, was intended to be the first of a number of studies of Australian mines with the intention of preserving the geological facts about the deposit before they were completely removed by the mining (Gregory 1905b). The book gives a short history of the mining, describes the ore bodies and country rocks with plans, cross-sections, chemical analyses, illustrations of many thin sections of the rocks and concludes that the deposit originated from pyritous solutions moving up and along faults, especially the Great Lyell Fault system, and permeating the country rock where it had been greatly fractured, particularly near conglomerate –schist contacts. Gregory included a brief survey of other important pyritic ore fields, Rio Tinto (S. Spain), Rammelsberg (Germany), and Ducktown (Tennessee). He was greatly helped by the mining and railway companies and included much mining data supplied to him. Later he described the method of smelting the ore (Gregory 1906a).

‘The Ballarat East Gold-Field’ This substantial 33  20 cm account (Gregory 1907) in over 50 pages with 14 photographs of the Mines, 32 photographs of thin sections (by H. J. Grayson), 27 detailed mine plans (by W. Baragwanath) and 29 figures in the text, details the discovery, the exploration, the exploitation and the geology of the goldfield including the origin of the gold and the nature of ‘The Indicators’ which gave a clue to some of the richest in-situ deposits after the alluvial phase of the mining. Gregory also suggested the future direction of exploitation of the goldfield. There is no date of submission and although much of it was probably written in Australia, Gregory may well have finished the bulk of it (together with Gregory 1905a) on his voyage back to Britain in 1904 as his time immediately before leaving Australia was occupied with completing reports, the Mt Lyell book and other matters. Most of the Ballarat account was based on written unpublished reports and publications made by previous workers and Geological Survey colleagues. Gregory’s main contribution was the overall synthesis plus the study (with numerous thin sections) of the structure and chloritic nature of ‘The Indicators’. Gregory rejected the lateral secretion theory, whereby the gold was supposedly concentrated into lodes from that originally deposited in a dispersed manner in the host Lower Palaeozoic rocks of the area, because of the work of Dr J. R. Don (1897) of Otago. Don had shown by his ‘accurate research that the country rocks of Ballarat contain no gold unless they also contain pyrites’. The pyrite, Gregory’s thin sections confirmed, was secondary, post-dating the cleavage and so, by implication, was the gold. Gregory thought the gold originally rose in solutions from below, along fault planes and breccia zones, and with quartz and pyrite, had slowly replaced the country rocks. The ultimate source was the plutonic solutions so often invoked by Gregory. However, his account was not without controversy, as mentioned later.

Gregory’s resignation and departure from Melbourne As recorded in C. J. Gregory (mss), Audrey’s mother and father came out to visit Melbourne from August 1902 until May 1903. Edith Chaplin’s letters to Audrey had often discussed a visit by Audrey’s parents but Audrey’s poor health accelerated the decision to visit. In early February 1902, Audrey was taken ill with a combination of inflammation around the appendix and a ‘reflexed uterus’ thought to be connected with a tear suffered giving birth previously. An operation was necessary when she

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was well enough (letter from Gregory to Edith of 11 February 1902). In early April a successful operation was carried out and Audrey recovered very quickly with Gregory visiting her in hospital three times a day, postponing various visits for the Survey and cabling the good news to Edith after several days when recovery was certain (letter from Gregory to Edith of 15 April 1902). However, this was not the only health problem inflicting Audrey as Edith had guessed from Audrey’s letters that something unspecified was wrong. They were not reassured by what they found. One evening Gregory was talking enthusiastically to Edith Chaplin about his work and the future in Australia. She said to him ‘Well, Jack, if you stay in Australia you will have to carry out your plans alone, for you won’t have Audrey’. Audrey’s impaired lungs suffered under the heat and dust of Australia; even her early letters home must have noted the adverse effects of dust storms on her breathing (letter dated 8 May 1901 from E. Chaplin to Audrey). The surprise with which Gregory received this advice suggests that Audrey herself had not hitherto revealed to Gregory how serious the problem was. Gregory had an unusual relationship with Edith Chaplin, not at all like the conventional mother-in-law and son-in-law, for he had known her from his school days and corresponded with her from before his courtship of Audrey had begun. He obviously respected her opinion and took her warning seriously, and as a devoted husband, despite his many absences, began to think of trying to get a job back in Britain. Audrey’s parents obviously did not expect an imminent move because, in a letter dated 31 December [1903], Edith wrote ‘Now I know how easy the journey is I might come out for a short visit via the Cape’. As Audrey and the children had long planned an extended return visit to England in 1904, Edith must have been thinking of some time in 1905 or later. In the writer’s view, all the factual indications are that Gregory intended to stay in Australia until the question of Audrey’s health was raised with him. Thus he wrote (Gregory 1906) that the Lake Eyre expedition was intended to be the first of several such explorations of central Australia. By the time these words actually appeared in the ‘Dead Heart’ book, he knew that the hope would not be fulfilled; presumably he wanted his previous intention recorded. The same was true of his stated intention to keep the bibliography of the economic geology of Victoria up to date by producing further updates each decade (Gregory 1907a), which again was retained despite him being in Glasgow by the time it was published. Both of these aspirations express commitments that were not contingent upon the success of university funding of his department. His own teaching and research record without much funding was spectacular, and Gregory would have continued in Melbourne for some time if Audrey’s health had not been the prime consideration. However, Gregory’s almost total lack of success in persuading the university to provide him with adequate departmental accommodation, or to found an Australian School of Mining, gave him justified professional reasons to obtain a post elsewhere which had better prospects, and such a position became available in Glasgow University and Gregory’s application was successful. According to Lim (1975) and Branagan & Lim (1984), Gregory resigned his Melbourne Chair on 10 June 1904 with a letter that included: ‘If there was any prospect of the University providing an adequate Geological Laboratory I would have preferred to remain in Victoria. But when I received the invitation to accept the new Chair of Geology in connection with the engineering school of Glasgow University . . . and no prospect of a laboratory within the next five years and possibly not then, I reluctantly decided to accept their invitation.’. He continued ‘I have not cared to harass the Council during the recent financial troubles by an unseasonable restatement of the needs of the Geology School; and I can only offer this explanation of the reasons that have led me to accept the Glasgow Chair in the hope that they may help to secure better accommodation and equipment for my successor than it has been possible to provide during the past five years’.

He made no mention whatsoever of his wife’s health, presumably because it would have blunted the support he hoped he had ensured

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for his successor, (who was to be Ernest William Skeats (1875 – 1953), Professor of Geology & Mineralogy, 1904– 41) but also because it might have lessened the professionalism of his resignation. Gregory’s resignation caused a rumpus in the university. It seemed the lack of support for geology and the rejection of Gregory’s very reasonable requests had resulted in the loss of a prestigious scientist. He had made a considerable mark on geological, geographical and mining understanding in Victoria and Australia, was influential in government (not only through his Directorship of the Geological Survey but also through advisory committees), was publishing much that brought the university great credit, was an FRS, a really forward-looking innovative and popular professor who would not easily be replaced by someone of such outstanding merit. Thus ‘the press was indignant and the Council shocked . . . one of the greatest blows to have fallen upon the university.’ An exasperated (Henry Bournes) Higgins ((1851 –1929) of the Council and later Attorney General of Australia) exclaimed that ‘in one of the chief mining countries of the world, we have not proper appliances to teach. I think it is a very grave disgrace to us’ (Selleck 2003). Ironically, the university’s financial position showed prospects of improvement in 1904. In May 1904 the Fink Commission on the university produced its final report. Since the Dickson fraud had only been possible because the Government auditors had failed in their duties of auditing the university’s accounts, the Government itself was partly to blame and the report recommended a permanent annual endowment of £24 000 plus £27 735 for equipping laboratories and £5140 paid over five or six years to repair badly neglected buildings. In exchange, the university would focus on subjects crucial to the state’s economy: agriculture, mining, electrical engineering, architecture, metallurgy, commerce and dentistry. This proposed re-orientation met with the approval of the new Premier of Victoria (since 16 February 1904), Thomas Bent (1838 –1906), who was more helpful than his predecessor, Alexander James Peacock (in office 10 June 1902 until 16 February 1904). Bent had actually toured the university’s laboratories, saying ‘Where is poverty? – until he reached the Geology Laboratory. ‘This is poverty’ he had then exclaimed’ (Selleck 2003). After negotiations between the Government and the university, Bent introduced a Surplus Revenue Bill on 7 July 1904 that included £10 000 to reduce the university’s debt, and £2000 towards mining and agricultural equipment, and promised a further £12 000 towards a mining & agricultural building, provided the same sum could be raised by the university through public subscription. Bent also requested a report on how to advance agricultural and mining technical education in Victoria, and appointed Samuel Williamson Wallace (1855 – 1932), Director of the Victorian Department of Agriculture, the dynamic Frank Tate (1864 – 1939), a Melbourne graduate who since 1902 had been the State’s first Director of Education, and Gregory, who as Director of the Geological Survey and Professor of Geology, Bent clearly trusted, to carry out the task. The report was published on 31 August (shortly before Gregory departed) in Melbourne’s newspaper, The Age. It called for the state to provide selected boys with the means to continue to study at a ‘continuation school for scholarship holders, in conjunction with a proposed junior training college for teachers.’ (There was much political opposition to the establishment of state secondary schools so the name was avoided.) From such schools entry to university could be achieved, with the state ‘nominating, say, twenty students each year to the university classes in mining and agriculture’ and funding their university studies. A Faculty of Agriculture and a BSc in agriculture should be offered by the university. As regards mining, in addition to the existing mining degree intended for the training of senior men, the university should offer a diploma to students who had studied for two years at a mining or Working Men’s College, and who had practical

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experience in a commercial mine (The Age, 31 August 1904). This report led in October to the University Act (1904) in which the university would be provided with £20 000 a year for ten years in exchange for scientific and laboratory training in agriculture and mining, plus £1000 a year for evening lectures in mining, agriculture and education. Gregory warned the university before the passing of the Act that the government would be watching closely to ensure the funds voted for agriculture and mining were spent on those purposes. Thus Gregory achieved much, although it was only implemented after he left, and did not directly help either him or the Geology Department. The Mining and Metallurgy Building was completed in 1906. It included a laboratory and museum for geology and a battery house, later filled with a three-stamp battery when the Minister of Mines presented a collection of mining material to the university (Selleck 2003). This was too late for Gregory, and still did not provide a geology building; however, it is arguable that without Gregory’s influence, the boost for mining and agriculture would never have been accomplished so soon. Understandably, the university authorities sought in public to minimize the loss of Gregory, as described by Branagan & Lim (1984), but in private used it to obtain funds from the Government. There is no question that Gregory was enormously popular among his acquaintances, friends, students and colleagues and his departure from Australia was a general matter of regret among most who knew him. Thus on 12 September 1904, almost on the eve of his retirement from being Director of the Geological Survey of Victoria, he was presented with an illuminated address by the Minister for Mines and the staff of the Survey and related Mines department in which no fewer than 35 photographic portraits of his colleagues appear, plus that of Gregory himself, together with scenes from Victoria. This (Fig. 13.12) now hangs in the Melbourne University Department of Earth Sciences. The address includes the words ‘We desire to state that during your Directorship your unfailing courtesy, kindness, and tact, under all circumstances have endeared you to us all, and you vacate your position with our sincere regret. We wish you every success in your new sphere of action in Glasgow, and trust you may be granted continued health and strength, to render there that eminent service to the cause of science which has so conspicuously marked your career in Australia’. Even 12 years after Gregory’s departure, a postcard from Victoria conveying good wishes and greetings to him for the New Year of 1917, shows the warmth of feeling towards him extending beyond his immediate colleagues, as the sender is not included in Figure 13.13. Gregory did not intend to slip away quietly. After completing his teaching for the academic year, and burning the midnight and early morning oil as he toiled to complete his book on the Mount Lyell Mining Field (Gregory 1905b), submitted on 30 August 1904, and the report for Bent noted above, he sailed on the P&O liner Himalaya on 15 September 1904. The very next day an article by Gregory (1904f ) appeared in The Age about teaching and mining education, lambasting the obsolete teaching methods in use in the university, the emphasis on lecturing and how, at the University of Chicago, where he claimed there were no lectures, teaching was much more advanced. One suspects his emphasis on learning through practical work in the laboratory and field in part stemmed from his early Montessori schooling plus his own experience of learning what he found he needed to know. He wrote that he would have included still more practical aspects such as studies of building stones if he had stayed and he concluded the article with ‘I came out here quite prepared to stay and it was of course my ambition to help the development of an Australian School of Mining Geology’. Only three days later on 19 September, a further article appeared outlining Gregory’s proposed ‘Mining Policy for Victoria’ in which the need for technical training was emphasized (Gregory 1904g). Both of these articles provoked considerable correspondence but, like most newspaper ephemera, this died down

Fig. 13.13. Reproduction of a postcard of The Egg Rock, Mt Buffalo, Victoria, sent to Gregory in 1916 with ‘a reminder that you are [still] affectionately remembered here outside the circle of your immediate scientific interests’ from A. D. Hardy of the Forestry Department, Melbourne.

quickly whereas Gregory’s parting shot (but not his final Australian publication by any means), which appeared in The Argus, on 22 September, had further repercussions. This was an article on the supposed saddle reef origin of the Broken Hill ore body, which being in New South Wales, was outside the purview of the Victorian Survey. These views conflicted with those of geologists familiar with the ore body and mines. E. F. Pittman, Government Geologist for NSW and J. B. Jaquet (b. 1867), Chief Inspector of Mines for NSW, wrote a letter published on 3 October in The Argus, opposing Gregory’s views, which they attributed to a flying visit to Broken Hill which had not allowed for very careful investigations.

Assessment Gregory’s main achievements while in Australia were to make major improvements to the teaching of geology and mining geology in the University of Melbourne and to enthuse the students with his dedication and interest in almost everything geological and geographical. He wrote textbooks to support the teaching of Australasian geography in Victoria and other Australian states

THE AUSTRALIAN YEARS: PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AND MINERALOGY AT MELBOURNE 1900–1904

and New Zealand; he suggested and implemented significant improvements to the Victorian Geological Survey while retaining the goodwill of the staff, a most difficult task; he initiated a series of academic studies of Australian mines with a view to recording the geology and seeking to explain the genesis of the ores; he lead, and published a newspaper account of (later an iconic book on) the Lake Eyre expedition; and he published widely on a range of other geographical and geological topics. He was like a breath of fresh air in the university and Survey. While bringing great distinction to the university with his FRS, he added to this by having the respect of Government ministers who appointed him to specific advisory committees and by the impression of a practical man conveyed to both ministers and those such as George McArthur, which brought great benefit to the university. With time, Gregory became recognized in Australia as a pioneer vertebrate palaeontology collector, and four of Gregory’s substantial publications deal with Australian topics, those on the Mount Lyell and Ballarat mines, the Economic Geology bibliography and the immensely popular ‘The Dead Heart of Australia’, books (respectively Gregory 1905b, 1907, 1907a, 1906). He wrote about Australia for over 20 years; mostly after he had left Melbourne. All these things served as a reminder for many years of what had been lost with his departure. The fact that the stated reason for his resignation (but not the real reason), of inadequate university support for Gregory’s department, was demonstrably true, put the university in an unfavourable position. The words of Thomas Bent ‘This is poverty’ (Selleck 2003) must have remained with the senior ranks of Melbourne University for some time for Selleck to record them a century later. Nevertheless, the blame for the lack of support for Gregory’s department must lie with Dickson for depriving the university with the means to fulfil its intentions for improvements which it had signalled with the appointment of Gregory at £1000 a year. In explaining Gregory’s outstanding publication record while in Australia, eight major factors can be identified. First, compared with for instance Africa, there was the ordered peaceful and healthy state of the country, without dangerous wild animals or hostile tribes, and with good communications. Second, the lack of the bureaucracy that now occupies so much of university and Survey staff time; no Head of a University Department or Survey Director could now spend the time Gregory did on research, still less incommunicado on so much fieldwork. Third, Gregory did not have to waste the enormous amount of potential research time now fruitlessly expended on applying for grants to do research. Fourth, his domestic situation, including most of the child-raising, was largely handled by Audrey, or the servants she employed. Nevertheless, since all these factors were common to most Australian men at this time, the following final four were crucial in Gregory’s relative success. Fifth, Gregory retained an astonishingly wide range of interests within geology and geography and often proposed original solutions even if unpopular and subsequently shown to be wrong, that is, he was a stimulating scientist to be with. He was never one to be abashed by being in a minority of one. Sixth, he was unusually full of energy, required only a few hours sleep each night, and was, at 36– 40 years old, at the height of his powers, with incredible writing skills honed by over a decade of practice and experience in both scientific writing and popular journalism. Seventh, he had an unusually good memory for significant detail which enabled him to cite, verbally and in print, the facts that supported some proposition. Finally, he had the driving determination, discipline, dedication to science and regularity of routine to apply his energy to teaching and research and conscientiously writing the results up for publication, and was not diverted, as many others have been into politicking or administration. But he did not allow this determination to let him ride roughshod over his colleagues and acquaintances, as some driven workers would have done; all the indications are that he was friendly, relaxed, available for consultation, stimulating to his

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students and concerned about their progress, eager for scientific discussion with both his peers and students, courteous and good company, and willing to make some general contribution as a citizen, such as being Chairman of a Wages Board. Above all, he enjoyed Australia and the lack of the stifling English class structure, and throughout the rest of his life he wrote in support of keeping what he considered were the characteristics of Australian life as he perceived it. All these aspects made his departure a real loss to his colleagues, even though it eventually precipitated improvements to the Department of Geology that he had not been able to achieve while there.

References Branagan, D. F. 2005. T.W. Edgeworth David A Life. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Branagan, D. F. & Lim, E. 1984. J. W. Gregory, traveller in the dead heart. Historical Records of Australian Science, 6, 71– 84. Campbell, J. M. 1910. The origin of laterite. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 19, 432–457. Darragh, T. A. 1987. The Geological Survey of Victoria under Arthur Selwyn, 1852– 1868. Historical Records of Australian Science, 7, 1– 25. David, T. W. E. (ed.) Jose, A. W., Taylor, G. & Woolnough, W. G. 1912. Geography of New South Wales–Historical, Physiographical and Economic. Whitcomb & Tombs, London & Melbourne. DeVogel, S. B., Magee, J. W., Manley, W. F. & Miller, G. H. 2004. A GIS-based reconstruction of late Quaternary paleohydrology: Lake Eyre, arid central Australia. Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology, 204, 1 –13. Don, J. R. 1897. The genesis of certain auriferous lodes. Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, 27, 610– 656. Fink, T. 1904. Royal Commission on the University of Melbourne, Final Report on Government, Teaching Work, and Finance with appendices. Melbourne. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: a sketch. Privately printed. Gregory, J. W. 1889. On a new species of the Genus Protaster (P. Brisingoides) from the Upper Silurian of Victoria, Australia. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 6, 24– 27. Gregory, J. W. 1890. Some additions to the Australian Tertiary Echinoidea. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 481–492. Gregory, J. W. 1892. Further additions to Australian fossil Echinoidea. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 9, 433–437. Gregory, J. W. 1895. Recent contributions to the geology of the Western Alps. Science Progress, 3, 147–174. Gregory, J. W. 1896. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London. Reprinted in 1968. The Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1901. Cyphaspis spryi, a new species of trilobite from the Silurian of Melbourne. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 13 (New Series), 179– 182. Gregory, J. W. 1901a. The Foundation of British East Africa. Horace Marshall & Son, London. Gregory, J. W. 1902. The Geology of Mount Macedon, Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 14 (New Series), 185– 217. Gregory, J. W. 1902a. Some remains of an extinct kangaroo in the dune-rock of the Sorrento Peninsula, Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 14 (New Series), 139–144. Gregory, J. W. 1902b. The West Indian eruptions: the whole world trembled: the crust we live on; Australia’s safety. The Argus, June 7th 1902. Gregory, J. W 1902c. The Lake Eyre Basin: question of flooding from the sea. The Argus, 5 July 1902. Gregory, J. W. 1902d. Scientific Literature; the International Catalogue. The Age, 13 September 1902. Gregory, J. W. 1902e. The factors that control the depth of ore deposits. Transactions of the Australasian Institute of Mining Engineers, 8, 127– 154.

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Gregory, J. W. 1903. Artesian water in Victoria. The Argus, 8 January 1903. Gregory, J. W. 1903a. The Geology of the Berry Lead at Spring Hill and Central Leads. Bulletins of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 1. Department of Mines, Victoria. Gregory, J. W. 1903b. The age of the metamorphic rocks of NorthEastern Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 15 (New Series), 123– 131. Gregory, J. W. 1903c. The Heathcotian –a pre-Ordovician series– and its distribution in Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 15 (New Series), 148–175. Gregory, J. W. 1903d. Instructions for the use of the aneroid barometer. Bulletins of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 8. Department of Mines, Victoria. Gregory, J. W. 1903e. Some features in the geography of Northwestern Tasmania. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 15 (New Series), 177–183. Gregory, J. W. 1903f. The Austral Geographies, Classes ii, iii, iv, v and vi (5 vols; 46, 48, 116, 112 & 144 pp respectively). Whitcombe & Tombs, London & Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1903g. The Teaching of Geography. Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd, London & Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1903h. The Geography of Victoria: Historical, Physical and Political. Whitcombe & Tombs. London & Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1903i. How geysers work. Review of Reviews (Australasian Edition for Schools), 1903, 244–247. Gregory, J. W. 1904. Note on the desiccation of the world. The Argus, 1 May 1904. Gregory, J. W. 1904a. Note on the Mosley Commission report. The Argus, 10 June 1904. Gregory, J. W. 1904b. The glacial geology of Tasmania. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 60, 37 – 53. Gregory, J. W. 1904c. The first record of glacial action in Tasmania. Nature, 70, 101–102. Gregory, J. W. 1904d. The Climate of Australasia in Reference to its Control by the Southern Ocean. Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd., Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1904e. The antiquity of Man in Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 17, (New Series), 120–144. Gregory, J. W. 1904f. Teaching and mining education. The Age, 16 September 1904. Gregory, J. W. 1904g. Mining policy for Victoria. The Age, 19 September 1904. Gregory, J. W. 1904h. Origin of the Broken Hill ore body. The Argus, 22 September 1904. Gregory, J. W. 1905. The Southern Ocean and its climatic control over Australasia. Transactions of The Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Proceedings of Section E, 329– 349. Gregory, J. W. 1905a. The Imperial Geography for New Zealand Schools Standard II, 63pp; Standards III –IV, 128pp; Standard V –VI, 148pp. Geographical Readers [for New Zealand schools] Standard III, 152pp; Standard IV, 234pp; Standard V– VI, 322pp. Whitcombe & Tombs, Christchurch, New Zealand. Gregory, J. W. 1905b. The Mount Lyell mining field, Tasmania; with some account of the geology of other pyritic ore bodies. The Australasian Institute of Mining Engineers, 10, 26 –196. Also issued separately as a book of 172pp.

Gregory, J. W. 1906. The Dead Heart of Australia. A Journey Around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 1901– 2 with some Account of the Lake Eyre Basin and the Flowing Wells of Central Australia. John Murray, London. Gregory, J. W. 1906a. The geological plans of some Australian mining-fields. Science Progress, 1, (New Series) 117–136. Gregory, J. W. 1907. The Ballarat East Gold-Field, with plans of the mines by Wm. Baragwanath. Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 4. Gregory, J. W. 1907a. A contribution to the bibliography of the economic geology of Victoria. Records of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 2, Part 3. Gregory, J. W. 1907b. The Mount Cudgewa Tin-field. Bulletins of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 22. Gregory, J. W. 1911. The flowing wells of central Australia. Geographical Journal, 38, 34 – 59, 157– 181. Gregory, J. W. 1914. The Kynuna Wells –a test case of rock pressure. Economic Geology, 9, 768– 775. Gregory, J. W. 1916. Australia. Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature, 90. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gregory, J. W. 1916a. The flowing wells of Western Queensland. Queensland Geographical Journal, 30, 1– 29. Gregory, J. W. 1923. On recent records from the flowing wells of Eastern Australia. Proceedings of the Pan-American Science Congress Australia, 1291– 1296. Gregory, J. W. 1927. Origin and distribution of underground water. British Waterworks Association Circular, 69, 644– 671. See also Sources of Underground Water, Nature, 120, 383. Gregory, J. W. & Smith, F. V. 1903. A new ammonite from the Cretaceous rocks of Queensland. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 15 (New Series), 141– 144. Herbertson, A. J. 1903. Geography as a science. Nature, 69, 195– 196. Hutchinson, H. N., Gregory, J. W. & Lydekker, R. 1900. Living Races of Mankind: A Popular Illustrated Account of the Customs, Habits, Pursuits, Feasts and Ceremonies of the Races of Mankind Throughout the World. Vols 1 & 2. Hutchinson & Co, London. Lim, E. 1975. Biographical note on John Walter Gregory. MS thesis, University of Melbourne. Morrison, I. 2003. The Baker of Maldon. Catalogue of a Baillieu Library Exhibition commemorating the Centenary of the George McArthur bequest, 1903. University of Melbourne. Pittman, E. F. 1907. Problems of the artesian supply of Australia with special reference to Professor Gregory’s theory. Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 41, 100– 139. Rich, P. V. & Van Tets, G. F. (eds) 1985. Kadimakara: Extinct vertebrates of Australia. Pioneer Design Studio Pty. Ltd, Victoria, Australia. Selleck, R. J. W. 2003. The Shop: The University of Melbourne 1850– 1939. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. White, E. I. 1925. Two new fossil species of Epiceratodus from South Australia. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 9, 16, 139– 146. White, O. 1978. The Super-Roo of Mungalongaloo. Puffin Books, Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Victoria.

Chapter 14 Appointment as Professor of Geology at the University of Glasgow

Appointment The University of Glasgow archives contain a printed application, dated 17 May 1904, by Professor John Walter Gregory, DSc, FRS, FGS for the new Chair of Geology in the University of Glasgow which was submitted on his behalf by his sister Anne J. Nicholson, acting as attorney for Gregory, and Arthur Smith Woodward (Hon. LL D Glasgow, FRS & Keeper in the Geology Department of the NHM; Fig. 14.1), as authorized by cablegram from Gregory himself. Once again his elder sister, who was close to him throughout his life, helped him as did Woodward. His application listed his experience and achievements chronologically of which only a few items are repeated here. ‘Obtained first place in Honours for Geology in BSc 1891, University of London . . . 1887 –1900 extremely varied experience in Palaeontology in BM(NH) . . . 1900 succeeded the late Sir Frederick McCoy as Professor of Geology in the University of Melbourne and since 1901 has also held office as Director of the Geological Survey of Victoria . . . 1900 Selected as Director of the Civilian Staff of the British Antarctic Expedition but did not accept the office . . . has visited nearly all the principal Universities and Geological Museums in Europe and North America and is well acquainted with the nature of the work in progress . . . 1892 Awarded the 1892 Lyell Fund, Sir A. Geikie addressed him “You have shown yourself to be at once an accomplished palaeontologist and an able petrographer”; 1894 Cuthbert Peek Award from Royal Geographic Society for geographic work in East Africa; 1894 selected to deliver one of the evening discourses at the BA in Oxford . . . member of the Royal Society subcommittees for Geology and Palaeontology in connection with the International Catalogue; 1892– 1900 Assistant Examiner in Physiography to the Science and Arts Dept [Univ. of London]; 1897 & 1898 Examiner in the Honours School of Natural Science at Oxford; For many years was actively associated with the work of Toynbee Hall in London’. The suggested referees were Prof J. W. Judd, FRS, Rev. Canon [Prof.] Bonney, FRS, and Emeritus Prof. Eduard Suess (University of Vienna) but these were not consulted. Printed testimonials were submitted from Sir Henry Hoyte Howarth (1842 –1923) FRS (JWG my friend . . . urbane and accessible, excellent and inspiring teacher and companion. Not possible to secure a more competent Professor . . .); Prof E. Ray Lankester, FRS, Director of the BM(NH) (special gifts and quality as a naturalist . . . work in geology first rate), Dr A. Smith Woodward, FRS (I have known JWG from the beginning of his career and associated with him for 13 years . . . wide knowledge . . . enthusiasm which cannot fail to be inspiring to students . . . broad grasp of the subject); Charles J. Martin, MD, Director of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, lately Prof. of Physiology, University of Melbourne (When Gregory came to the University of Melbourne four years ago, the geology department was in a sorry state. In two years he had made geology one of the most important and popular subjects in the university. As a lecturer he [has a] quiet, clear and finished style and his teaching of an enlightened character (viz based on plenty of field and laboratory work). Principal part in the organization of the School of Mining Engineering . . . during the last two years entirely re-organized the Geological Survey of Victoria for the State Government. His energy . . . was the admiration and envy of us all . . . ); Rev. Canon S. A. Barnett (1844 – 1913), MA, Warden of Toynbee Hall (Dr Gregory was intimately known to me during many years when he was associated with

the residents of this place. He is both able and humble, persistent in all his work and very tactful, conscientious and honourable, most agreeable as a fellow worker. He made many friends among all classes). From Mrs Nicholson (Gregory’s sister), a letter sent to her from Sir George Sydenham Clarke (1848 – 1933) FRS, late Governor of Victoria . . . ‘I cannot speak too highly of his work in Victoria, especially in connection with the reorganization of the Geological Survey . . .’ In commenting on the above, it is notable that Suess was a suggested referee. Gregory seems to have maintained correspondence with Suess, whom he admired immensely, over the subjects dealt with in ‘The Face of the Earth’ for many years. Martin’s account of the increase in the popularity of geology in Melbourne under Gregory was not reflected in the numbers of students taking pure geology, which remained static if Lim’s (1975) figures are correct, so the increase in popularity, if true, must have been in the geology for mining and other engineers course which Gregory also taught, and Martin may have been referring to Gregory’s success as a teacher both in geology and in the geography extension classes, rather than to numbers of students. Considering the total lack of success Gregory had over improving the accommodation for geology, it seems exaggerated to claim that Gregory had ‘made geology one of the most important and popular subjects in the University’. Martin was a close friend of Gregory. Although Gregory submitted testimonials for both his Melbourne and Glasgow applications, it is clear from his letter of 26 January 1897 to Geikie over the Oxford Chair, that he did ‘not like the system’ (of testimonials) (Edinburgh Univ. Geikie Archives). In view of Geikie’s influence, his Scottish connections and his past strong support for Gregory, it seems surprising that Geikie was not suggested as a referee. It is likely that Gregory was well aware that a Chair in Glasgow would attract applications from senior Geological Survey staff whom Geikie would have felt bound to support over Gregory. This possibility was specifically mentioned by Gregory in his letter to Geikie over the Oxford Chair, in which Gregory asked Geikie for support ‘if the matter should not rest between me and anyone who is one of your staff’. Accordingly, Gregory probably thought it was safer to use other referees who would have undivided loyalties. The reference to not accepting the office on the Antarctic Expedition was not strictly true as he had accepted it and had been paid for about a year before he resigned. However, three letters (in the possession of A. Mendell) written by Geikie to Smith Woodward (on 27 April, 4 and 17 May 1904 from 10 Chester Terrace, Regent’s Park) who had consulted Geikie about supporting Gregory’s application, show that Geikie was deeply involved in supporting Gregory, although totally surprised by his application. At this time, no one had more influence in geopolitics in the UK than Geikie, for although he had recently retired as Director General of the Geological Survey, he was Secretary to the Royal Society (1903 –8) and within a few years would be President (1908 – 12), and President of the GSL (1906 –8) for the second time. In addition, his Scottish birth, upbringing, roots, degrees and connections made his views particularly respected in Scotland. Geikie and Smith Woodward met to discuss the matter. Subsequently Geikie ascertained that the university appointing committee were unlikely to appoint without seeing the successful candidate, and were reluctant not to have the post filled for the beginning of the 1904 –5 session in October 1904. Geikie persuaded them that Gregory was such a good candidate

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 99–110. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.14

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Fig. 14.1. Dr Arthur Smith Woodward FRS, Gregory’s old NHM colleague who helped Gregory to secure the Glasgow Chair. By permission of the Geological Society, London.

that they should not miss him even if they could not interview him. The letters show that Geikie was, however, insistent on getting two assurances from Gregory before pressing his case. The first was that Gregory would definitely accept the post if offered to him, and the second was that he would stay for a reasonable period – evidently his short time in Melbourne at a time when people did not so readily move as now, raised the possibility that he might move on again after only a short time. Geikie also recognized in Gregory a talented man who might well be invited to a more senior post. Gregory must have given these assurances by telegram to Woodward and Geikie, as requested. Gregory was appointed without interview. The support of Geikie and Smith Woodward was crucial and must have convinced Principal Robert Herbert Story (1835 –1907) of the outstanding merits of Gregory if he neither consulted the referees nor demurred at Gregory’s slightly late arrival. The University of Glasgow archives show that the unsuccessful candidates were Philip Lake (1865 –1949), Thomas J. Jehu (1871 –1943), William F. Hume, J. G. Goodchild, Sidney H. Reynolds (1867 –1949), William Mackie (1856 – 1932), Percy F. Kendall and William S. Boulton (1867 –1954).

Background to the institution of the new Chair of Geology The University of Glasgow is the fourth oldest in Britain and Ireland being one of the five pre-Reformation universities and

was founded by a Papal Bull in 1451. Like all the older universities, it was, and is, a blend of conservatism (e.g. until the 1990s the principals had all been either graduates or members of the university before appointment) and innovation (e.g. in 1840 it was the first UK university to appoint a Professor of Engineering) with the industrial revolution that made Glasgow great, having a significant influence on the university. Glasgow in the 1900s was near, but just past, its industrial peak and claimed to be ‘the second city of the Empire’. Greater Glasgow’s coal mines, iron and steel foundries and chemical factories etc. fed the extensive Clyde-side shipbuilding, railway and locomotive engineering works that dispatched all over the world whole railway systems and Clyde-built ships that were synonymous with reliability and quality. Even as late as 1939 Clyde-side had more ship building capacity than the whole of the USA. All this coal-based industrial activity made the atmosphere above the city impenetrable, except during the July holidays, and blackened the cream and red sandstone buildings. At various times in the past, Adam Smith (1723 –90; classic economist); Joseph Black (1726 – 99; chemist and identifier of carbon dioxide); James Watt (1736 – 1819; perfector of the early steam engine), Joseph Lister (1827 –1912; pioneer with antiseptics), William Thomson FRS, later Lord Kelvin (1824 –1907; physicist and applied physics), and Frederick Soddy (1877 –1916, radiochemist and Nobel prize winner), were all one-time members of the university. The following brief summary of the background to the establishment of the new Chair of Geology in 1904 is taken from Leake with Durant (1993) which contains the references. Although Gregory was the first to be named Professor of Geology, in a new department, geology had been taught at Glasgow University since at least 1807, when George III founded the Regius Chair of Natural History. This Chair was founded against the wishes of the university and even those of the first holder of the Chair (!), which was conjoined with the duties of Keeper of the Collections in the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow. This was to safeguard the extensive collections of minerals, rocks, fossils, coins, paintings, prints, medieval and older manuscripts, medical curiosities and books, etc. left to the university in 1783 by the King’s friend and old Glasgow student, the anatomist William Hunter (1718 – 1783) FRS. The first two occupants of the Regius Chair made little impression on the study of geology but the third, Henry Darwin Rogers (1808 –1866), appointed in 1857, was an American geologist and brother to the renowned William Barton Rogers (1805 – 82). H. D. Rogers had surveyed New Jersey and then was appointed Director of the Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, whereas his brother surveyed Virginia. In 1842, the two jointly produced the first detailed geological map of the great Appalachian mountain chain, describing the long parallel anticlines and synclines. H. D. Rogers introduced field excursions, but died early in post in 1866 and was succeeded by another Survey geologist, this time from that of Great Britain. The remarkable John Young, (1835 – 1902) MD, lapsed into medical zoology and university administration, became an authority on old books and coins, sketched and painted, studied foreign literature, was very widely read in science and arts and undertook much work in the Hunterian Museum (Keppie 2007). What he published in geology was mainly in palaeontology and glacial geology. According to W. D. I. Rolfe (1966), Gregory purchased the library of the deceased John Young and donated it to the University Geology Departmental Library in 1908. Although the BSc degree was founded in Young’s time in 1872, after which graduation in geology was possible, until 1893, when the Faculty of Science was established, the Regius Professor of Natural History was a member of the Medical Faculty and had to also teach medical students anatomy and physiology. When Professor John Young died in 1902, the Regius Chair was renamed for Zoology and the noted zoologist (Sir) John Graham Kerr FRS (1869 –1957) was appointed and a Department of

APPOINTMENT AS PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

Zoology formed. This left the way open for the establishment of a separately named Chair and Department of Geology when an endowment of £15 000 was provided by the Carnegie and Bellahouston Trusts and others (University Court Ordinance of 12 February 1903). This guaranteed a salary of at least £600 a year, which could be supplemented according to other matters, such as student numbers. Thus Gregory had ‘a clean slate’ on which to build the new department but he was hardly a true ‘Foundation’ Professor. There was a substantial tradition of geological studies in the university with a few former graduates who were outstanding geologists such as John Horne (1848 –1928) FRS, who worked with Benjamin Neeve Peach (1842 – 1926) FRS, in geologically mapping the Moine Thrust and the Lewisian basement in NW Scotland. Like his predecessors in natural history, with the Chair of Geology were attached responsibilities in the Hunterian Museum of the university. The Hunterian Museum was Scotland’s first public museum, moved from London and opened in Scotland in 1807 (Keppie 2007), but Gregory’s responsibilities were restricted to the Geological Collections, which were substantial, a duty that his NHM experience fitted him better for than the training that any of his predecessors, or successors, received. From its medieval college buildings, which by the mid-19th century were immersed in the smoky, fume-ridden, slummy centre of Glasgow, the university and the university museum had moved in 1870 to a vast new east –west aligned edifice, made of on-site quarried Carboniferous sandstone, on Gilmorehill, ‘a breezy eminence at the extreme west end of the city’ according to The Times of 8 November 1870 (Fig. 14.2). Thus, unlike the situation in Melbourne, there was adequate, although not lavish, accommodation available for the teaching of geology, with impressive purpose-built facilities for the Hunterian Museum and University Library along the north side. Geology was located in the NE corner of the East Quadrangle which is now joined to the West Quadrangle by the enormous north –south Bute Hall with the Professor’s Square, containing the houses of many of the professors and the Principal’s Lodgings, to the west

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of the West Quadrangle. The whole was set in a park overlooking to the south the River Kelvin and eventually the Kelvingrove Museum. The space for geology had to be carved out of the old natural history accommodation of Prof. John Young, which had largely become zoology when the Regius Chair was re-named for Zoology, but Professor Kerr and Gregory got along very well and Kerr allowed Gregory to expand the geology accommodation as the student numbers in geology increased (Court & Senate papers, GU archives). Unlike Oxford and Cambridge, Glasgow University was never the preserve of the upper classes and had become particularly strong in training medical doctors, engineers and practical physicists, including the first Japanese students to study in the west, especially under the Professor of Natural Philosophy (physics), Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) who trained both the founder of the now great Mitsubishi Corporation and that of the Dutch Philips Company. It was Thomson who was President of the Glasgow Geological Society for a surprising 22 years, 1872– 1893, who put Glasgow University on the intellectual geological map with his calculations of the age of the Earth, which created great dissent, and his studies of the causes of sea-level variation, glaciers, tides, the age of the ocean basins and in showing that the Earth did not consist of a solid shell enclosing molten rock. Kelvin not only made substantial academic contributions in physics and geology, but by his applied work and patents on determining how to set magnetic compasses on the new iron ships and his improvements so that transatlantic cables became a practical possibility, not only became rich but set the seal in the university on being useful as well as academic. Kelvin, although retired, was still active and was Chancellor of Glasgow University when Gregory was appointed. It was into this environment that Gregory, effectively trained by Imperial College staff, and with his mining geology, Geological Survey, exploration and museum experience, arrived and fitted very well. A major attraction of the post in Glasgow, especially for Gregory, was that traditionally the academic year in Glasgow

Fig. 14.2. View of the main 1870 building of the University of Glasgow as it is today. With acknowledgements to the University of Glasgow.

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University extended only from early or mid-October until late March, leaving April until October, that is, six months, completely free for writing, fieldwork, travel and any other type of research.

Settling in In late February or March 1904, Audrey, her two children and ‘Jessie’ who travelled with them as a nanny (and returned later to Australia), embarked on the White Star Line’s Medic for England (C. J. Gregory mss). Gregory followed later in order to complete as much of the Melbourne academic year as possible, having stipulated that he could not begin in Glasgow until November 1904 (Gregory 1977). Initially, Audrey and the children stayed with her parents at Bassetts and the children did not come to Glasgow for over two years until Audrey and Gregory had moved into 4 Park Quadrant, about October 1906 (C. J. Gregory mss). At first Audrey and Gregory lived in Gibson Street, a few minutes walk to the university, until they found a satisfactory permanent home in which they remained during Gregory’s time in Glasgow. Almost as soon as Gregory reached Glasgow, he received a major boost as a new appointee by the notice of the award to him of the Bigsby Medal, by the GSL, the awarding Council of which included Lapworth, Geikie, Bather, Garwood and Judd, all of whom were familiar with his work. Prof. J. E. Marr (1857 –1933), President, in presenting the medal at the Annual Meeting on 17 February 1905, said: ‘The Bigsby Medal is awarded to you, as an acknowledgement of your eminent services to Geology, the result of work carried on in many parts of the world. The Founder of this Medal was himself a traveller . . . wandering over the greater part of the Canadas . . . He also did good work in his study . . . he would give a warm welcome to one who has earned this Award by work in the study and the museum, and by explorations carried out in many lands, exposed at times to the scorching sun of Africa, at others to the icy blast of Arctic climes. Worthy indeed are you to receive this Medal, which in terms of the Bequest is to be awarded “as an acknowledgement of eminent services in any department of Geology” for we acknowledge your services in all departments of that science’. Gregory replied: ‘It is impossible adequately to express my thanks to the Council for the honour of this Award . . . The list of my contributions to geological literature includes a somewhat wide range of subjects, to which you have referred very kindly, although they may appear sadly disconnected. Of course, every geologist, who is not a master of his own time, must devote most of his energies to work not of his own selecting. He must do what he should, and not what he would. I owe it to the sympathetic consideration with which the senior officials of the British Museum treat their assistants, that much of my work, when I was on its staff, had as close a bearing as it had, upon the problems in which I have been most deeply interested. My attention was first directed to geology, in order to understand the geography of the districts through which I rambled, and the, often, apparentlyerratic course of the rivers. The bent that led me into geology, in order to understand local topography, subsequently roused my especial interest in the existing plan of the Earth. That interest has caused me to spend so much of my vacations collecting evidence in the ‘back-blocks’ of the Earth, that I have not yet had sufficient opportunity to work out the results. This Award will justify an attempt to secure more time for this work . . . I am bound to make as good a return to our Science as I can for this valued Medal . . .’ (Abstracts of Proceedings GSL, 806, 49–50). The Bigsby Medal is the only GSL medal given not only for past achievement, but also in the expectation of more to come, as the awardee ‘must not be older than 45 years at his last birthday, thus probably not too old for further work, and not too young to have done much’, and in this respect Gregory certainly more than fulfilled reasonable expectations.

Within days of arriving, he joined the Geological Society of Glasgow, which, since 1880 had its own rooms at 207 Bath Street, by courtesy of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow. He became a (Life) Member on 10 November 1904 (Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow (TGSG) 12, 405– 406) and immediately, at that meeting, described an instance of ‘an intrusive dyke of ultrabasic material that had been almost entirely replaced by silica’. In return, to mark their appreciation of Gregory’s appointment to the Chair and their pleasure at the filling of the first Glasgow University Chair devoted to the study of Geology, the Glasgow Geological Society (GSG) entertained Gregory on 15 December 1904 to a complimentary dinner at the Grand Hotel. Numerous representatives from the university and other scientific bodies were present (Macnair & Mort 1908), and there were speeches and toasts, with Gregory replying but drinking non-alcoholic toasts. According to the Glasgow Herald (16 December 1904) Gregory’s speech expressed amazement at what Scottish geologists had achieved in advancing geological knowledge in a wet and cold climate that, during his six weeks in Glasgow, had evidently been a surprise to Gregory after the sunshine and dryness of Australia, and even that of London. In slightly less than two years Gregory was elected Vice President on 8 November 1906 (Macnair & Mort 1908) as a prelude to becoming Jubilee year President on 12 November 1908. The records show that Gregory never became a member of the Edinburgh Geological Society, but almost immediately after his appointment he was nominated for Fellowship in the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) by Sir John Graham Kerr, John Horne, Benjamin N. Peach and Lionel Wordsworth Hinxman (1855 –1936), the last three being renowned Survey geologists. Gregory was elected a Fellow on 20 January 1905, and subsequently became a Councillor (1908 –11), Vice President (1920 –3) and was awarded the Keith Prize for 1921– 3 (RSE archives). Also within a few weeks of arrival in Glasgow, on 30 November 1904, Gregory became a member of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (RPSG), and either then, or shortly after, became a Life Member, but he seems have been little involved until he wanted to revive the Geographical Section as detailed later (Proc. Roy. Phil. Soc. Glasgow). Although there is no written evidence, it is certain that Gregory, who was almost totally unfamiliar with the geology of Scotland, would have spent many days, probably at the weekends, in his first year in Glasgow in the field around Glasgow, scouting out the best day excursions and deciding which to use and planning access and routes. If, as seems likely, he had to lead some during his first year, becoming familiar with the route would have been carried out under some pressure as would have been the completion of some lectures with Scottish content. The GSG ran an extensive series of day excursions, mostly on Saturdays, but also on some Bank Holiday Mondays, and even evening excursions, and Gregory would have attended some of these, indeed by 4 May 1905, he was suggesting an autumn excursion to the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy (TGSG, 12, p. 411). Since he started to submit papers on Scottish geology within about a year of coming to Glasgow, he must have begun research on the ‘local’ geology within a short time of November 1904. It has proved difficult to identify the holiday trips Gregory and Audrey took together and there is a significant gap in this respect, especially as Gregory often made geological or geographical observations while ‘officially’ on holiday.

Departmental matters In the Department of Geology, as distinct from the museum, Gregory was the sole staff member on his appointment, although it seems that Miss Agnes T. Neilson (18?? –1938), a self-funded demonstrator and unpaid curator in the Hunterian Museum,

APPOINTMENT AS PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

formally appointed from 1910 until 1938, predated Gregory (Ian Rolfe, pers. comm. 2006). In late 1905, Gregory made the brilliant appointment of George Walter Tyrrell (1883 –1961) to be his Assistant starting in 1906 (Fig. 14.3). Tyrrell came from the Royal College of Science, being strongly recommended by J.W. Judd, with a First Class Associateship of the Royal College of Science, despite not having a degree, presumably because Tyrrell had been forced to withdraw for financial reasons before graduating. Initially it seems assistants were paid personally by, and employed by, Glasgow professors. Possibly in Gregory’s early years the university paid the assistant’s remuneration directly to the professor who, in turn, paid the assistant. Gregory had obtained approval on 6 July 1905 from the University Court, the supreme governing body of the university, to appoint an Assistant at the rate of £150 a year. However, he apparently appointed Tyrrell without first informing the Senate (who were responsible for academic standards), for which he was reprimanded on 29 December 1905, either because Tyrrell lacked any degree or because all academic appointments had to be endorsed by the Senate. Tyrrell’s salary was then recorded as £150 a year (but see below), but he was not formally appointed until 6 July 1906, according to the Court minutes. For many years, at least into the 1920s, the university paid salaries only quarterly (UG Court Minutes, 3 November 1920). Oral tradition has it that one month or one quarter Gregory failed to pay Tyrrell. After hesitating for some time, Tyrrell broached the

Fig. 14.3. Dr George Walter Tyrrell, distinguished Glasgow University petrologist and Gregory’s right-hand man. Courtesy of Professor D. R. Bowes.

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matter with Gregory, who apologized and stated he had not overlooked the matter but was temporally financially embarrassed himself. Seizing a microscope that was on Gregory’s desk and was Gregory’s own property, Gregory thrust it at Tyrrell and said, ‘Take this’. Tyrrell flushed pink as he needed cash and, moreover, he knew the microscope was worth far more than the wages he was due. ‘Oh no’ he said, ‘I couldn’t take that’. ‘Go on’ said Gregory, ‘It’s got a cracked objective!’ It is not known exactly when Tyrrell became employed directly by the university (probably from 1906), as the present pattern of professors and lecturers developed out of Ordinance 17 of 1889 which enabled the university to appoint lecturers ‘whose teaching shall qualify for graduation,’ as distinct from ‘assistants’ who were paid by and employed by professors (Leake with Durant 1993). Tyrrell taught from 1906. Certainly by the session 1 October 1908 –30 September 1909, Tyrrell was included in the departmental estimates handwritten by Gregory (Glasgow University archives 25360), which seem to include museum geological expenses (but not staffing costs), and show the quite small departmental expenditure, mainly on staffing (as today) when Gregory’s unstated salary is added in. Thus:

Assistance G. W. Tyrrell ARCS, Assistant & Demonstrator Boy attendant [Probably Arthur Ian Curlette; Leake with Durant (1993)] Class Expenses Materials: Geological maps Cardboard trays (12 gross) Mounting boards for Museum & miscellaneous Museum fittings Tools Mineral & rock specimens Chemicals Diagrams Carriage of materials to the university Apparatus: No entry Repairs: No entry Printing: Maps and data for class excursions Stationery: Including labels, lithographic paper, lithographic ink, linen for map mounting, tracing and sectional paper Total, for assistance, £176; for class expenses, £54, making a grand total of

£125 26

4 2 12 2 5 12 5 2

5 5

£230

Tyrrell became a most distinguished igneous petrologist of international renown but he was also a most assiduous and systematic teacher, able to cover most of the field of geology, keep the first year class under firm control and act for Gregory in Gregory’s absence. Without Tyrrell’s efficiency and abilities, Gregory could not have left the department as much as he did. Tyrrell often stood in for Gregory’s lectures, for instance during 1917 –19 and when Gregory was in Angola in 1912. Gregory and Tyrrell got along extremely well and Tyrrell was a great friend of the Gregory family. He continued his friendship with Christopher Gregory long after the latter had left university and had married (letters; courtesy of A. Mendell). Tyrrell became the first lecturer in the department in 1913 and subsequently the first senior lecturer, and by special dispensation of the Senate, in view of his distinguished publications and his election to FRSE, was allowed to present for a PhD without having a first degree. Tyrrell obtained his PhD in 1923 with E. J. Garwood as External Examiner (Senate minutes). Apart from his many petrological papers, his textbook The Principles of Petrology, first published in 1926, was still in print in the 1980s, while his 1928 Geological Survey Memoir of Arran was reprinted in facsimile 60 years later

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by the Geological Survey, a remarkable testimony to its longlasting quality and lack of errors. There was a gradual build-up of staff in the department as the student numbers increased, but the precise account of this expansion, recorded in the Court minutes, such as the appointment of a demonstrator and an assistant demonstrator in late 1909, will not be detailed. Departmental and museum business was not usually conducted by staff meetings, which were rarely or never held, in Gregory’s time or for many years afterwards. A few words from the professor, who was almost always the permanent Head of Department, sufficed in their place and saved much working time (Leake with Durant 1993). Gregory’s room, in the NE corner of the East Quadrangle, was next door to the old zoology lecture theatre, which was also used by geology, and to which a private door gave him direct access. Facing a slate blackboard that extended the full width of the dais were rows of austere wooden benches that rose increasingly steeply, so that the back row was at a disconcertingly dizzy height. Originally Gregory’s room was as high as the theatre, immensely high for its tiny area, a chimney of a room; but he later had a floor built across it halfway up, forming a new room out of its upper half for his secretary and letter files. This incidently gave him a warmer room (C. J. Gregory, mss). In the 1980s, the old lecture theatre was called the Gregory Lecture Theatre, but it was reconstructed in the early 21st century and lost that name (Fig. 14.4).

First year and subsidiary geology course By the time Gregory retired in 1929 he had built up a very large department compared with most other British university geology departments, and one with reputedly the largest first year class of all – over 400 students. Indeed the numbers became so large that a lecture theatre larger than even the old zoology lecture theatre had to be used. This was partly the result of the system whereby students had to take and pass at least one first year

subject in another faculty than the one in which they would eventually graduate, and also the requirement to have a broad curriculum within the graduating faculty, both strengths of a typical Scottish degree until recently. So those graduating in arts for instance, had to take a subject outside the Arts Faculty, such as a science or theological subject and geology was attractive as no previous school experience in the subject was required. Geology was popular because Gregory brought his wide personal experience to both academic and practical aspects. His lectures deliberately appealed to a wide variety of students including engineers (building stones, road metals, water supply, geological maps, cross-sections etc.) agricultural students (rocks, soils, subsoils, fertilizers) public health students (rural hygiene, sanitary requirements of septic tanks and cemeteries, geology of water supply) mining and mining engineers at a time when coal and metalliferous mining at home and abroad in the Empire, were major industries. In addition there was the subsidiary teaching of arts, science and theology students, plus of course, the first year course for geology pass (three years study) and Honours (four years study) BSc students. The controversy over Darwinian evolution and the account in Genesis in the Bible was a magnet that drew many theological students to the first year geology course with its basic introduction to palaeontology. In addition, there were a small number of non-graduating students who came to the university for one year to gain a year’s university education in subjects that were of interest to them, or might be of subsequent use to them. The GU Senate minutes for 14 June 1905 record the annual fees for courses in geology and mineralogy (5 guineas; £5.25), advanced geology (same), geology for agriculture (4 guineas; £4.20), geology for mining (3 guineas; £3.15), geology for engineers (5 guineas; £5.25), geology for BSc (public health) (3 guineas; £3.15), and practical geology (3 guineas; £3.15). Apart from geology being a subject for the MA degree, it was also included in the courses for BSc in pure science, BSc in engineering, BSc in mining, BSc in agriculture, BSc in public health and BSc in mining engineering.

Fig. 14.4. The NE corner of the East Quadrangle, Glasgow University, where the Geology Department was located, entrance in the central corner; with the Hunterian Museum on the left on the upper floor. By permission of the University of Glasgow. There is a spiral staircase in the round turret on the right. According to George Scott Johnstone (1922– 2005) (pers. comm. 2003), William John McCallien (1902– 1981) told him that it was in this dark gas-lit staircase that Gregory, leading (after the ladies) a party of students upwards, encountered an extinguished gas light. As he had no matches, he turned to the students and asked if any of them had a box of matches. One damsel had one and passed it down to him but he found it difficult in the dark to find the place to strike a match on. ‘On the bottom, Dr Gregory’ she said. As she was above him on the stairs, he duly obliged and the match was lit. With acknowledgements to the University of Glasgow.

APPOINTMENT AS PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

Traditionally in Scotland, the first year lectures were given by the professor, which ensured that all these varied students were exposed to the most distinguished minds, and generally the most experienced teachers. Whatever Gregory’s reservations about the value of lectures, he had no option but to lecture to the first two years according to the Science Faculty requirements. What then was the content of these first year lectures and why were they so appealing? Fortunately Glasgow University archives contain the carefully written up notes of 58 lectures (three per week) made by a conscientious first year student, Andrew R. Bain, from 16 October 1911 to 19 March 1912, that is, the complete academic year except for the immediately following examination (GU Archives). The lecture content, in very brief, almost note-like summary, and corroborated by an anonymous set of lecture notes for 1921 –2 (GU MS Gen 815), was: 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Geology is a discourse upon the Earth its constitution, the structure of the crust and material in it, and past history. Two aspects, theoretical & practical. Specific Gravity 5.67 but crust only 2.5; Fe–Ni centre; earthquake evidence. Salic & femic materials; Earth formed by aggregation of meteors. Rocks aggregates of minerals; igneous or primary (e.g. granite & lavas) and secondary (e.g. sandstone). Crystal systems; petrological microscope, polarizing light, refractive indices. Crystallography, Indices, etc. and optical mineralogy. Symmetry elements; Mohs’ scale. Salic minerals; quartz, feldspars, feldspathoids. Femic minerals; micas, chlorites, amphiboles, pyroxenes, olivines, garnets, ores. Rock compositions in main oxides; granite, syenite, diorite, gabbro, peridotite & volcanic equivalents. Textures for example, porphyritic, ophitic, etc. Plutonic rocks and their volcanic equivalents. Sedimentary rocks, arenaceous, argillaceous and calcareous; economic geology, slates, fireclays, etc. Continuation with sedimentary rocks, especially economically useful ones. Fossils. Guano, coal. Coals, oil shales, rock salt, oolites. Account of the Glasgow basin geology & economic resources. Dolomite. Metamorphic rocks, Gneiss, schist, contact, thermal, dynamic, regional metamorphism. Tectonics, dips and folding. Folding, faults, ‘V’ing up valleys. Joints and use in quarrying. Volcanoes. Dykes & laccoliths. Land forms for example, fold mountains (none in Africa except Atlas); block mountains typically the Rockies; Dip & Escarpment slopes. Escarpments in Scotland. Stratigraphical Geology. Fossils in stratigraphy. Stratigraphy: PreCambrian rocks; Silurian System, Lapworth’s Ordovician. Cambrian–Ordovician –Silurian Systems. Trilobites & graptolites. Caledonian Orogeny. Devonian– Carboniferous – Permian Systems. Occurrence in Great Britain. Hercynian Orogeny. Appalachians. Triassic –Jurassic Systems. Fossils, reptiles, plants. Cretaceous (chalk) to Pleistocene. Alpine movements. Glacial deposits. Stone implements Agents of erosion and transport. Excavating power of rivers, waves, glaciers. Moraines. Ice phenomena, hanging valleys. Ice as a transporting agent. Water as a transporting agent. Rivers, Mississippi, Rhine, etc. deltas. Depth zones of deposition from water

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

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Atolls. Boulder Clays. More on glacial deposits around the world. Isostasy. Sea level changes; subsidences. Economic Geology. Soils. [Followed on the next day, 20-1-12 by an excursion to Giffnock]. Soils continued. Water table. Evaporative controls. Permeability. Percolation. Artesian Wells. Water Supplies, dangers of pollution; sewage. Building stones and decay. Microscopic examination of building stones. Outline of the geological features of Britain. Brick Clays. Wind gaps and railway routes. Earthquakes and Volcanism. Volcanoes. Mont Pele´e. Fissure eruptions. Tuffs. Examples: Deccan, Africa, Victoria. Volcanoes through the British stratigraphical column, especially in Scotland, Campsie Fells, etc. Earthquake waves. Elastic waves, epicentres. Estimating an earthquake’s centre. Earthquake examples including Glasgow 8.54pm, Dec. 1910. Shadow zones etc. Crystallography. Rational indices, Miller symbols. Planes of symmetry, start of systematic listing of the crystal systems: cubic. Cubic, Tetragonal and Orthorhombic. Hexagonal and Monoclinic. Triclinic. Common minerals and their crystallography. Continued. Classification of the elements and oxides. Palaeontology. Simple life forms to graptolites. Graptolites & corals. Echinoderms, crinoids. Trilobites, Mollusca.

Although much of this content was common in many British university first year courses pre-1960 and plate tectonics, the above was much more designed to provide instruction in practical matters than was usual, while giving adequate academic background. A detailed dissection of the course will not be given, but it is clear from the notes made by Bain that Gregory drew on his immense personal experience to give examples that not only were of interest in themselves, but enlivened the subject. For instance, his tips on how to proceed when looking for a reliable water supply or finding a good local building stone are full of practical points for example, for the last: go to the nearest churchyard and inspect the gravestones and see which of the oldest are the best preserved . . . The stress on useful applications was planned and purposeful. However, lecturing (but not practicals or lecturing to post-first years) to first year classes in Glasgow University until the 1970s was not idyllic. A custom had developed among the larger first year classes right across the university of deliberately causing as much disruption and disorder as the lecturer was prepared to allow. A really strong personality with either stentorian attributes or the quiet voice of complete control and a sharp eye to detect any misbehaviour, with prompt ejection of the culprit(s), together with everything drawn or written on the blackboard before the lecture that required more than a few seconds to accomplish with the lecturer’s back to the class, could ensure a quiet, untroubled class, but some staff could not cope psychologically and could not be given such lecturing. Although Gregory was a strong personality, he did not give that impression, being a rather small man with a quiet voice and an unmilitary manner. He never became reliably accustomed to controlling such classes and there is evidence that matters got particularly bad just after the First World War, when veterans returned.

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Margaret Macdonald, one of Tyrrell’s daughters, who was herself a Glasgow geology student in the 1920s wrote in September 1993 (pers. comm.): ‘For student purposes Professor Gregory’s lecturing was quite hopeless. It took place against an incredible barrage of noise—cat calls, whistling, singing, foot stamping, raucous laughter, ironic clapping, from the 400 plus students in the first year class. The Professor simply ignored the pandemonium, and presumably kept on lecturing—you could see his lips moving. There was much competition amongst the more responsible students to sit in the front row below the platform since that was the only place you could hope to hear a word the Professor was saying. He simply ignored the chaos, and went on lecturing as though there was complete quiet. I can only remember one occasion when he gave any indication he was aware of the pandemonium. On this day he suddenly leapt off the platform, went up the steps of the lecture room aisle in two jumps, and holding one arm high above his head—he was a little man—yanked the six-foot, shouting, ringleader down the steps by his ear, and threw him out, to the resounding cheers of the electrified class. For once there was peace and quiet for a time after that.’

Another account, admittedly by his son (C. J. Gregory 1977), indicates that some years much more effective control was exercised, presumably depending upon the particular class, but this account also records that in Gregory’s very early years, his wife ‘heard the formidable protest made by students dragging their feet on the floor, an astonishing noise . . . [when Gregory] had illadvisedly referred to “the English army” and had been corrected’. Even the 1977 account by his son, who studied geology in Glasgow University but took his first year during Gregory’s absence, makes clear, that there was particular difficulty in 1919 when Gregory returned after two years absence and the class must have included ex-servicemen. According to that account, this disruptive class was eventually quelled because they ‘came to realize I didn’t like it’ Gregory said, which seems unlikely. John Graham Comrie Anderson, (1910 –2002) who was in the last first year class taught by Gregory in 1929 (pers. comm. 1999), confirmed that Gregory was an excellent lecturer, so probably the extreme problems described by Margaret Macdonald were largely immediately after the First World War, but this tradition of first year lecture disruption in the university continued until the early 1970s. Tyrrell on the other hand was an excellent lecturer with perfect control of the class so that the only sound to be heard was him speaking and the pens scratching and he could, and did, stand in for Gregory when Gregory was away. As Miss M. Filbin, a then 92-year-old ex-student wrote in 1992 (pers. comm.) about the period 1918 –21, ‘Professor Gregory “was always rushing” and after he finished one first year lecture and raced out, he reappeared seconds later with the query “Had I a hat or have I left it?” “It’s on your head, Sir”. A weekly practical class ran concurrently with the lectures. In the practicals 18 common minerals were examined under the microscope, drawings of some thin sections were made and descriptions made of a series of igneous rocks, some sedimentary rocks, and a few metamorphic rocks and oozes. 166 hand specimens of minerals, starting with gold and the chief economic minerals, then the carbonates and silicates, had to be studied and learnt, and a series of rocks and sediments consisting of 79 sedimentary rocks and sediments, 70 igneous rocks and 29 metamorphic rocks, all in sets for examination in the laboratory. Printed departmental leaflets summarized: optical procedures and mineral properties under the microscope and how to construct geological cross-sections with the data for one across the Kilsyth Coalfield specifically designed to show the disposition of the coal seams. Another sheet summarized blowpipe procedures. Numerous geological cross-sections had to be completed. The practical work was carefully planned to educate the students in a range of useful skills and probably elaborated on the practical work programme devised by Judd and Grenville Cole at Imperial College. Day field excursions were part of the course but the precise records of these, except for the one noted above, are not preserved for 1911– 12. It is known that Gregory often hired a whole train to convey the c. 400 students, usually on Sundays, and, as recorded by Anderson (pers. comm. 1999), the walk from Aberfoyle to Balmaha across the Dalradian Schists of Ben Lomond, was

legendary for its length (c. 20 km with climbing) and toughness, especially in inclement weather. David Boyd (pers. comm. 2006) recounts the story of that excursion on one winter’s day with a snow storm when the tail of students was so slow that they were likely to miss the last ferry down Loch Lomond from Balmaha to Balloch. The heftier of the men, reputedly rugby players, put some of the struggling girls onto their shoulders and carried them the last few miles to the pier. The girls included two nuns who had come in full habit and were afterwards said to have had the experience of a lifetime. Campsie Glen with its alum works, Carboniferous sediments and volcanic rocks, was a more typical excursion. ‘If Gregory arrived in trousers, an easy walk lay ahead. If he had on knee breeches, you would have to exert yourself. But if he was wearing puttees [a long strip of cloth wrapped spirally around the leg from the ankle to the knee] you knew an arduous day lay ahead, ankle deep’ (Gregory 1977) in water, peat or heather. Gregory invariably led the way and was often far ahead of most of the following class which would be strung out over hundreds of metres, with Tyrrell at the rear to ensure no one was lost or went astray. It was joked that the distance of a student from the front could be judged by the garbledness of the examination answers as the professor’s words were verbally repeated down the line by the students. The Sunday excursions offended some of the strongly Protestant Sunday observers, who were not uncommon in Scotland at the time. On one such excursion in Perthshire, when Gregory was wearing a cloak with a red lining, the crocodile of students went past a small church at the gate of which was an old man with a walking stick, who on the approach of the last man, Tyrrell, waved the stick in the air and pronounced that ‘It was the Devil who was leading ye’, only to be assured by Tyrrell that it was Professor Gregory (Fig. 14.5). From the beginning, the geology classes in both the university and the field were mixed – for both men and women. The story was often re-told of Gregory, in his early years, being accosted by the University Registrar and asked should he not run separate field classes for men and women? Gregory replied that he only had two ladies in that class and one of them had a medical certificate exempting her from fieldwork; one of the two was very pretty but without consulting the records, he was not sure which one it was. That was the last Gregory heard of the matter. Gregory’s philosophy of what should be taught in university science courses has already been summarized based on Gregory (1905).

Second, third and fourth year course in geology The ordinary BSc involved three years of study including one in Junior Honours, while the Honours BSc required four years of study including Junior and Senior Honours. With smaller classes of students than in the first year, and mostly ones who were interested in geology, Gregory’s ability to hold and interest his audience was at its best, especially in the two year honours course where the methods of teaching were not specified and so a set number of lectures was not prescribed. The mining geology lectures were particularly notable as their content could not be obtained from any textbook. They involved Gregory describing the different mineral deposits and their formation, from all over the world, enlivened by personal touches, comments and experiences (C. J. Gregory 1977). That this was not filial invention was later confirmed when Gregory included much of this material in his book Elements of Economic Geology (Gregory 1928) and the reviewer, Robert H. Rastall (1872 –1950) (1928) wrote ‘The strongest point of the book is beyond doubt the impression that it gives that Professor Gregory has actually seen a large proportion of the things that he describes, and it differs in this respect from some other works, which though perhaps more strictly accurate in all points, yet lack the touch of a living personality’.

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Fig. 14.5. Gregory in the centre and Tyrrell on the extreme right on a (second year?) student field class, to Bonskied, Pitlochry, Perthshire, 1 –8 June 1923.

Almost certainly, Gregory’s lectures on world stratigraphy and tectonics must also have involved much of the same recipe, with accounts of, for instance, the Alps, giving a broad sweep of synthesis with personal asides and in those subjects, many map and cross-section practicals. A letter from Gregory to Sir Archibald Geike at the Royal Society, dated 26 February 1908, states ‘I have been trying for two years to complete the International Geological Congress map of Europe. Many of the first issued sheets, which are most wanted by my classes here, are out of print. I remembered the Royal Society has sets at its disposal . . . the list of sheets we lack appended’ (RS archives, MC 08194). Gregory developed a close relationship with his more senior students. By tradition, Glasgow University had a half-term Monday break in each of the two terms; the first in November and the second in February, known as ‘Meal Mondays’ because they were originally supposed to allow students to return home for that weekend and replenish their bag of oatmeal which was their staple diet. On the first of these breaks, ‘if the snow was adequate, he might take a few senior students skiing – with half a dozen pairs of skis that had been stored under the lecture theatre – to an upland moor near Glasgow or to the Highlands. He was an early enthusiast for Scottish skiing, and seems to have been involved in the formation of the Scottish Ski Club in 1909 because he became its second President from 1910– 13 (Who Was Who, 3), and encouraged the organization of snow reports from the best spots’ (C. J. Gregory 1977), even writing in the Scottish Ski Club Magazine on ‘The Snow-Patches of Ben Nevis and the occurrence of black snow in Scotland’ (Gregory 1912). In this he revealed that he started monitoring and measuring a patch of what might be permanent snow just below the summit of Ben Nevis in early October 1906, revisiting it at the same date in 1908 and 1911 when he found it had completely melted away. So at this time he was climbing up Ben Nevis just before term began, perhaps in the hope of some early skiing. Skiing was not just a pleasurable experience. Most of Gregory’s graduates expected to do much fieldwork and some would go to the Polar regions. Already it was evident from instances such as Scott’s 1902 –3 failure to reach the South Pole by a mere 100 miles [160 km], that if skis and dogs had been used, the Pole would have been achieved, as Amundsen was to later triumphantly to demonstrate when his party speedily made the Pole and returned

in 1912 weighing more than when they started, and they had not even used all their caches of fuel, while Scott’s party starved to death (Huntford 1979). Gregory knew from personal experience in the Alps and Spitzbergen how useful skis could be, and no doubt this was a factor in Ernest Henry Shackleton (1874– 1922)’s 1914 choice of Gregory-trained geologists. The second weekend was used for geological field excursions to areas such as Blair Atholl or Bute for which more than a day visit was needed. ‘In the evening, Gregory would often be got to talk about his travels, or the opening up of Africa, in which he had taken part, sometimes as the London correspondent of the influential monthly magazines’ (C. J. Gregory 1977). Unfortunately, Gregory’s son does not name the magazines, so the articles have not yet been found. Generally however, even to the end of his life, he was little given to reminiscence, being much more interested in the present (C. J. Gregory 1977). These field encounters helped to make a close bond between Gregory and his students which lasted throughout his life. According to J. G. C. Anderson (pers. comm. 1999), although Gregory was a teetotaller, he would allow some alcohol to be taken on his senior field excursions, whereas his successor, Edward Battersby Bailey (1881 – 1965), totally banned it.

Mining degrees From the start, Gregory was keen to improve the teaching of geology to mining students. On 24 March 1905, Professors Gregory and Kerr (of Zoology) submitted to the Senate a scheme of 50 compulsory first year lectures on the principles of geology for mining students with an advanced (second year) course in economic and mining geology, including ore deposits. Gregory criticized the existing mining degree course, and a committee was set up on 24 March 1905 to institute a broader based mining degree (GU Senate Archives). Two years before Gregory’s appointment, a Lectureship in Mining had been endowed by James Stedman Dixon (1846 – 19??) the Coalmaster of Bothwell, and Charles Latham (d. 1917) was appointed lecturer. Under the new initiative, Dixon funded an endowed Chair which led in April 1907 to the appointment of Latham to the new Dixon Chair of Mining on a salary of £600 per year (GU Calendars; Senate minutes 9 April 1907). After

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this, the pressure for change seems to have disappeared with Gregory content that mining students had to take the first year geology course and the second year geology course included much on mining as noted above. Mining itself continued to be taught by Latham at the Royal Technical College (Anderson College) in Glasgow (much later Strathclyde University). This was then an institution uneasily affiliated to Glasgow University, and whose degrees were awarded by Glasgow University. In addition, mining students, including Gregory’s own son, had to complete six months of underground practical work in a working mine, usually done between April and October. An integrated Geology and Mining School never developed along the lines of the Royal School of Mines (RSM), although mining students had to take courses in both institutions. Ironically, Glasgow University was built on top of an old drift coal mine with access by steps and an incline and this remained accessible for long after Gregory’s time, so that students could easily experience being underground. As noted of Gregory’s time in Melbourne, he was not one to waste time politicking in the university; he put research, publication and teaching first and last.

University museum matters The following is taken from Keppie’s (2007) and Rolfe’s (1966) accounts unless otherwise stated. The new Hunterian Museum premises at Gilmorehill were opened in 1877 following their transfer from the Old College Hunterian Museum by Mr (later Dr by an Honorary LL D awarded in 1893) John Young (1823 –1900), the Under Keeper who was a geologist and palaeontologist, and afterwards often referred to as ‘the good John Young’ in order to differentiate him from Professor John Young, who was Keeper of the Collections. Dr John Young retired in 1900 and was not replaced, and when Professor Young died in December 1902, the duties of the Keeper were performed in theory by the University Museums Committee until February 1908 when the University Court appointed the Professors of Zoology and Geology to act as Honorary Curators in Zoology and Geology, respectively, and Dr George Macdonald (1862 – 1940) as Honorary Curator of the Coins and Medals, joining the University Librarian who was Keeper of the Hunterian Books and Manuscripts. Accordingly, by the time Gregory came in 1904 the Geological Collections were without any appointed curatorial staff or a nominated keeper, and Gregory had to work with others through the Museums Committee to achieve the University Court’s staffing improvements of February 1908 when he became Honorary Curator, and only later Keeper, of the Geological Collections. Simultaneously, but obviously with Gregory’s approval, an Under Keeper in Geology, William Kinghorn, was appointed, who continued until 1939. However, the Senate minutes record Gregory as only being made Honorary Keeper of the Palaeontological Collections on 21 January 1909. An Assistant Curator of Geology, Mr (soon Dr) William Robert Smellie (1885 –1973) was not appointed until 1914, but he was absent on war duties from 1916– 17, after which he lectured in palaeontology during Gregory’s absence, and when he resigned in 1919, Ethel Dobbie Currie (1899 – 1963), a 1920 Glasgow geology graduate, was appointed Assistant Keeper in 1920 and continued until 1962. Thus the build up of geological staff at the museum under Gregory was slow, but it achieved much during his Honorary Keepership. Accessions of geological specimens (rocks, fossils, minerals or ores) flooded in to add to the already substantial collections. This is not the place to detail these but to give a flavour of what Gregory achieved in the years 1904– 29, Gregory alone donated about 10 000 samples from many expeditions around the world, short visits such as to Canada and Tennessee in 1925, Spain in 1926, Switzerland in 1928, Aden at some unascertained stopover, and

fieldwork in the British Isles, especially the Scottish Highlands which alone provided about 1000 samples. His world-wide connections, former students and members of staff such as the petrologist, Tyrrell, who alone donated 4000 or so igneous rocks, many with thin sections, brought in material from all over the world. To mention but a few localities, Australia, British Columbia, South Georgia, South Orkneys, South Shetlands, Antarctica, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Spitzbergen, Norway, Finland, USSR, Venezuela, Trinidad and Honduras and his East African connections brought in more, while the scholarly reputation Gregory established for the department and museum encouraged many donations and bequests of valuable material, such as the Robert Kidston (1852 –1924) bequest of 3500 thin sections of fossil plants, mostly Carboniferous, including type specimens. The substantial residue of the enormous collections of Dr John Young of which much had already been deposited in the museum in his lifetime, were purchased after his death in 1900 by J. T. Tullis and donated partly to the Hunterian Museum, and partly to the Glasgow City Museum. Whole collections of particularly valuable materials were purchased, such as those of Gregory’s old teacher, Frank Rutley (1842 –1904), who had accumulated over 2000 minerals and rocks which were purchased in late 1907 for £40, using a Carnegie Trust grant; the Wintour Frederick Gwinnell (1846 –1921) collection of over 2000 fossils, including the bones of dodos and moas, and 400 cephalopods; the Wilfred Hudleston (formerly Simpson) (1828 –1909) collection of about 3500 fossils mostly from the English Mesozoic rocks; the James Fox (?– 1924?) collection of 700 Chalk fossils from SE England; and the Alfred Nicholson Leeds (1847 – 1917)’s collection of around 600 fossils from the Oxford Clay of the Peterborough district. In view of the fact that Gregory almost always collected samples wherever he went, these will not be mentioned in general in the following account, unless they are crucial to establishing where Gregory went. Nearly everything he collected while at the NHM from 1887– 1900 was of course NHM property, but from 1904 onwards until his death, nearly everything he obtained went to the Hunterian Museum, and he also brought a certain amount of material with him from Australia and New Zealand, that he had collected while there, probably duplicates of what he had obtained for his Department in Melbourne, such as fossils from the Silurian and Miocene of Victoria, collected in 1901. During Gregory’s time, the careful cataloguing that Dr John Young had earlier carried out was erratically resumed from 1908 and 1909 with the appointment of Kinghorn and then Smellie, but it was not until Gregory appointed Ethel Currie that serious, protracted catching up of the cataloguing took place during her long service, which was noted for the immense number of specimens registered and labelled in her characteristic handwriting. When she retired in 1962, the then Honorary Keeper in Geology, Professor Thomas Neville George (1904 –80), wrote: ‘Her departure marks the end of an era. Although there were extensive geological collections before she took up her appointment 41 years ago, they had been curated only intermittently, and to her fell a first task of putting the geological house in order. There followed years of re-organizing systematically, cataloguing, and preparing for display, not merely what she inherited when she began the task but also the vastly increasing accumulations that were built up, partly through her own activities, during the subsequent decades . . . Her going breaks the last link with the band of Glasgow graduates who, trained by Professor Gregory, continued the traditions of the department from its establishment nearly 60 years ago [by Gregory] (George 1962).

Such careful curating encouraged further bequests and donations. Gregory was not one to accumulate but not publish, as his NHM time had shown. The collections were there to be used, and in his last decade he established and promoted the Monographs of the Geological Department of the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, of which five volumes were published between 1925 and 1938. Four of these dealt with East African Collections connected to Gregory (Wyllie & Smellie 1925; Weir et al. 1929, Gregory et al. 1930; McKinnon-Wood et al. 1938), and the other with Scottish Quaternary vertebrates (Gregory & Currie 1928).

APPOINTMENT AS PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

Gregory assembled small teams of experts whose specialized knowledge rapidly gave prestige to the series. Thus in Gregory et al. (1930), in 232 pages the Kenyan collections of Miss Meta McKinnon-Wood (1893 –1969) were described by L. F. Spath (ammonites), John Weir (1896 –1978) (other Mesozoic mollusca and brachiopods), Leslie Reginald Cox (1898 – 1965) (Cenozoic mollusca), Henry Dighton Thomas (1900 –66) (Cheilostomata), E. D. Currie (Echinoidea), J. W. Gregory (Corals), M. H. Latham, (Ostracoda and Foraminifera), S. Williams (fossil plants), A. Neilson, (igneous rocks) and M. McKinnon-Wood on the stratigraphy of the Kenya coastlands – a research team, not all in the museum, but one which brought credit and the attention of the geological world to the Hunterian Museum. Unfortunately the series fizzled out under Gregory’s successors. These Monographs were used in exchanges which built up the Departmental Library much more quickly than the restricted finances would otherwise have permitted. The scientific output achieved under Gregory raised the national and international geological status of the museum to heights not achieved before, even under Dr John Young. The geological exhibits which, when Gregory arrived, were largely those installed in 1877 when the museum was re-opened after its move to Gilmorehill, were gradually replaced but the details of this have not been researched. The accommodation within the museum was far from ideal with inadequate storage space and gross overcrowding of the exhibition space, both of which were bulging with the anatomical, pathological, ethnographical, geological, zoological, archaeological and other specimens, plus the coins and medals under special security and the art collection (Fig. 14.6). The lack of an overall Director, whose role at arm’s length, was assumed by the Museums Committee, inevitably led to territorial disputes, as each keeper tried to do his best for his own subject. Ultimately the space problem took nearly 100 years to largely resolve with the removal of the anatomical and pathological specimens in 1911–12, the zoological ones in 1923, some of the fossil plants in 1936, the paintings and prints in 1980, all to separate accommodation for display and

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storage, while the 1990s purchase of extensive off-site storage alleviated the storage of the remainder of the collections. In summary, Gregory boosted the collections and the prestige of the geological part of the Hunterian Museum more than any of the preceding or succeeding keepers. The increasing burden of running the Department of Geology progressively left the Professor of Geology less and less time for the honorary duty of managing the geological part of the museum, and none had the urge to accumulate material in the way Gregory did.

University matters Not a great deal is known about Gregory’s role in the university outside of departmental and museum matters. The fact that he was usually in the field, often abroad, or at conferences (e.g. BA; IGC) or giving lectures away from Glasgow, and that increasingly Audrey returned to Essex and Gregory often spent time there when he could, meant that he probably sat on fewer university committees than would otherwise have done. The Senate minutes show that he attended regularly when he was in Glasgow, although there is a well-known oral tradition that he used Senate meetings as a time to catch up with correspondence by writing letters. Unlike many middle-aged or elderly academics, he avoided the insidious trap of becoming an administrator, so as to retreat from research, although some of his non-geological books might well be considered a diversion from serious research. He took his turn as Dean of Science only seven years after arriving in Glasgow, being elected on 19 January 1911 (Senate minutes), but generally spent little time on committees, concentrating on research and teaching. It is certain that Gregory lectured outside his own department, on various topics to a wide range of audiences of which the following few in 1913– 15, are cited as examples. On 18 March 1913 he gave a university address on Livingstone as an Explorer; on 7 November 1913 he gave the opening address of the session to the Glasgow University Jewish Society on ‘Two schemes of

Fig. 14.6. Photograph of the Hunterian Museum before the Zoological Collections were removed in 1923. By permission of the University of Glasgow.

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Jewish colonisation’ (concerning his expeditions to Cyrenaica and Angola); on 10 November 1913 he gave the first of a university series of ‘Monday Free Lectures’ on ‘Problems of Central Australia’ (concerning water, soil, and isolation); on 15 February 1915 he lectured the Glasgow University Egyptian Research Students Association on ‘The climate of ancient and modern Egypt’ (a pluvial period during the Pleistocene glaciation but climate was otherwise ‘practically unchanged’) (Glasgow Herald of the following days to those cited).

References George, T. N. 1962. In the Annual Report of the Museums Committee for 1961– 2, pp. 2– 3 Glasgow University. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: A Sketch. Privately printed. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, J. W. 1905. The Southern Ocean and its climatic control over Australasia. Transactions of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Proceedings of Section E, 329– 349. Gregory, J. W. 1912. The snow-patches of Ben Nevis and the occurrence of black snow in Scotland. Scottish Ski Club Magazine, January 1912, 147– 175. Gregory, J. W. 1928. The Elements of Economic Geology. Methuen & Co, London. Gregory, J. W. & Currie, E. D. 1928. The Vertebrate Fossils from the Glacial and Associated Post-Glacial Beds of Scotland in the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, and their Evidence on the Classification of the Scottish Glacial Deposits. Monograph on the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, 2. Gregory, J. W., Mckinnon-Wood, M. et al. 1930. Reports on geological collections from the coastlands of Kenya Colony made by Miss McKinnon-Wood. (Includes the Introduction (p. 1) and The fossil corals of Kenya Colony (185– 209) by J. W. Gregory.) Monograph

of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum University of Glasgow, 4. Huntford, R. 1979. Scott and Amundsen. Hodder & Stoughton, London. Keppie, L. 2007. William Hunter and the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow University 1807–2007. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Leake, B. E. with Durant, G. P. D. 1993. Geology. In: Thomson, R. Y. (ed.) A Faculty for Science: A Unified Diversity. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, 159–178. Lim, E. 1975. Biographical note on John Walter Gregory. MS thesis, University of Melbourne. Macnair, P. & Mort, F. 1908. History of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 1858– 1908. Geological Society of Glasgow, Glasgow. Mckinnon-Wood, M., Currie, E. D., Gregory, J. W., Ovey, C. D., Tyrrell, G. W., Neilson, A. & Williams, S. 1938. On a second collection of fossils and rocks from Kenya made by Miss M. McKinnonWood. (Gregory’s contribution was on the fossil corals, p. 90 –97.) Monograph of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, 5. Rastall, R. H. 1928. Review of elements of economic geology. Geological Magazine, 65, 190. Rolfe, W. D. I. 1966. Unpublished general notes about the museum dated September 12 1966. Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow. Weir, J., Currie, E. D., Latham, M. & Gregory, J. W. 1929. Jurassic fossils from Jubaland, East Africa, collected by V. G. Glenday and the Jurassic geology of Somaliland by J. Weir with descriptions of Echinoidea by Dr E. D. Currie and of corals by Mary Latham. Introduction by J. W. Gregory. Monograph of the Geology Department of The Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, 3. Wyllie, B. N. K. & Smellie, W. R. 1925. The collection of fossils and rocks from Somaliland made by B. N. K. Wyllie and W. R. Smellie with an account by them of the geology of part of Somaliland. An Introduction –the Geology of Somaliland and its relations to the Great Rift Valley by J. W. Gregory (p. 1– 7) and descriptions of the Collections by E. D. Currie, W. N. Edwards, J. W. Gregory (Fossil Corals, p.22 –45), A. T. Neilson, R. B. Newton, L. F. Spath & J. Weir. Monographs of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University, 1.

Chapter 15 Early publications (1905 –10) and research activity while in Glasgow

First a summary and overview of the main activities Gregory undertook in the first five years after arriving in Glasgow is given with minimal references, and then follow, with full references, a detailed examination of his different society and research activities. Without the latter it is hard to appreciate the wide extent of his interests and the intensity of his dedication and productivity.

Summary of the activities of the first five years Gregory’s life in Glasgow revolved around teaching lectures, practicals, and excursions from October to late March, together with lectures given locally and elsewhere in the UK. In addition, he made visits abroad, usually in the summer, the first of which was to South Africa and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the summer of 1905, mainly in connection with the British Association (BA) and mining. This was followed by a visit to Norway and Sweden in the summer of 1907 to see the major SE-directed thrust nappes, iron ore and glacial deposits, and in 1908 to Cyrenaica (part of Libya), hitherto closed to geologists, which turned out to be mostly Eocene Limestone. In 1909 he returned to Australia, visiting both Queensland and Western Australia and probably Melbourne, returning to Scotland via the Pacific Ocean, and Canada with stops in British Columbia, central Canada and at the BA meeting in Winnipeg in late August. He also took ‘holiday’ breaks with Audrey in continental Europe. Unfortunately there is no record of the detailed personal incidents that must have taken place during the many travels he undertook both abroad and within the British Isles during his time in Glasgow. Already by 1910 he had marked himself out as a geologist with exceptionally wide experience of seeing rocks in North, South and East Africa, Australia, New Zealand, North America, the West Indies, Britain, Spitzbergen and various parts of continental Europe, at a time when such extensive travelling was quite unusual. As would be expected, Gregory’s first few years in Glasgow produced much work based on his time in Australia that he had been unable to complete while there, or that had been submitted whilst he was in Australia, but was only published later. He also started to publish new work carried out since arriving in Glasgow, especially in the mining area. The emphasis was on mining topics, geographical matters and completing long delayed Natural History Museum (NHM) work, although he must have spent some time in 1905 (perhaps on the voyage to South Africa?) preparing his book (Gregory 1906) on The Dead Heart of Australia describing his 1901– 2 journey around Lake Eyre, even though much of it was put together from newspaper reports. Gregory’s presidential address on the control of Australasian climate by the Southern Ocean given in Dunedin in January 1904 (Gregory 1905) and his book on the Mount Lyell mining field in Tasmania (Gregory 1905a), both completed in Australia, were his only substantial 1905 research publications; his (1905b) Imperial Geography and Geographical Readers (for New Zealand schools) were textbooks. This was a brief publication slow-down caused by the move to, and settling into, Glasgow, plus the time and effort expended in making a tour in 1905 of the mines in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. The Dunedin address was among the first of many invited lectures that were to play an increasingly important role in his career. The main changes that Australia had wrought in Gregory were that he returned full of enthusiasm and knowledge about Australia

and Australian life in general and Australian geography, mining, mining geology and gold mining in particular, and also concerned about the training of mining geologists and engineers. The contrast in the development of both Australia and New Zealand and of the education of the white colonists there with his experience of East Africa, promoted a life-long approval for the official ‘keep Australia white’ policy. His interests in racial matters, that had early manifested itself in his accounts of the indigenous peoples of East Africa (Gregory 1894, 1896), later became much more strongly developed and prompted a series of articles, books and lectures. He also became a champion of the British Empire at a time when Empire fever was close to its height. The continual calls upon his time to give all the invited lectures, plus the time spent writing the books and articles that he produced, came at the expense of the solid palaeontological work that had characterized his NHM days, and was never replaced by any other such rigorous disciplined study. He was also now acutely aware of how much western industrialized civilization was dependent upon a continued abundant supply of metals, which he realized could only be sustained by mining more and more difficult-to-recover ores. This prompted him to become an apostle of improved training for mining geologists and engineers. He had made a short intensive visit to the USA in late 1900 to see the facilities and talk with the teaching staff about the curricula of what were then considered to be the leading mining schools in the world, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, the Colorado School of Mines in Denver and probably the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, New York State. This visit was clearly intended to guide his proposals for curricula, equipment, facilities and a new building for his Department in Melbourne, but he now used the information as part of a campaign to improve the standards of training in the UK in mining and mining geology. He did not do this as an ‘outsider’ to the mining scene, but became closely involved as he had done in Australia by studying mines, mining methods and mining training, becoming an active member of mining associations, and producing a flood of publications on mining. Shortly after returning to Britain he became a full Member of the Institute of Mining Engineers (IME) in 1905 (Membership list; Transactions of the Institute of Mining Engineers), and by 1905 he was also a member of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (IMM). The biggest change in his society activities compared with his NHM days was that attendance at the Geological Society of London (GSL), the Royal Geographic Society (RGS) and the Geologists Association (GA) was no longer easy, with a minimum of a 9– 10 hour train journey each way to and from London, so that there was not even an early morning train from Glasgow that would make a late afternoon meeting in London. Instead, his main platform became the Glasgow Geological Society and his appearances on the national stage now concentrated more on the annual meeting of the BA; although he still fitted in visits to London when he could. He generally travelled down on a night sleeper and returned the next night, also by sleeper, unless, in the initial years (1905 –8) he could spend longer and work in the NHM on the great Cretaceous Bryozoa catalogue. Thus his 26 February 1908 letter to Geikie (RS MC 08194), ended with ‘I was very disappointed to be unable to get to London last Friday in time for the afternoon meeting . . . [I was] prevented in leaving the night before and so could only get to London in time

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 111– 131. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.15

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for the dinner. Though I had to leave London again that same night I thought it better than nothing’. Otherwise he would leave on the 9.15 am train the day before the meeting (RS MC 17113). By 1906 he was in full publication flood again, especially in topics relating to mining, with a dozen publications in that year, including one book (Gregory 1906), together with papers on Egyptian corals (Gregory 1906a) and echinoids (Gregory 1906b) in February and March 1906, and the work of the National Antarctic Expedition (Gregory 1906c), already dealt with. The following record of his early research and lecturing activities while in Glasgow shows his extraordinary energy and the wide scope of his work, to which must be added the fact that whenever he could spare time while in London, he returned to the NHM to continue with completing the massive second volume of his catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa. Almost certainly the delay in completing this stemmed from his declining enthusiasm about the subject (as intimated to Geikie above) combined with the pressure of other more congenial subjects. His emphasis moved to mining geology, perhaps partly influenced by his admiration for Judd as Head of the RSM, and certainly in part because he was increasingly aware of the extent to which civilized life depended upon limited metallic resources. He clearly wanted to make his mark in this field in which he had done nothing before leaving for Australia. Consequently what follows is dominated by work related to mining. In the northern summer of 1905, Gregory’s mining-related tour of southern Africa, described below, was the first of his mining ventures from Glasgow. On 21 December 1905, probably as he and Audrey were staying at Bassetts for Christmas, and seeing their children and Audrey’s family, he attended a meeting of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy in Burlington House on ‘Occurrence and treatment of gold ore at Bidi, Sarawak, Borneo’ (Scrutton 1906) and joined in the discussion. On 11 January 1906 he made his first contribution to Scottish geology based on fieldwork done within little more than year of his coming to Glasgow. This was a paper read to the Glasgow Geological Society on ‘A glaciated rock surface at Lugton, North Ayrshire’ (Gregory 1907). On 14 February he read his paper on ‘The mining fields of Southern Rhodesia in 1905’ to the Institution of Mining Engineers at a General Meeting in Glasgow (Gregory 1906d). On 22 February 1906 he lectured to the Engineering Society of Glasgow University on ‘Mining in Australasia’, dealing with the initiation of alluvial gold mining in 1851, gold mining in Victoria, the Broken Hill lead – zinc and other base metals, and the pyrite mining and smelting at Mt Lyell, Tasmania (Gregory 1906e). Following the completion of his first year lectures in Glasgow, he lectured to the RGS in London on Monday 19 March 1906 on ‘The economic geography and development of Australia’ (Gregory 1906f). He seems to have spent most Saturdays (and sometimes part of Friday getting there) while in Glasgow doing fieldwork, either leading student or GSG excursions, or else carrying out his own research, using trains, bicycle and foot. He frantically visited and collected from different parts of the Highlands, as he sought quickly to become familiar with Scottish Highland geology. His field notebooks for an undated part of 1906 record one exceptional visit to the NW Highlands (by motor car?) starting at Glenelg, on to Kinlochewe, Altbea (sic) and Ullapool, Cnocan an t Sassunaich, Ledbeg and Inchnadamph, Scourie, Laxford Bridge, Durness, Sango Bay, Loch Cealla-Dail, Ben Cannabin, Loch Eriboll, and Ben Hope, with stops between. Usually he spent time nearer to Glasgow but the surviving field notebooks do not record more locations. Thus, according to Gregory (1931) on Saturday 7 April 1906 he was in a tunnel of the Loch Katrine aqueduct, north of Glasgow, observing the Dalradian Schists thrust over his supposed Lennoxian, which was actually just more Dalradian. On Friday 27 April 1906 he delivered one of the prestigious invited weekly evening lectures to the Royal Institution of Great Britain on ‘Ore deposits and their distribution in depth’

(Gregory 1907a). This was the first public display in London of his expertise, gained in Australia, on mining, which with typical thoroughness, he had pursued in many varied ways. This lecture drew on material already used under a similar title in Bendigo (Gregory 1902). On 17 May 1906 Gregory delivered another mining paper, this time to the IMM in London (Gregory 1906g). This paper discussed the gold-bearing conglomerates of Southern Rhodesia, drawing on his observations while in Southern Africa with the BA in 1905. By 15 June 1906 he was addressing the IME again, this time in London on the topic of ‘The education of mining engineers’ (Gregory 1906h). July saw the publication in Science Progress of a non-technical summary of the geology of some Australian mining fields (Gregory 1906i) and by early August he was at the 1906 BA meeting held in York, where on 7 August he presented a paper entitled ‘The problem of the Palaeozoic glaciation of Australia and South Africa’ (Gregory 1907b). Here he had renewed contact with Edgeworth David from Sydney who was also at the meeting. Preparing the BA paper probably returned Gregory’s thoughts to the subject of climate control by varying ocean –continent geographical dispositions, which he further expounded in a paper to the International Geological Congress in Mexico in 1906 entitled ‘Climatic variations, their extent and causes’ (Gregory 1906j), as a non-attending member. By early 1907, Gregory (1907c) was delivering the three 1907 Cantor Lectures of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce on ‘Gold Mining and Gold Production’, lecturing on 28 January, 4 and 11 February in London. The invitation to give these lectures was regarded by the Council of Glasgow University as a great honour (Minutes, 6 June 1906). On 14 March, John Renwick & Gregory (1907) presented an account of ‘The Loch Lomond Moraines’ to the Glasgow Geological Society. In the summer of 1907, Gregory visited France probably Brittany (Gregory 1913), on holiday with Audrey, and then had ‘a long tour of Scandinavia’ (Gregory 1931) visiting Swedish Lapland, including the museums of Uppsala and Stockholm. He wanted to see the recently recognized massive SE- directed overthrust of the Precambrian and some Lower Palaeozoic rocks of the western Norwegian Gneiss region over the Lower Palaeozoic rocks. This he subsequently wrote up in summary (Gregory 1908). Some of the Swedish thrust sections he examined with Peach and Horne. However, he did not accept all the supposed thrusts, such as near the great Torneatra˚sk Lake (between Kiruna and Narvik), because there was no mylonite. He seemed happier with Alfred Elis To¨rnebohm (1838 –1911)’s thrust plane around ˚ reskutan (Gregory 1931). He also undertook a series of visits A to see the iron ores of Scandinavia in the field, visiting Taberg, Gellivaara and Kiruna, (revealed in Gregory 1925), presumably to widen the range of his mining knowledge and in connection with an IGC project on the iron resources of the world. As President of Section C of the August 1907 BA Leicester meeting, he delivered his presidential address. On 26 September 1907 he was at the great centennial dinner of the Geological Society in the Hotel Metropole as the representative of Glasgow University and afterwards on Saturday 28 September led a field excursion to Sudbury in Suffolk where the Upper Chalk, the Thanet Sands, the Reading Beds, the London Clay, the Red Crag and other Quaternary deposits were inspected (Herries-Davies 2007). By 17 October he was lecturing at the IMM again, this time on the origin of the gold in the Rand (Gregory 1907d). On 9 January 1908 he lectured the Glasgow Geological Society on Kelvin’s contributions to the study of geology (Gregory 1908a). On 26 March 1908 he lectured the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, giving a summary of his 1902– 3 Lake Eyre expedition in which his love for the desert and Australia came across and prompted him to become quite lyrical with praise at the pleasure of doing the project (Gregory 1908b). In July and August 1908 he led an expedition to what is now part of Libya. On 12 November

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1908 he was elected President of the Geological Society of Glasgow in its Jubilee year for a three-year term. Beginning in 1909 he became an editorial advisor or assistant editor of the Geological Magazine, an honorary post which he faithfully continued until his death. There are numerous unsigned reviews, obituary notices and other items that can be fairly certainly identified as emanating from his pen (e.g. Eminent Living Geologists: Dr Eduard Suess, Geological Magazine, 1913, Dec V, 10, pp. 1 –3) but none of these will be dealt with in this account, as attribution may be a matter of opinion. On 23 January 1909 he lectured the Scottish Association of Secondary Teachers (Western Branch) in Glasgow on the causes of variations in the level of the sea. In the northern summer he went to Western Australia and Queensland, returning by British Columbia with stops and crossing the Rockies by the southernmost Canadian Railroad, to attend the August 1909 BA meeting in Winnipeg, Canada. There on 30 August he exhibited ‘Material described as Geyserite from the Mount Morgan Mine, Queensland’ which he had studied in some detail, although he did not read a paper at the BA. The words quoted earlier ‘Professor Gregory was always rushing’ come to mind as being typical of his life. It is also undeniable that he was a popular public lecturer, a point emphasized in several obituary notices (e.g. Boswell 1936) and from the number of invitations and the wide range of audiences that he lectured to.

Early BA activity while in Glasgow, including visits to Zimbabwe and the Witwatersrand Mines Gregory had been a member of the BA since 1894 and usually attended its annual meetings. His involvement now increased, if only because of his more senior status, and he seems to have attended and contributed to most of the BA annual meetings from 1905. He had the unusual honour of not only being President of Section C (Geology) twice, in 1907 and at the centennial meeting in 1931, but also President of Section E (Geography) in 1924. He was also a member of a small number of BA Research Committees as detailed later. In this period from 1900– 10, the BA Annual Meetings commonly drew 1500 –3000 attendees, an enormous number for that time (BA annual records). Sometime in early 1905, the BA, which was due to hold its annual meeting for 1905 in South Africa, sponsored Gregory to examine the mining, especially the gold mining, in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and report on the prospects compared with the highly successful South African mines, a task which of course necessitated examining the mines of both countries. The prime movers in this are not known to the writer, possibly Dr Frederick Henry Hatch (1864 – 1932), but the background, as summarized by Gregory (1906d), from which the following is taken, was that up to 31 March 1905, over £70 million had been spent by European companies in Southern Rhodesia, a country with ancient (perhaps 3000– year-old) gold mines, for a return of only £4.24 million, whereas in South Africa the returns had exceeded outlay several times over. Presumably the BA felt that with meetings in Cape Colony (Cape Town) and the Transvaal (Johannesburg) it ought to make a scientific contribution to the struggling, and somewhat disheartened, northern neighbour, Southern Rhodesia, which in 1904 contained fewer than 13 000 Europeans. Were the poor results due to the use of unsuitable mining methods or the fault of the geological structure, and did the latter explain the unfulfilled glowing expectations of a second Rand bonanza, with its flood of fortune-seeking European settlers? The BA support enabled Gregory to make his visit to Southern Rhodesia in July and August of 1905, immediately before the BA meeting which began in Cape Town on 15 August 1905 (BA 1906). In September 1905 he visited the Rand mines in South Africa.

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Gregory would have been keen to see southern Africa because of its many geological similarities with Australia, particularly if both geological and mining matters could be combined with assisting European settlement as part of the British Empire. He returned to Britain during late September or early October 1905, no doubt writing furiously, as his reputation for being able to use every available opportunity while travelling to write was legendary, so that he probably worked longer hours at writing while voyaging than circumstances would allow him when in the University and at home. Gregory used the recently installed railways to visit the Southern Rhodesian Globe, Phoenix, Gaika, Tebekwe and Wanderer gold mines, Sebakwe, and the Ayrshire and Eldorado gold mines, Lomagunda (Gregory 1906d). These mines accounted for over 50% of the country’s gold output. He also visited the Wankie coal mine. In a thorough manner, he collected samples, examined the geology and geography, absorbing whatever published and unpublished information there was available, as well as being shown the mines and the surrounding ground by the mining staff, and receiving samples from unvisited mines. Unpublished, but not very helpful, hand-drawn maps of his route and detailed summaries of mine plans are in the University of Glasgow’s Gregory archives under ‘Maps of Zimbabwe’, DC 005/2. He went into the economics of the mining in great detail, including the cost of labour, excavation, pumping, crushing, transport, the grade of ore and the receipts obtained and, as far as he could ascertain, the prospects. It was this appreciation of the crucial role of income and expenditure that made his opinions so valuable to the mining community. Back in Glasgow, he studied thin sections of the rocks, and with Tyrrell’s assistance, made a few simple determinations of density and of mineral identifications and wrote a comprehensive 58- page summary which included an outline of the geology and geography and of the history of the mines and of the exploration and economics of Southern Rhodesia (Gregory 1906d). His conclusions, first reported in early 1906 to the IME in a meeting in Glasgow, were that there was an urgent need for a Geological Survey to be established, that the gold was in scattered veins so that small, well-managed mines had good prospects, with a healthy climate and water available, but there were not the major, concentrated rich deposits which characterized the Rand. At the second part of the 1905 BA meeting in Johannesburg on 29 August, Gregory presented two papers on ‘The Rhodesian Banket’ and ‘The indicators of the Ballarat Gold Fields; a study in the formation of Gold Pockets’. The first of these accounts was later given in detail in Gregory (1906g), the second in Gregory (1906i) but particularly in Gregory (1906f ) and are described below. Gregory’s friend Grenville Cole was also present and gave a paper. At the 1905 BA meeting, Gregory was appointed Chairman of two BA committees; one with 13 others who were experts on southern African and Indian geology, to ‘Investigate and report on the correlation and age of South African strata and the question of a uniform stratigraphical nomenclature’ (BA 1906). The other, with his old associate, A. C. Seward, and Mr T. N. Leslie, on ‘The fossil flora of the Transvaal’, seems to have been mainly to enable Leslie to continue his research on that subject. The first committee did its business entirely by correspondence, and did not report until the 1910 BA meeting at Sheffield, when despite much disagreement, it was recommended that the System names of Swaziland, Witwatersrand, Ventersdorp, Transvaal and Waterberg should be adopted in southern Africa (Gregory 1911). Probably it was at the 1905 BA meeting that he was offered the Presidency of Section C, Geology for the 1907 meeting. After the 1905 BA meeting, he visited a whole series of Rand mines ‘from Krugerdorp on the west to Modderfontein in the east, and to examine the magnificent mine plans, whereon are tabulated the results of years of observations made by a large number of trained workers’ (Gregory 1907d).

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At the York BA meeting in August 1906, which Gregory attended, he considered the Upper Palaeozoic glaciations of Australia and South Africa in particular, but of Gondwanaland (his use of the Suess term) in general, including India and South America (Gregory 1907b). He maintained there was no widespread single ice sheet but a series of ‘local and sporadic’ glacial events that ‘were not all synchronous; they developed on mountainous regions on the borders of the continent of Gondwanaland, in the neighbourhood of warm seas . . . where there was an ample supply of moisture from the sea, high mountains to precipitate it as snow and a distribution of land and water that would have produced a suitable wind system and low summer temperatures’. He concluded incorrectly that the glacial episodes could ‘be explained by the action of existing meteorological forces acting on their present scale’. Also while at the York BA meeting, Gregory participated in a Section A discussion on ‘Radioactivity and the internal structure of the Earth’ in which he said ‘we no longer have to believe in high temperatures in the past history of the Earth . . . Arrhenius’s theory [see below] may now be dismissed’ (BA 1907, p. 454). Nevertheless for reasons unknown, Gregory did not see that the dispensation of a molten early Earth history also removed the crucial need for a shrinking Earth that the Tetrahedral Theory was designed to explain, and therefore made that theory untenable. Also, it has recently been maintained (England et al. 2007) that Kelvin’s calculations of the age of the Earth were not disproved by the discovery of radioactivity, as is, and was, popularly believed, but they were made untenable by his assumption that no convection of the mantle or of fluids, takes place inside the Earth. This point was made as early as 1895 by one of Kelvin’s own assistants, John Perry (1850 –1920; later FRS) (1895a, b) and published in Nature, but since widely ignored for reasons that are uncertain, but may well be those that England et al. (2007) allege. At the 1907 BA meeting at Leicester, where Gregory was President of Section C, Geology, his presidential address delivered on 1 August (BA 1908, 490–502), was a curious hotchpotch mixture of topics that in itself was typical of Gregory’s research interests. It started with a eulogy of praise for the GSL which was shortly to celebrate the centenary of its foundation in 1807; it went on to consider the composition of the inner Earth (an Fe –Ni centre similar to the Fe meteorites); then considered the deep-seated control over what happens at the surface of the Earth, claiming that there was widespread uniformity in the sedimentary deposits of each of the distinctive geological systems, such as thick deposits of feldspathic sandstones at the end of the Precambrian (Torridonian of Scotland; the Sparagmites of Scandinavia, the Keweenawan Sandstones of the USA and perhaps the quartzites of the Rand). He then switched to ‘Plutonists and ore-formation’ dealing with the relationship of igneous rocks in the genesis of primary ore deposits, especially dealing with iron ores such as those of Taberg and Kiruna in Scandinavia, which he had recently visited in 1907 (Gregory 1925). Modern dating (Smith et al. 2009) has shown that the volcanic sequence hosting the iron ores of Kiruna is older than 2050 Ma whereas the iron ores are much younger, being deposited from fluids in the interval between 1920 and 1860 Ma, even though the fluids were probably of granitic origin, and therefore ultimately of igneous origin (Lledo & Jenkins 2008). Also, but more controversially, he cited the Sudbury nickel ores, which he believed were of hydrothermal, not magmatic, origin. He based the last theory on his examination of thin sections made from purchased samples for an economic geology practical, and C. W. Dickson’s (1904) descriptions and conclusions. He moved on to considering the assurance of ample supplies of iron ores, despite ‘the general rule of diminishing ore grade with depth’, a dogma Gregory subscribed to and repeated in several of his papers. The subject of the iron ore deposits of the world, and whether they would soon be exhausted, is dealt with in more

detail later, but Gregory had contrived to make the topic one of discussion at the Leicester meeting and this sparked a later IGC study of some depth. He then switched again to the education of mining geologists, stressing the need for the teaching of science to be more technical for the needs of the country, and how British mining geologists were not as well trained as American and continental ones. He expressed the view that there was no cause for worry about the future of academic work, as there would always be those who chose that field because of its ‘fascination’. This roving address was reprinted in its entirety in 1908 by the Smithsonian Institution of Washington (DC) under the title ‘Geology of the Inner Earth Igneous Ores’ in the Smithsonian Report for 1907, pp. 211– 330. A summary of the above address was written by Gregory (1907e) for the Geological Magazine. He repeated his views on the non-magmatic origin of the Sudbury Ni ores, which left him open to attack which the absence of discussion following the President’s address at the BA had not. Prof. Arthur Philemon Coleman (1852 –1939) FRS (1908) wrote to state that ‘practically every geologist who has seen [the Sudbury ores] in the field agrees they are magmatic –the best example in the world of magmatic segregation.’ Gregory (1908c) promptly replied doubting that interpretation. The problem arose because of the apparently later crystallization of the ores compared with the main igneous rockforming minerals. Gregory does not seem to have considered that the ore minerals might have formed from either a slightly later magmatic injection into the partly, or largely, solidified magma, or the back injection of a late magmatic fractionation, or even an immiscible sulphide magma, perhaps because the sequential history of magma in magma chambers did not start to be unravelled in any detail until Lawrence Rickard Wager (1904– 1965) and William Alexander Deer (1910 –2009) (1939) began to reveal the history of the Skaergaard intrusion. Although few details of Gregory’s 1909 visit to Canada, cited erroneously in Gregory (1922, 1925), as 1908 are known, it is certain that the above response (Gregory 1908c) was written before he visited the Sudbury nickel deposit, in connection with the 1909 BA meeting (BA 1910), presumably to enlarge his experience to include nickel mining, and to see for himself the field evidence bearing on the different views. The visit confirmed to him his view that the ore, although often associated with, and in, the norite, was not a magmatic segregation because it also occurred outside the norite in greenstones, as he saw in the Victoria Mine. In the Frood Mine the country rock was fractured and the sulphides acted as cement to the fragments, both in gabbro and diorite, while blebs of ore also occur in quartzite. After his 1925 BA meeting attendance in Toronto, he re-affirmed the non-magmatic origin of the Ni-bearing sulphide ore (Gregory 1926). Almost certainly he would have visited other geological sites but no record has been uncovered.

Mining geology Gregory’s first work in this field while in Glasgow was his 1905 visit to southern Africa but his publication while in Glasgow of a flurry of papers, lectures and a book, on mining topics, started with the 1905 book on the Mount Lyell mining field, completed just before he left Melbourne (Gregory 1905a). This book seems to have prompted a spin-off summary of the Mount Lyell geology and other Australian mining fields (which was written before 20 January 1906, when Gregory (1906k) appeared), and was published in the July 1906 Science Progress (Gregory 1906i). In this account he first gave a summary of the geology of the Mount Lyell Copper Field which he thought formed by solutions moving along faults. He then detailed the first major use in the world there of the process of pyrite-smelting in which no other fuel than the sulphur and iron in the ore is used in the blast furnace, the exothermic oxidation of these two elements

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providing the heat. This enabled the copper and iron pyrites ore to be smelted at the unprecedentedly low price of 13 shillings (£0.65) per ton (and produced silver and sulphuric acid as by-products). He then went on to describe the Mount Bischoff tin mine, also in Tasmania, in which the cassiterite was thought to be related to quartz porphyry dykes, and then he described the Australian ‘saddle-reefs’ at Bendigo, Victoria, where the gold is concentrated at the apex of gentle anticlines. He mentioned the alluvial gold of Castlemaine, Victoria and then described Broken Hill and the separation of the zinc ores there before concluding with an account of ‘The indicators of Ballarat’ which he had already described in some detail in Gregory (1906k). In the last Gregory recounts how in 1871 a Morgan Llewellyn first noticed that gold concentrates occurred where a thin vertical rusty plane met a flat quartz vein. These rusty planes or lines as they were called, were named ‘the indicators,’ had never been scientifically described and Gregory investigated them with thin sections and showed that they developed along slip bands in the slates. The rusty plane was an oxidized iron chlorite, sometimes with rutile, that had formed due to fluids moving along the crack developed along apexes of tight folds in the slates. These fluids presumably also brought in the gold which was deposited where the fluids intersected those that produced the flat-lying quartz veins. Gregory (1906e) reproduced critical views of thin sections. Gregory’s lecture on ‘Ore deposits and their distribution in depth’ (Gregory 1907a), given at the Royal Institution, is good evidence of his popular lecturing ability, as such lectures were intended for the public, not specialists, and only good speakers were invited. First, he discussed the relatively limited resources of workable alluvial deposits of metal ores. Next he considered that only mining could meet the enormous consumption of the early 20th century industrialized world. He then surveyed the origins of buried ores and, despite pointing out several facts to support the lateral secretion theory, he finally rejected it as ‘discredited,’ mainly because he claimed it could not explain a mixture of metal ores when some of the elements do not occur in the surrounding rocks. The account reveals his wide reading combined with his Australian mining knowledge. He concluded that the only available substantial deposits of metal ores that can be mined were derived from deeply sourced plutonic fluids that had dissolved metals from the Earth’s interior and deposited the metal ores near to the surface, especially where subsequent secondary enrichment by meteoric fluids had also acted. Based on his knowledge of the Bendigo (Victoria) mines, which greatly influenced his thinking, he pointed out that groundwater was confined to the surface zone below which the rocks are dry, except for localized springs of hot alkaline waters, encountered at depth. These, Gregory stated, are of plutonic, not meteoric, origin. These juvenile waters, as he pointed out that Professor Suess had named them, were superheated and alkaline and so able to transport many metals which were precipitated as the solutions rise and later on might be secondarily enriched by weathering and the downward descent of meteoric water. Again Gregory’s erroneous (1906) belief in deep-sourced plutonically-derived water is evident. Gregory’s 17 May 1906 lecture to the IMM (Gregory 1906g) on the gold-bearing conglomerates of Southern Rhodesia was based on his 1905 visit. He had tried to understand the confusing use of the term ‘banket,’ which he decided had been variously used for a sedimentary conglomerate, a crush-conglomerate and an eruptive breccia of a dyke with some pebble-like segregations, the only other common feature being the occurrence of gold, which had been mined by the Africans for many years. He particularly described the ‘Eldorado Mine’ in ‘Lomagunda’ about 15 km west of the c. 130 km long ‘Ayrshire Railway’ which ran to the ‘Ayrshire Mine.’ At the Eldorado Mine, a glaucophane –epidote schist underlay the boulder-bearing horizon which passed laterally into the main sedimentary conglomerate consisting of pebbles and boulders of granite, diorite and other plutonic rocks, together with metamorphic and vein quartz pebbles. Such conglomerates also

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occurred elsewhere in Southern Rhodesia, for example, near Seukwe, overlying, and in association with, banded ironstones and both rested unconformably on schists, gneisses and granites. Gregory, who had also seen the Rand banket (and later gave a 40-page account of the origin of the gold there (Gregory 1907d)), agreed with Dr F. Hatch, that the Rhodesian and Rand conglomerates differed in origin, age and lithological character, the Rand conglomerate consisting of quartz and quartzite pebbles. Interestingly, he compared the Rhodesian conglomerates with the Nullagine conglomerate of Western Australia, which he had not then visited, and he ended his (Gregory 1906g) account with the words ‘There are several similarities between the geology of Southern Rhodesia and that of the corresponding latitude in north-western Australia’. Gregory’s (1906h) account of how the education of mining engineers should proceed emphasized the need for the training to include civil, mechanical and electrical engineering in addition to some knowledge of chemistry, geology, mineralogy and metallurgy. He decried the poor training generally given in the UK, if only because at least four or even five years of degree work was required, and was given in the best mining schools in the United States and Australia, whereas three years sufficed in the UK. He suggested a higher entrance standard in Britain with more of the basics being taught at school. He strongly supported the ‘sandwich’ system in which a student spent six months each year both in the university and on practical work in a mine. This prepared students for both mining techniques and management while the academic course should try to use mining examples, rather than the usually cited igneous and metamorphic petrological examples. The six month academic year in Glasgow would have enabled a truly equal sandwich of six months academic work and six months practical work. Gregory was scornful of the quality of the British output of mining engineers in general (even of the Royal School of Mines), but had some commendatory remarks about the course at the University of Birmingham which, perhaps through his friend Charles Lapworth, he had become familiar with, and with Professor Richard A. S. Redmayne (1865– 1955) of Birmingham, a pioneer in higher education training of mining engineers. Redmayne had been a colliery manager and was a consulting engineer and in the discussion he supported Gregory’s criticisms. Gregory advocated specialization and module courses of the type already introduced at the RSM. He realized that it was not possible to train mining experts with the classical broad education favoured by Oxford and Cambridge universities. It is therefore somewhat surprising, that during his time in Glasgow, Gregory did not found and lead an outstanding School of Mining Geology. By 1907 he had established himself as a professional geologist whose experience in visiting a wide variety of mines and whose expertise in mining geology and mining subjects was well recognized. His acute perception of the costs of the various operations involved, which he was always careful to get the precise figures for (if he could), marked him out from most academics involved in the subject and would have endeared him to ‘practical men’. His three 1907 Cantor lectures (Gregory 1907c) for instance, on gold mining, show this careful attention to costs. The first of the lectures dealt mostly with the recovery of alluvial gold, preceded by a summary of the sources of gold. The chief recovery methods, from the small-scale panning and the miner’s cradle, through to the largest dredges and hydraulic sluicing, were described, illustrated, and costed, and the amazingly low gold concentrations that were economically workable by large dredges persuaded him that such methods had a long life. He then described the recovery of gold from present day rivers and old river beds in Victoria, including gravels lying under, and covered up by, young basalt flows, that had filled up old river valleys, but the gravels could be mined underneath the basalt flows. The second lecture dealt with gold-bearing lodes, classified into eight types, the use of the term ‘reef’, the value of the microscope in mining

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geology and the importance of understanding the genesis of any ore because of its practical value in determining mine development. According to Gregory (1907c, p. 37), it was during this second lecture that he suggested, using a lantern slide, that the smooth pebbles of pyrites in the Rand conglomerates were pseudomorphing worn sedimented iron oxides. This must have provoked some controversy for he agreed to the publication of a copy of the lantern slide in the Mining Journal for 9 March 1907, together with his interpretation of its origin, an interpretation doubted by Horwood (1907), and perhaps by F. H. Hatch, in the same account. In the third lecture (Gregory 1907c), he described the types of crushing machines, including stamp batteries and the Tube Mill, the filter-press and other means to release and expose the mined gold and then the methods of extraction of the gold by smelting, chlorination and cyanidation. Finally, he considered the whole question of the world gold production and the costs of extraction. Continuing with gold mining, by 17 October 1907, when he lectured to the IMM again, his report on The origin of the gold in the Rand banket, based on his 1905 observations and collections, was published before the meeting (Gregory 1907d). This topic, which was already controversial and would remain so for about a century, prompted him to quote that ‘the origin of the banket remains the great riddle of modern economic geology’. He defined banket as ‘auriferous sedimentary conglomerate’ which occurs in the upper part of the Witwatersrand System. It is clear from the account that he had visited at least five or six mines. He concluded unequivocally that the gold was deposited with the enclosing sedimentary rocks as a placer deposit on a marine shore, together with heavy black iron oxides that were later converted into pyrites while the gold was dissolved and re-deposited in situ. The gold is found in the cement, not the pebbles, and follows the bedding, while vertical lodes containing gold, crossing the bedding, are absent. Such lodes would have been expected if the origin of the gold was external to the conglomerate and derived from incoming solutions. As was often so with Gregory, once a subject had aroused his interest, he continued to think and read about it after he had published on the matter, and later returned again with further evidence (Gregory 1909), in this instance, after he had come across an account by Professor John D. Irving (1904) of the Cambrian gold ores of South Dakota, in which the gold was introduced by solutions moving up vertical channels and then being deposited in the sedimentary layers. The feeder channels were extremely clear and obvious and were illustrated by Irving in convincing photographs. Gregory saw that if such channels had existed in the Rand banket, with the enormous amount of mining that had taken place there, they would certainly have been found and yet no one had found any. So his 1909 paper was basically a summary and a repetition of his 1907d paper but with an extended description of the thin section evidence based on the samples he had collected, plus the South Dakota evidence. The account appeared in the relatively new journal Economic Geology, which would have had wider distribution in the United States than his 1907d paper. A summary of Gregory’s views on the origin of the Rand gold deposits was given by Horwood (1917). After over a century of controversy, it is only recently that the Witwatersrand gold controversy has been largely resolved by the discovery that vast fluxes of pervasive hydrothermal solutions have passed through the .10 km thick, c. 2900 Ma succession in the Witwatersrand basin. The main movement was generated by the heat from the intrusion of the Bushveld Complex and the resulting metamorphism of the basin. Monazite and xenotime intergrown with the gold give U –Pb dates the same as the age of the Bushveld Complex, c. 2060 Ma. Detrital gold originally formed a little before 3000 Ma, and deposited c. 2900 Ma was mobilized and re-deposited in different places at c. 2720, 2630, 2130 but particularly at 2060 Ma (Rasmussen et al. 2007; Frimmel et al. 2009). So Gregory’s support for the view that

the Witwatersrand gold was mobilized sedimentary gold was precisely correct and he defended it throughout his life (Gregory 1914, 1928). 1907 saw the appearance of three delayed Geological Survey of Victoria publications, all related to aspects of mining, and the work involved has already been described (Gregory 1907f –h). The Survey memoir concerning the Ballarat East Goldfield (Gregory 1907f) created a minor rumpus as a number of the observations and their interpretation were strongly disputed by some of the Victorian Survey geologists who had spent much longer in the mining area than Gregory had been able to. Accordingly, F. D. Johnson (1907) criticized some of Gregory’s conclusions in the 6 July fortnightly Mining Journal, Railway & Commercial Gazette and Gregory (1907i) replied in the 20 July issue by a letter, dated 16 July, sent from Little Baddow. Gregory’s reputation in the mining field naturally brought in requests for him to give advice and act as a consultant regarding mining prospects, and it is difficult to know how much he did of this but probably very little. His work for Henry North Holroyd (1832 –1909), the third Earl of Sheffield, resulted in two published reports, the first of which (Gregory 1908d) examined the possibility of mining iron and smelting it at The Sheffield Park, Sussex. The second (Gregory 1908e) dealt with the prospect of finding coal in the district of Newhaven in Sussex. It concluded that while no geologist would lightly discourage any attempt to prove the existence of coal under the Weald, there was no evidence to show Newhaven lay over a coal basin, and the question could only be settled by making a borehole, which Gregory did not recommend (The Times, 22 April 1908). In general Gregory’s reputation as a mining ‘expert’ probably held up better because he did not put it to the acid test of making prospecting predictions! Although Gregory could not attend all the IMM meetings in London, he contributed fairly regularly to the discussions from time to time, by written communications, which were published in the Transactions of the IMM. Four examples follow. (1) In a discussion on 21 April 1910 of a paper by J. M. Campbell (1910) on ‘The origin of laterite’, Gregory wrote that he agreed with Campbell that downward solutions containing organic matter were responsible for the laterite in West Africa and also some of the laterites in East Africa and Australia, but not all. ‘The laterite to the north of the Great Boulder Mine, Kalgoorlie was due to ascending solutions which was quite clear to me when I was there in 1904’. No one explanation will apply to all laterites. (2) On 26 May 1910, Gregory wrote to concur with Rickard’s (1910) views on the standardization of English in technical literature and agreed with him that ‘lode’ should be used for ‘reef’. (3) On 19 October 1911 and also on 16 November 1911, discussion of Coste’s (1912) paper on the inorganic origin of petroleum took place with Gregory disagreeing by written communication. Gregory stated that the Scottish oil shales got their oil from organic remains and he argued that cholesterol was solely of animal, not plant origin, and that the cholesterol in petroleum must be of animal origin. (4) Gregory wrote opposing the adoption of the metric system when Ingalls’ (1917) paper on the subject was discussed on 24 May 1917. In each instance, Gregory’s written discussion is contained within the references cited.

Bryozoa Another delayed publication that appeared in 1907 (Gregory 1907j) concerned the description of the Bryozoan Bicavea rotaformis, n. sp. which had been lying unpublished for eight years in the still to be completed second volume of the catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa. Dr Arthur Walton Rowe (1859 –1926) was completing his memoir on the Chalk of the Isle of Wight and needed to refer to the new species, and so Gregory abstracted a short account of this distinctive cog-wheel shaped bryozoan and described it in less than two pages with a promised fuller account in the

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forthcoming catalogue, which he hoped would be out ‘this winter’, although in fact it took nearly two more years. Nevertheless, this indicates that Gregory had made significant progress on the catalogue since returning to the UK (Figs 15.1 & 15.2). Even when the massive catalogue did appear (Gregory 1909a; Figs 15.1 & 15.2), nearly three dozen new species that had been named by others too late to be included were briefly described by Gregory (1909b) and the references listed, which showed that, at least up until 1909, Gregory was carefully following the literature in this field although his own work on bryozoa was tailing away.

Geographical contributions and publications Soon after Gregory’s arrival in Glasgow, he began promoting the subject of geography in the university, which was not then recognized as a distinct subject, but he achieved little until a new principal, Sir Donald MacAlister (1854 –1934), was appointed in 1907. Although primarily a physician, MacAlister had been involved in founding the University School of Geography in Cambridge, and he and Gregory agreed upon the need for a Chair of Geography, even though he appreciated that Gregory was a distinguished geographer in his own right (MacAlister 1921). MacAlister recognized the international dimensions of Glasgow’s trade and the university’s expertise in subjects like medicine and engineering, so that foreign students from dozens of different countries continued to increase in numbers under him (and reached no fewer than 200 by 1919), all of which combined to emphasize the university’s deficiency in not having a School of Geography. In addition, according to MacAlister (1921), the Scottish Educational Department and the Provincial Committee for the Training of Teachers were desperate to improve both the primary and secondary school teaching of geography and needed teachers with geography qualifications. So by 1908 the University Court was persuaded to found a Lectureship in Geography which would undertake the double task of teaching geography to university students and separately to trainee school teachers who were not in the university. This funded the post, as the student numbers increased rapidly, but did not provide the resources for a Chair or initially for accommodation, which Gregory found within geology. The post was filled from 1909 by (Sir) Henry G. Lyons FRS, later Director of the Science Museum, and an old collaborator with Gregory. Lyons left in 1911 and John Downie Falconer (1876 –1947) replaced him until called away to serve in Nigeria during the 1914 –18 War, eventually becoming Director of the Geographical Survey of Nigeria. Alexander Stevens (1887 – 1966), an old student of Gregory’s, was appointed from 1919 and eventually, in 1947, became the first Professor of Geography in Glasgow University. Gregory decided to advance study and research in geography in Glasgow in an analogous way to how the Geological Society of Glasgow was promoting geology among the Glasgow citizens. He set out to revive the Geographical Section of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (RPSG), and the following is extracted from the RPSG Council minutes. He had not been much involved with the society before, although he was a life member. He got himself elected to the Council in 1908, attending his first Council meeting on 20 May 1908, when he was appointed to represent the Society as a delegate to the 1908 BA meeting in Dublin, which he duly did. By 1909, using the threat of a new society being formed to promote geography in Glasgow, he achieved his aim. At a meeting held on 25 November 1909, which Gregory chaired, the decision to re-form the Geographical Section to stimulate the study of geography in the city and to do research, was approved and supported by the President of the RPSG, who was present. Gregory was appointed convenor of the Provisional Committee.

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A long statement appeared in the Glasgow Herald (26 November 1909, p. 13) detailing the meeting and the views expressed there that it was time for the university to found a Geography Department with a distinguished first head, such as Captain Lyons (applause). Captain Lyons became the first President of the revived Geographical Section of the RPSG (1910 – 11 while Gregory was Vice-President of the Geographical Section 1910– 1917, and elected President for 1929 –30. Gregory served on the RPSG Council only until 1911). A summary of Gregory’s introduction of geography into Glasgow University and a brief review of some of his geomorphological work was given by Leake & Bishop (2009). It seems that Gregory did not become a member of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society until 1910 (Society records) and was not an officer or member of the Council until he became a Vice-President in 1920, which position he retained until his death (Scottish Geographical Magazine, 48, 226). Once Gregory had started to write geographical texts while in Victoria, he continued with a flow of books and articles in this field until his death, and the following summarizes output that occurred within the first part of his time in Glasgow.

Australian geography; insights into Gregory’s appreciation of Australia Gregory’s 19 March 1906 lecture to the RGS on ‘The economic geography and development of Australia’, dealt with three main factors in Australian economic development: the geology which determined the mineral and soil wealth and the subterranean water supply; the geographical position which controlled Australian climate; and the quality and quantity of its manpower (Gregory 1906l). After a brief summary of the geology, with emphasis on the importance of vertical subsidence in dividing the continent into three major geographical divisions which cut right across the worn-down stumps of many previous orogenies to delimit the East Australian Highlands, the Great Plains of eastern Central Australia and the enormous Western Plateau (west of c. 1368E), Gregory described the rich mineral wealth, the fertile soils and the inadequate rainfall that compelled the use of a limited supply of underground water. He then went on to support the ‘white Australia’ policy, pointing out that despite the high wages paid there, the productivity of the white coal and gold miners was extremely high, in coal far exceeding those achieved in Britain and elsewhere. The Australian policy of universal education (which ignored the aborigines) and discouragement of extremes of poverty and wealth had fostered the high efficiency of white Australian labour. Gregory was pessimistic about the long-term future of the aborigines and he did not favour the unrestrained selfish individualism, as he put it, that was promoted in America. Among the listeners who spoke afterwards were Sir John Forrest (1847 –1918) of the Australian Commonwealth Government, who had previously been Prime Minister of Western Australia, and the Agents-General of Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, all of whom congratulated Gregory on the facts he had cited and discussed, and the generous way in which he had applauded the Australian way of doing things. The account is a distillation of much geographical and personal knowledge about Australia. Even more revealing of Gregory’s love and admiration for Australia and ‘the Australian way of life’ is the 32-page introductory chapter on Australia and the Australians in Australasia Vol. 1 (2nd edition) of Stanford’s Compendium of Geography and Travel (Gregory 1907k). Ever since Gregory had become involved in writing geography texts for Victoria’s school children, he had continued to produce, or contribute to, geography books. It is not known exactly when the chapter was written but the frequent reference to ‘England’ when ‘Britain’ would have been more

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Fig. 15.1. Various Cretaceous Bryozoa reproduced from the Catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa, Volume 2, by Gregory (1909a). With acknowledgements to the NHM.

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Fig. 15.2. Various Cretaceous Bryozoa reproduced from the Catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa, Volume 2, by Gregory (1909a). With acknowledgements to the NHM.

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appropriate, suggests it was either written before he went to Scotland, or most likely in his first two years there. In this chapter he emphasized the long isolation of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand (‘Australasia’) that was responsible for the distinctive vegetation, the survival of three-eyed lizards, the wingless birds of New Zealand and the preponderance of marsupials in Australia. He passed onto what would today be regarded as very partial political views. The physical isolation of the early settlers forged a unity of interest in sports, food, and newspapers –a great source of cohesive strength to Australia which has ‘not been handicapped by the weak, the ignorant and the discontented as in the caste-ridden countries of Europe’. The low crime rate and efficient working in eight-hour days, all kept Australia competitive, despite high wages. He then considered Australian politics and defence and strongly supported keeping the ‘white Australia’ policy but recognized that the hot tropical north of the continent, which at that time had not been greatly populated by Europeans, could not, using white labour, compete in growing cotton. This chapter revealed much about his political and social views and his clear approval of the relatively egalitarian society in Australia compared with ‘the Home Country’. As a self-made, non-Oxbridge man from a business background, he approved the Australian lack of deference to ‘superiors’ that markedly contrasted with British Society. He also had an acute appreciation of the need to produce and trade economically in competition with those producing from low wage economies, a problem that is still familiar today. This chapter (Gregory 1907k) is so illuminating of Gregory’s thinking, and repeats opinions expressed by him several times in other publications (e.g. Gregory 1906l) that there is little doubt that they were his personal views. Portions from the penultimate section are quoted so that his own words can be savoured and his political views understood. The first quote comes from ‘The Labour Party and its ideals,’ which despite an obligatory perfunctory disclaimer (p. 21) to the effect that ‘Special reference is made to the Labour Party simply because it is the party that is most often misunderstood. It is not to be inferred that the author regards it as the best or wisest political party in Australia, and he is conscious of the dangers to its future development,’

it is clear that Gregory writes approvingly and with conviction (p. 22): ‘‘The intensely democratic communities of Australia and New Zealand are always open to new ideas, and ready for fresh experiments. The democratic principles of the country are a matter of habit and instinct; they are not adopted in a spirit of philanthropic benevolence, as they were in Britain by the Young England party, or as a matter of intellectual conviction, as among British Liberals. Democracy in Australia is not a distant ideal to be sought and fought for. The young Australian breathes it in, like the oxygen of the air.’ ‘The general British idea of the Australian Labour party is a phantom . . . an image of the most recklessþ section of the English [Labour] party, magnified according to its greater power. But the Labour parties of Australia and Great Britain are strikingly different. Mr Tom Mann, [1856 –1941] who recently went out to Australia, in one of his fiery orations, appealed to the men of Australia to throw off their chains; and he denounced existing authorities in the approved manner of the European revolutionist. He was promptly told by his own side that that sort of thing was “fluff”. He was reminded that the Labour party had only recently held the Commonwealth Government, that it held a two-thirds majority in the Senate . . . that Labour Ministries were in office in Western Australia and Queensland . . . and therefore, if the Australian workmen were “in chains”, it must be because they liked them.’ ‘The Australian Labour party . . . has a practical, constructive policy, and has shown that its leaders have the ability to carry it out. New Zealand, under twelve years of Labour Government has advanced to unprecedented prosperity; and the fact that Australian stocks increased in value in the European money markets while the Watson Labour Ministry was in power, shows that full confidence was placed in its honesty of purpose and method. The feature that surprised me most in Australian politics was the moderation of the immediate demands of the Labour leaders. As a Conservative in British politics, I went to Australia with the “bogey” idea of the Australian Labour party. I was very surprised to find less socialistic legislation in Australia than there is in Britain. It is true that in Australia the railways are owned by the States; the legislation limiting hours of work in factories and shops is more advanced than in Britain; some of the States have laws providing a minimum wage, they enforce compulsory arbitration, and give old age pensions’ [None of the last three existed in Britain in 1907]. ‘But on the other hand there are no poor laws; there is nothing like the advanced municipal socialism of such cities as Glasgow; the trams are generally held by private companies; the

laws for the protection of workmen in factories are far less stringent than at home; colliery and mine owners may employ any manager they choose and the state does not test his efficiency . . . The advanced temperance legislation in Australia was mainly carried by [the] insistence [of the Australian Labour party which is ] amongst the strongest supporters of a system of advanced national education; it has taken up a sound policy in regard to the spread of technical education; it shows sympathy with the higher educational institutions such as the universities, and it warmly supports all means of public culture, such as free libraries and picture-galleries. It shows an intense distrust of militarism . . .’ ‘The fundamental principles of the Labour party do not seem to be essentially anti-capitalist. The aims of its policy are to secure reasonable equality of chance by providing free education and fair opportunities; to develop a healthy, vigorous race by securing sanitary homes and conditions of work; to spread a spirit of national patriotism and goodwill by preventing the growth of hostile social classes, and to give every man the opportunity for culture and recreation. The members of the Labour party point to the extreme differences between classes in Europe, and the deplorable consequences of such inequalities . . . the unrestrained individualism of America is leading to the same results there, and tends to inculcate a spirit of selfishness. Australia, they say, is a country which can produce sufficient food and clothes for a large population, and sufficient metals and produce, which are wanted in Europe, to provide the capital for its development. Australia, they claim, should be so governed that it should provide work and fair wages to a vast industrial population; that it should be able to afford a fair day’s wage for good workers; and that its work should be performed under such comfortable, healthy conditions, that the workers may take an interest in their work, and have sufficient time for culture and recreation. It is better, they claim, that Australia should have a large, well-educated, contented, working population, than that it should produce a larger yield of wool and cotton by a servile, black population.’ ‘The Australian policy of excluding undesirable alien immigrants aims at maintaining the high standard of the race. It has been much misunderstood in England. Australia knows how important a greater population is to her, and has shown no intention of excluding white men. The danger to Australia of allowing free Asiatic immigration is serious; as the northern coast is only four days’ voyage from the overcrowded countries of south-eastern Asia, with their teeming populations of Chinese. No such danger has threatened England, and yet there is an Act for the exclusion of undesirable aliens. The Asiatics have always been near Australia. No doubt they have known of its existence for many centuries. But they made no attempt to occupy the continent. It was only when British enterprise has opened the continent, has given it good roads and railways, and wells, and has made it safe for the traveller and the trader, that the Hindu pedlar would like to go in and reap the benefit.’ ‘There is plenty of room for the Asiatic in his own continent, and there is ample work for him in its development. Sir J. A. Baines has pointed out in his paper on ‘‘A Census of our Empire’’ (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 16, 1903, p. 12) that the peopled parts of Australia—and the Asiatic will only go to them—have comparatively dense populations. The average is only low when we include the vast regions which are still unoccupied . . .’ ‘The aim of the white Australian policy is to produce a race that shall be equal to its opportunity, and to the best of British traditions. Its advocates believe that the British race is better than that of the Chinese or the Hindu, and that it would be lowered and not improved by intermixture of Asiatic blood . . . They believe that a race must do all its own work, and that no honest, necessary work is degrading. They do not believe in the equality of men of the same race; and so they point out that, if a nation employs blacks to do its manual labour, there is no respectable livelihood left for the less efficient of its own people. The policy of the democratic party in Australia is, therefore, to develop a people that shall be equal to its chances, preserve the purity of the race, and so build up a happier community, and a civilization that is an improvement on that from which it has sprung.’

The above, now in part politically incorrect, was even then a matter of differing opinions. Popular Victorian and post-Victorian thinking in both Australia and Britain, tended to agree with Gregory as shown by the discussion in Gregory (1906l ). As a man born in 1864 in mid-Victorian time, Gregory, understandably, was a creature of his time. In the British Empire, Britons had priority although the debate about who should be allowed into Australia and New Zealand was sufficiently developed that Gregory had felt it necessary to justify the nature of the controlled immigration and would do so throughout his life. Only months after returning to Britain, he wrote a long letter to The Times (1 May 1905) arguing that the aborigines in Western Australia were being treated fairly by the West Australian government and that any lapses of official behaviour were in the region of the NW coast where ‘Malay, Manillamen and Japanese pearl fishers’ had come in and ‘Dr Roth’s report on the condition of affairs along this coast will help Australians to realize the evils that might follow any extensive Asiatic emigration’ This would now be considered a whitewashing of the West Australian government policy on the aborigines. The end of Gregory’s (1907k) introductory chapter to the book was a section on ‘The hopefulness of Australia’ in which his own love of the scenery, the wild open, disease-free, safe space of the

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bush (in contrast to his African experiences) and, apart from serious droughts, the generally agreeable climate, in a country populated by folk with his own democratic roots, encouraged him confidently to predict a successful future for Australia. No doubt his pro-Australianism was one of the reasons his writings on Australia, which went on for many years, were generally welcomed. Gregory’s admiration for Australia and the British Empire were announced as going to be combined in a lecture to the RGS in a series under the general title of ‘The geographical conditions which affect the development of the British Empire’ (The Times; 18 October 1907).

General geography The geography textbook Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative (Gregory 1908f) was, according to the preface, intended for use in schools and was completed in April 1908. It sought ‘to state the most important facts concerning the structural geography of the earth and the evolution of our present continents from older lands’ using the minimum of geological terms. The list of sources in the preface ‘frequently mentions Professor E. Suess of Vienna, to whom this book is deeply indebted; and the descriptions of the structure of Europe and Asia are little more than elementary statements of his conclusions. This special acknowledgement is imperatively due to Professor Suess – the most original force in contemporary geography’. It is in this April 1908 preface that Gregory first reveals thoughts about using familiar English words in specialized meanings with his comment ‘I have used various English words in what seems to me to be their generally accepted English meaning, and not in the technical sense in which they are also used.’ Later this concern with the dual meanings of some words used in science was to boil over into publications dealing with the subject.

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This readable 305-page book shows how Gregory’s views were developing on the origin of the present continents (and incidentally, the oceans also) and their shapes and how they were so formed. They were summarized in the frontispiece (Fig. 15.3) showing three major continental blocks, Gondwana-land, Angaraland and Arctis, including areas now oceans, separated by the Tethys Ocean which ends in the west against a small Antillia block in Central America. Much of the western part of North and South America, and all the present Pacific Ocean, is shown as ocean and Antarctica is omitted. It is clear that he regarded much of the present North and South Atlantic, and Indian, oceans as simply sunken parts of the Arctis and Gondwana-land continents, seemingly inconsistent with his Tetrahedral Theory with its permanence of the present positions of the oceans and continents, although this problem was not raised. The book has several parts. Part I (40 pages) briefly dealt with the Earth, its structure and materials (rocks, soils), including a synopis of ‘The plan of the Earth’, and the land forms both above and below the sea; Part II (also 40 pages) was concerned with the making of land forms, including coasts and coastal types, islands and lakes; Part III (17 pages) considered the influence of the atmosphere and oceans, including climate and the factors that controlled it while Part IV, the largest part of the book (180 pages) formed the descriptive geography of the British Isles, Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, Central America and the West Indies, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Oceania or the Pacific Islands and finally Antarctica. A list of some readily accessible publications was given instead of original references as this was a school book. It reveals a daunting list of books that Gregory must have consulted, even if he did not read them through. The book is attractive reading and illustrated with coloured maps of the continents and coloured maps showing the January and July isotherms, isobars, rainfall and winds plus sketches and comments on the different indigenous races.

Fig. 15.3. Reproduction of the coloured frontispiece of ‘Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative’ (Gregory 1908f). ‘The Chief Continents from which the present continents have been derived’. NB. To which time in the past this refers to is not given.

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However, its appearance provoked a very critical review by an anonymous reviewer in Nature (80, 31– 32) who made numerous complaints, amongst which were the inclusion as fact of views not generally accepted, for example, the Tetrahedral Theory, and the frontispiece depicting ‘the distribution of land and sea as it existed in some epoch not specified . . . [and] is to a large extent imaginary’; the inclusion of so much meteorology; criticisms of the treatment of ‘the grain of the land’ and of the anthropological illustrations . . .’ the worst is probably that of a Polynesian . . . which is not even good as a caricature’ and many other points. Unusually, Gregory (1909c) replied, accepting only one point and pointing out some mistakes made by the critic. In brief, it is clear that some of the criticisms were unjustified, but from the lack of any acknowledgement to any colleague or reader for assistance, one can only assume Gregory had not had the book critically read before publication; this is probably true of a number of his other books, and in part explains how he sustained such a phenomenal output. The whole question of how much refereeing was involved in Gregory’s books and papers is intriguing, but a research project in itself. It seems likely that most of his books sold enough copies that publishers were eager to take them without any refereeing, as few have any acknowledgements. This book must have sold reasonably well because it was reprinted unchanged in 1913, 1918, and 1921 and was followed by a second edition in 1925 which was almost identical in length, text and figures, including the frontispiece, apart from a few very minor changes (Gregory 1925a). These were mainly acknowledgements to his colleague A. Stevens for some suggestions, and a brief two-page summary in Appendix II of Gregory’s 1925 views on the evolution of the English rivers, starting with ‘ancient uplift of the north-western parts of the British Isles’.

Climate variations in the past Gregory’s specific publications on past climate were preceded by a number of marginal incursions into the subject, showing his interest in the matter, such as those of Gregory (1896) dealing with East Africa, or Gregory (1897, 1897a) dealing with the Arctic, as deduced from his Spitzbergen work. He gave a good summary of the climate of Victoria in his 1903 school textbook ‘The Geography of Victoria’ (Gregory 1903), and when this appeared it advertised a book ‘Climate of Australasia’ by Gregory ‘new edition 1s’ which seems to indicate at least an earlier edition than 1903, which has not been found. This may have been the first edition of the later 96-page book on ‘The Climate of Australasia in reference to its control by the Southern Ocean’ (Gregory 1904), a book whose main thesis was repeated in summary in his 1904 Dunedin presidential address to the Australasian BA (Gregory 1905). It is certain that Gregory’s 1901– 2 expedition around Lake Eyre, with its skeletal evidence of very recent desiccation and lack of rain where, even a few years earlier, there had been lush vegetation in a wetter period, had a powerful effect on Gregory and turned his mind to the subject of climate variation, specifically, what controlled the Australian climate. He would not have forgotten some of the horrific scenes of starvation he saw during drought in British East Africa. During his 1903– 4 ‘vacation’ in South Island, New Zealand, he would have noticed the astonishing contrast of tumultuous rainfall west of the Southern Alps with the rain shadow to the east. There would have been marked differences from the dryness in Australia and the diminished flows from many former lakes and previously gushing wells, observed during his 1909 visit to Queensland and West Australia. Even years later, the subject rankled with him as expressed in his 1914a paper, ‘Is the Earth drying up?’, and ‘The reported progressive desiccation of the Earth’ (Gregory 1915), in both of which he concluded it was not changing. An extant letter (with A. Mendell) of 17 October 1913 from Lord Curzon (1859 – 1925), Viceroy of India (1899 – 1905), Lord Rector of Glasgow

University in 1908, shows that in researching for these papers, Gregory asked Curzon his opinion on the former climate of Persia and Central Asia, but Curzon wisely thought his own opinion of no value. The subject is currently of great interest. Although Gregory did not attend the 10th International Geological Congress in Mexico, according to the published records, he was a member and submitted a paper on climate and its causes. In this (Gregory 1906j) he emphasized that the present climate of the Earth has been maintained since the date of the earliest unaltered sedimentary deposits with climatic zones concentric to the Poles. He thought there was no evidence of progressive chilling of the Earth, such as supposed by those proposing that the Earth was still cooling from its initial molten state. This is consistent with his views expressed at the 1906 BA meeting that the Upper Palaeozoic glaciations of Gondwanaland could ‘be explained by the action of existing meteorological forces acting on their present scale’ (Gregory 1907b). Gregory (1906j) next considered the causes of climatic variation, dismissing several possibilities (e.g. elevation of the continents; ‘obliquity of the ecliptic’) giving particular attention to the then relatively new calculations of Svante August Arrhenius (1859 –1927) (1896), that increase in carbon dioxide (‘carbonic acid’) in the atmosphere would lead to significant warming. This theory seems to have been brought to Gregory’s attention by its early espousal by Thomas Chrowder Chamberlain (1843 – 1928) (1897). Gregory’s criticism of the theory was that if past ice ages were due to low global atmospheric CO2, then how could the Gondwanaland Upper Carboniferous to Permian glaciation not have affected Europe where hot coal-forming forests were growing at that time? Also, Gregory could not understand how such rapid CO2 fluctuations could have taken place in the Pleistocene, so as to give ice-ages and warm interglacial periods in quick succession. These problems were partly solved by Milutin Milankovic´ (1879 –1958), but only in 1920, and Milankovitch cycles were not generally accepted for some years, and even when there were they could not explain all the variations recorded historically and deduced geologically. Climatic variations are still not fully understood and in part explain the delay of 100 years in the general acceptance of Arrhenius’s calculations and their impact on global warming – thus making geologists’ four decade delay in accepting continental drift seem relatively rapid! Gregory pointed out that the easiest way of quickly increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere was by massive volcanic eruptions, but none of such periods recorded geologically were followed by either ice ages or periods of global heat, except ‘coincidentally’ for the southern hemisphere Upper Carboniferous to Permian volcanism. In conclusion, he identified different geographical dispositions as critical, causing variations of atmospheric currents (not oceanic currents; he erroneously thought the Gulf Stream of little importance) such as caused the cold NE American to Canadian coast with its icebergs compared to that of the relatively warm NW European coast of the same, or even higher latitude. Geographical variations could explain the non-synchronous climatic variations found throughout the world in past times. Although not stated, such a view fitted with Gregory’s disposition to accept the submergence of continental areas to give oceanic basins and vice versa. Somewhat illogically, having dismissed continental elevation as a cause of ice ages, he concluded, as in Gregory (1907b), that the Gondwanaland Upper Carboniferous to Permian glaciation was seen in areas that had been relatively elevated, but near to the sea, so that heavy precipitation produced voluminous snow, giving glaciers; the main control again being geography. He was becoming a dedicated uniformitarianist.

The level of the sea By late 1908 or early 1909, Gregory was considering what controlled sea level, and gave a summary of his views to the Scottish

EARLY PUBLICATIONS (1905– 10) AND RESEARCH ACTIVITY WHILE IN GLASGOW

Association of Secondary Teachers (Western Branch) on 23 January 1909 (The Glasgow Herald 25 January) and to the Scottish Geographical Magazine (1909d). This was a topic of particular interest to geographers, as well as geologists, and the existence of a very prominent 25 ft (7.6 m) raised beach on Clydeside and a 50 ft (15 m) one also on the west coast of Scotland, made the topic one of interest in secondary schools. In brief, he showed that older views that either the land moved while the sea remained unchanged, or the sea height changed and the land was unmoved (‘terra firma’) were both wrong, for both the land and the sea moved. According to Gregory, Suess believed that the land was static but the sea height changed; thus the horizontal Cretaceous high up in the Rocky Mountains was deposited when the sea was 14 000 ft (4286 m) higher than at present (!), a rare instance where Gregory clearly disagreed with Suess. Gregory detailed many of the processes that can cause variations in sea level (even when there is no movement of the continental masses), such as the wind, salinity variations, meteorological air pressure variations, sideways gravitational variations caused by varying thicknesses or compositions of the adjacent land and ice sheets, variation in the vertical gravity of places, sinking or rising of the seafloor causing water to in- or out-flow and thus affect sea level elsewhere, and variations in the thickness and extent of the polar ice caps. Kelvin had estimated that melting 400 ft (122 m) of the thickness of the Antarctic ice would raise sea level by 10 ft (c. 3 m). Gregory did not mention the factor commonly cited today of the mean temperature of the oceans, increases in which cause expansion of the water. Gregory did discuss the ups and downs of the famous Italian ‘Temple of Serapis’ (now a market), memorably described by Lyell (1868, p. 164– 179), and the increasing northward rising of Sweden, recovering from depression by the great weight of Pleistocene ice. A more detailed account was said (Gregory 1909d p. 311) to be ‘appearing in a set of essays which will be published by A. Constable & Co.’ which have not been found.

Contributions to the Glasgow Geological Society Gregory became an active member of the Glasgow Geological Society from his first days in Glasgow, and generally attended between October and April, but was frequently absent for the April to June meetings. This Society was quite prominent then, with Presidents who were FRS, such as Peach and Horne, who also led excursions and Tyrrell, who began to make a reputation as an internationally-recognized petrologist, visitors such as Harker were attracted to the meetings, and Geikie was closely associated. Although Gregory did not formally read a paper to the Society until 11 January 1906, he contributed to the discussion on the Kimberley Blue Ground on 9 February 1905, moved a motion that urged the colour printing of important 1:63 380 Geological Survey Maps on 27 May 1905, and exhibited a native gold mill he had brought from ‘Rhodesia’ (Zimbabwe) and explained its workings on 9 November 1905, when he was elected to the Council of the Society (TGSG, 13, 87–114). Gregory’s first contribution to Scottish geology and the Glasgow Society was an account of a multiple-striated Carboniferous Limestone rock surface exposed at the Lugton Lime Works in northern Ayrshire (Gregory 1907). The striations were believed to be caused by Pleistocene ice movements. The actual slab, weighing a few hundred kilograms, was displayed in the Hunterian Museum for many years and the caption, ‘Collected by J. W. Gregory and students’ caused many comments and some amusement as to how it could possibly have been carried (rolled?) (David Boyd, pers. comm. 2006). Almost certainly the venue was visited by Gregory as a potential or actual day excursion to examine the Carboniferous Limestone, and for the students to collect from the abundant fossils, especially corals and brachiopods, but also

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fish and other remains that are exposed there. The main striae showed clear ice movement to the NE followed by several later minor episodes of cross-movement. The main northeasterly movement contradicted the generally accepted view that the main ice movement south of Glasgow was from north to south, but Gregory supported his northeastward movement by showing that the published record of boulders in the nearby Boulder Clay was of rocks derived from the south of Glasgow, not from the north or the Highlands, and that structures in the Boulder Clay overlying the Lugton quarry certainly showed pushing from the SW to the NE. This was a significant finding in unravelling the glacial history of the area and was one of Gregory’s more careful glacial studies. On 8 November 1906, he was elected Vice-President and the following March 1907, Gregory’s second contribution (Renwick & Gregory 1907), was read to the Society. This was rather an unusual paper for Gregory, being jointly authored. It concentrated on the Glen Fruin (west of Loch Lomond) moraine and argued that the ice depositing it came from the east because the deposit was U-shaped with the two arms pointing to the east. These two papers, and the excursions noted below, show Gregory’s old interest in glacial geology had not dimmed, and they were to be the first of many subsequent papers on aspects of the Scottish Pleistocene glacial deposits. Although both the above locations were easily accessible from Glasgow by tram or train and walking, especially for Gregory, he soon adopted the use of a bicycle to extend the range of his personal fieldwork, and to save time in walking, and took it with him on the train (C. J. Gregory 1977). The 1905 excursions are not fully recorded, and the first field excursion he is credited with leading for the Society was on Monday 1 April 1907, a Bank Holiday. During an 18 km walk they inspected the moraines and igneous complex of Loch Garabal, Dunbartonshire. Only 12 days later, 13 April 1907, he and Renwick jointly led an excursion to Glen Fruin to show the moraines described in their joint paper, and then again on Saturday 29 June 1907, Gregory led an excursion to see the moraines at Buchlyvie, Stirlingshire (TGSG, 13, 87– 114). Generally Gregory led one, or sometimes two, excursions a year for the Glasgow Society, for example 27 June 1908 to Carstairs, Lanarkshire to examine kames; 28 September 1908 to Denny and Kilsyth to see Carboniferous strata and basaltic intrusions; and 16 October 1909 to Gryfe Valley, Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire to see the Lower Carboniferous Series (TGSG, 13, 87–114). At the Society meeting on 10 October 1907, Gregory read a paper on the ‘Great Scandinavian Overthrust’ which he had seen ‘on a recent visit to Lapland’ (TGSG, 13, 262) and which is summarized in Gregory (1908). A year later on 8 October 1908 he delivered an address on the ‘Geology of the Rand Goldfield.’ His contribution to the Jubilee history of the Society is dealt with under ‘Historical Studies’. Gregory became President of the Glasgow Geological Society on 12 November 1908, in time to preside over the Special Meeting to celebrate the Society’s Jubilee on 28 January 1909, when the principal feature was an address by Geikie, then President of the Royal Society of London, on ‘The Pioneers of Geology in the Glasgow District.’ Gregory remained in office until 9 November 1911 when John Horne FRS succeeded him. One of Gregory’s first accomplishments was to make Prof. E. Suess and J. J. H. Teall, Director-General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, Honorary Members on 14 January 1909, just as he had ensured when Vice-President, that Prof. T. G. Bonney was made an Honorary Member (elected on 13 February 1908). Gregory also read a paper at the Society meeting of 14 January 1909, on ‘Sideroplesite in the Glenboig Fireclays,’ although the work on these clays was also read to the RSE on 15 March 1909 and published in the Proceedings of the RSE (Gregory 1910) under the title ‘The Glenboig Fireclay’ together with a related study on the supposed mineral tuesite (Gregory 1910a). He considered the fireclay derived from a lagoonal

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deposit of transported subsoil from Carboniferous forest, because there were no tree roots above it. Later, in 1910, he led a field excursion to Glenboig, East of Glasgow. Gregory’s first presidential address was delivered on 13 January 1910 and dealt with the problems of the succession and correlation of the Dalradian rocks of the SW Highlands, but in fact added nothing of lasting value (Gregory 1910b). He started by pointing out that it was as much the duty of a professor to identify significant unsolved problems as to explain solved ones, summarized the major geological problem lying on the doorstep of Glasgow, namely the order of the succession in the Dalradian rocks, and he urged the members of the Society to try to solve the problem. Were the oldest Dalradian rocks in the south and younger ones to the north, or was the succession the other way round? At this time in Britain, the value of sedimentary ‘way-up’ markers, such as cross-bedding and graded bedding had not been recognized. Even if it had, the isoclinal folding made appreciation of the need to identify way-up in conjunction with folding essential, and Gregory totally lacked any appreciation of isoclinal folding. Indeed, one of his professorial predecessors, H. D. Rogers, (see later and Gregory 1916) had a better understanding over 50 years earlier. So, despite most of the Dalradian outcrop having been mapped in some detail by the Geological Survey, the way-up of the succession was not known at that time. Gregory stated that since coming to Glasgow, he had seen the Dalradian rocks in places between Loch Awe and Dunoon, Ben Lui to Ben Lomond, Ben Vannoch and the Forest of Mamlorn to the east of Loch Lomond, Glen Lyon, Glen Ogle, the Pass of Leny to Callander and then only parts of the Schiehallion area and the ground to the east, including Glen Tilt – an impressive record of field excursions, many of which were no doubt part of the senior field classes, but without any mapping. He also recorded that he had had long discussions with George Barrow (1853 – 1932) and Edward Battersby Bailey, both of the Geological Survey, in an attempt to obtain the latest Survey views. However, without reliable way-up, the address was full of speculation (e.g. the Loch Lomond Dalradian was the oldest and the succession was younger to the north) including some conclusions now regarded as ridiculous (e.g. the Dalradian rocks were Pre-Torridonian). Gregory was not at his best in dealing with well-mapped and multiple-folded metamorphic rocks in which classical stratigraphical principles were not easily applied and multiple folding had not yet been generally recognized. He had never undertaken the rigorous task of detailed geological mapping of such rocks and the way-up of the Dalradian succession. It was another 20 years before it was worked out by Gregory’s successor, Bailey, while he was in the Glasgow Chair. Interestingly, Bailey had attended Gregory’s 1910 lecture despite Bailey’s much more detailed knowledge of the Dalradian rocks. Gregory (1910c) wrote a summary of the address for the Geological Magazine.

many papers to the Society’s Transactions, mostly in the field that Gregory was reviewing. Gregory would have had a particular interest in Kelvin’s views on matters such as, the age of the Earth and influences on past climates. Before Gregory had completed his review (or even started?) for the 1908 history, Lord Kelvin died (on 17 December 1907) and to mark his death, Gregory almost immediately gave a lecture to the Glasgow Geological Society (on 9 January 1908) on ‘Lord Kelvin’s Contributions to Geology’ which appeared later in the Glasgow Society’s Transactions (Gregory 1908a), but not before Gregory had also written an account of ‘Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth’ for The Glasgow Herald (Gregory 1908h). All this preceded the completion of the Jubilee history, and was cited in the history, and made it unnecessary to give an extended account of Kelvin’s work in the Jubilee history. Gregory (1908a) reviewed and listed the references to Kelvin’s geological contributions under four headings: contributions to physics which explained geological and geographical problems; calculations as to the age of the Earth (also in Gregory 1908h); the nature of the inside of the Earth and contributions to the study of past climates. Unfortunately, the authors of some of the biographical accounts in the Jubilee history are not identified. From internal evidence, it seems likely that Gregory, who is stated in Macnair & Mort (1908) as writing some of the obituaries, wrote at least those describing Sir Archibald Geikie FRS (President 1893 –99), Professor Charles Lapworth FRS (President 1899–1902), and Dr Ramsay H. Traquair (1840 –1912) FRS (President 1902–5), all of whom were still alive, and John George Goodchild (1844 –1906) of whom Gregory also wrote a much more extended obituary notice for the Edinburgh Geological Society (Gregory 1909e) (Fig. 15.4).

Other activities Historical studies As Gregory’s quite early publications showed (e.g. Gregory 1890, 1890a, 1891), he was interested in recording and assessing the contributions made by earlier geologists to the advancement of Earth science. His 1906 election as Vice President of the Glasgow Geological Society meant he played an important role in ensuring the 303-page Jubilee history of the Society was written and published (Macnair & Mort 1908), with Gregory (1908g) himself reviewing the 50 years of publication achievements in ‘Physical and Dynamical Geology’ and contributing to the biographical summaries of members and past members who had made outstanding contributions to science. Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) had been President of the Society for 21 years from 1872– 1893, and had contributed

Fig. 15.4. John George Goodchild, of the Geological Survey and one time Toynbee Hall co-worker with Gregory. Courtesy of the British Geological Survey.

EARLY PUBLICATIONS (1905– 10) AND RESEARCH ACTIVITY WHILE IN GLASGOW

Goodchild, who was based in Edinburgh from 1889, being in charge of the Geological Survey’s rock and mineral collection (as Keeper of the Mineralogical Collection), then held in the Royal Scottish Museum, was a very old friend of Gregory from his London days. They had worked together at Toynbee Hall, both were self-made Eastenders and like Gregory, Goodchild had published in an astonishing number of fields from glacial geology, physical geology, stratigraphy, the age of the Earth, mineralogy and petrology, palaeontology, zoology (ants, corals, molluscs) especially ornithology, botany, museum methods, English dialects, archaeology, etc. with over 200 papers (not including Geological Survey publications) right through to the evolution of the Japanese clock! Palaeogeography was a paramount interest. He was a keen member of the Glasgow Geological Society and, just before Gregory’s arrival, the Society had published Goodchild’s (1903) 68-page monograph on Scottish zeolites. He was a skilled lithographer and artist which was certainly relevant to the fact that, ironically, he is perhaps best remembered today as being the editor who saw through to publication the classic work of Professor Heddle on the Mineralogy of Scotland, which was not completed when Heddle died. It involved Goodchild in preparing 400– 500 royal octavo pages of letterpress and over 100 plates, each containing many detailed figures of crystals of Scottish minerals (Gregory in Macnair & Mort 1908). However, Paterson et al. (2008) claim that Goodchild (1892) first proposed the process of stoping in plutons by describing inclusions in the Ross of Mull granite. The University Court minutes show that Goodchild donated over 600 specimens plus diagrams to the Hunterian Museum in July 1906.

Legal matters, including Gregory as an expert witness Upon appointment to the Chair in Geology in Glasgow, Gregory was almost immediately involved in problems concerning the Honeyman-Gillespie lectureship in Geology and Mineralogy, which had been endowed by Mrs Honeyman-Gillespie in 1876 in memory of her husband, William Gillespie, (b. 1808), and a former student in the university (Univeristy of Glasgow archives from which the following is also mostly derived). This endowment was originally attached to the Regius Chair of Natural History (then held by John Young), by the University Court, but when that Chair was transmuted into the Regius Chair of Zoology in 1902, the first occupant, John Graham Kerr, declined to accept the conditions of the lectureship which were entirely geological and so the University Court arranged for the income of the endowment to be added to that supporting the Chair of Geology. Part of the stimulus for the endowment arose from a court case that Honeyman-Gillespie had lost. This revolved around whether the lease he had let to James ‘Paraffin’ Young (1811 –83) for the working of coal on a certain piece of land at Torbanehill, near Bathgate in Central Scotland, included that of the highly profitable oil-rich shale, torbanite (or cannel coal), which HoneymanGillespie maintained was not coal. The court decided against him. Young was producing oil by distillation of the cannel coal. A condition of the endowment was that this subject should be lectured upon at least once a year, and another was the obligation to deliver at least 52 lectures a year in geology. Gregory accepted these conditions, the first of which could easily be incorporated into a lecture on coal and the second he was committed to anyway. However, the endowment also entangled him, with the considerable assistance of Kerr, in being involved in late 1905 in part of the sale of some of the property held by the HoneymanGillespie Trust. C. J. Gregory (1977) records that his father gave expert evidence many times but most of these cases have not been uncovered by the writer. When asked to give evidence, Gregory always studied the affair most carefully, and not unless he was convinced that the side approaching him was geologically in the right did he agree;

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this with his great stored knowledge of geology, acute reasoning powers, unusually fine memory and an unshakeable nerve, made him stand like a rock in court. Lord Findlay once expressed the opinion that expert witnesses were useless to a case in court, presumably because each side produced ones to support their own cases., ‘Except,’ he added, ‘one of ’em—a Scotchman [sic] from Glasgow called Gregory.’ One spectator in another case watched Gregory under crossexamination for some hours and remembered how clear and decisive his answers were. At one tense moment, there was a momentary pause, then Gregory answered, the tension snapped and a laugh went round the court. Gregory had looked ahead, seen the entanglement prepared by the opposing barrister, and eluded it. In general, when he recognized what Counsel was embarking on wringing out of him, he would simply produce the required information. ‘You save time’ he once said, ‘and incidently get a reputation for frankness. You can be sure they will get it out of you in the end; that’s their job, and they are expert at it.’ A typical case, such as one cited by Gregory (1909f ), involved a railway company which was under Section 70 of the Railway Clauses Consolidation (Scotland) Act, 1845, (8 and 9 Vict. Cap. 33) bound thus: ‘The company shall not be entitled to any mines of coal, ironstone, slate or other materials under any lands purchased by them except only such parts thereof as shall be necessary to be dug or carried away or used in the construction of the works unless the same shall have been expressly purchased . . .’ The railway buys land for its line but not the minerals under the land and not even support from the underlying minerals. The expression mines or minerals raised the question of exactly ‘What is a mineral?’ which was the title of the paper Gregory (1909f ) read to The Mining Institute of Scotland at a meeting in Glasgow on 10 February 1909. It is virtually certain from the legal instances quoted that Gregory had been involved in just such a court case in Scotland, which had caused him to clarify the distinct difference between the scientific term ‘mineral’, the evolution and history of which he documents in great detail in 19 pages, and the commercial use of the term. Gregory defined the latter thus: ‘a commercial mineral is any constituent in the Earth’s crust that has a value of its own apart from its value as a soil, or as a support’ [for a structure]. A summary of the conclusions was also written up for the Geological Magazine (Gregory 1909g) presumably because Gregory thought the matter of more general interest than the relatively limited circulation of the Transactions of the Institute of Mining Engineers would achieve. A similar case involved Gregory affirming against the Great Western Railway that China clay was a mineral (Geological Magazine, 1908, Decade V, 5, 564– 567). In Gregory’s final presidential address to the Geological Society of Glasgow on 9 November 1916 (Gregory 1917), he revealed that he had been involved in a legal dispute in Melbourne in 1902 over whether the phosphate imported from Christmas Island, near Java (Andrews 1900), was guano, and therefore free from harbour duty, or rock phosphate which did not have such exemption. Gregory identified numerous veins of optically crystalline apatite (‘staffelite’) among the amorphous phosphate, which supported the court’s decision that the material was rock phosphate, even though formed by guano-derived solutions acting on coral.

Expedition to Cyrenaica (Libya) In 1908 Gregory led an expedition to explore Cyrenaica, now part of Libya (but west of the region then called Libya), to see if it was a suitable place in which to establish a Jewish Homeland, and of course to examine the very little-known geology. Subsequently, in 1912, he undertook similar tasks in Angola. As Gregory was not a Jew, some family history is necessary to explain the circumstances that led him to undertake the task.

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According to A. Mendell (pers. comm. 2004), Audrey Gregory’s father, the Rev. Ayrton Chaplin, was the son of John Clarke Chaplin and Matilda Adriana Chaplin (ne´e Ayrton). Matilda Adriana’s brother was Edward Nugent Ayrton (a barrister and uncle to Ayrton Chaplin), whose distinguished son, William Edward Ayrton FRS (1847 – 1908), married Ayrton Chaplin’s sister, his first cousin, Matilda Charlotte Chaplin (1846– 1883). Matilda was one of the first women medical doctors in Britain. William Edward Ayrton and Matilda Charlotte Chaplin had a daughter, Edith Ayrton (1875 –1945), who was therefore a cousin of Audrey Gregory. Matilda Charlotte died of TB when Edith was about eight. William Ayrton remarried in 1885 when his daughter was about 11, so she was partly brought up by the Chaplins, and Edith and Audrey became particularly close. William Ayrton remarried and his second wife was a Jew, Phoebe Sarah [Hertha] Marks (1854– 1923). She was a distinguished physicist and suffragette and, incidentally, the mother of the Labour MP Barbara Gould (ne´e Ayrton) (1888 –1950) and grandmother to the well known artist who used the name Michael Ayrton (1921 – 1975). Edith Ayrton attended Bedford College, London University, and was eventually the author of six novels and active in the establishment of the League of Nations. Edith met Israel Zangwill (1864 – 1926), a successful novelist and an Anglo-Jewish literary and political figure, at a reception in 1895 and they married in 1903. One of their three children, Oliver Louis Zangwill (1913 – 87), became Professor of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge and a founder of neuropsychology (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004). In 1905, Israel Zangwill, one of the best known Jews in the English-speaking world in the early twentieth century, believed that there was an urgent need to rescue persecuted Jews, particularly from Russia and Eastern Europe. He formed, and became President, of the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO; initials from the Yiddish), the goal of which was to establish a self-ruled homeland for the Jews wherever one could be found, advocating a nonZionist solution. The ITO also brought 10 000 Jewish immigrants to the United States between 1907 and 1914 under the Galveston Plan. The ITO considered various territories in Africa, Australia, Mexico, Canada and elsewhere, all ultimately without success. The British Government offered land in British East Africa and an expedition had been there, arranged before Gregory’s return

from Australia (Gibbons et al. 1905). Gregory was therefore approached, through Audrey’s cousin, to see if he would investigate the potential of Cyrenaica in which a populous Jewish colony had lived in ancient times. He probably accepted because of the opportunity for geological exploration., He generally seized any chance to explore new territory; as the Ottoman rulers had prohibited the entry of geologists for many years, little was known about the geology. Somehow Israel Zangwill managed to get an indication that permission would be given for the Gregory party to explore. The heart-rending accounts of Jewish suffering told by Israel Zangwill would also have been an inducement to find a settlement area. In a later account of the expedition, Gregory (1916a, p. 324) revealed that ‘the immediate acquisition of Palestine by the Jews was clearly impossible, but Cyrenaica might serve as a temporary land of refuge’. Permission to visit was given in Tripoli (now Tarabulus), where the party went first, by Redjeb Pasha, GovernorGeneral & Commander-in-Chief of Turkish Africa, because he feared Italian seizure of the country and hoped a Jewish settlement would be an added obstacle to this. In the event, in 1911, the Italians did invade and seize the country. The expedition included an engineer and water expert, Mr M. B. Duff, Dr M. D. Eder, a medical officer and zoologist, Dr J. Trotter, an expert in agriculture and botany with several years’ agricultural experience in the Sudan, and Prof. M. Nahum Slousch of the Sorbonne, who was an expert on the history of the Jewish connection with Cyrenaica. They travelled during July and August 1908, in summer so that the permanent water supply could be estimated (not possible in the winter wet season) (Gregory 1916a). The party then steamed further east and landed in eastern Cyrenaica at Derna on 24 July 1908, as this was the easternmost that they were permitted to go, and was also the place with the most water, the flow of which was measured (Fig. 15.5). The party then marched almost uneventfully westwards with camels and a military escort along the coastal strip, not venturing more than 50 km from the sea (largely because of the lack of water), reaching Benghazi on 14 August, having covered nearly 500 km during the height of the hot summer. The limited exploration away from the coast was only achieved by discarding their pith helmets and donning red fez so that their escort could pass them off as Turkish officials. Later Gregory learnt he had been

Fig. 15.5. Cyrenaica (Libya) showing the route of Gregory’s 1908 expedition. (From Gregory 1916a.)

EARLY PUBLICATIONS (1905– 10) AND RESEARCH ACTIVITY WHILE IN GLASGOW

represented as a Kurdish cavalry pasha in order to explain his ignorance of Arabic. Cyrene near the coast attracted them because of its beauty and Roman remains, amongst which were evidence of the means by which the Romans conserved water, showing its scarcity even in their time, and conditions were drier by 1908 (Gregory 1916a). The ITO report was delivered quite promptly in 1909 (Gregory 1909h). It did not recommend Cyrenaica because of the lack of water and the already occupied nature of what land could be lived upon, concluding that the fertility and economic capacity of Cyrenaica had been exaggerated and that the arable areas were small, overpopulated already by inhabitants who were ‘well-armed and inclined to be truculent.’ The geological results took longer to write up. They first appeared verbally at the BA meeting in Sheffield on 5 September 1910 but nothing was published until 1911 (Gregory 1911a– c,) when the main results were presented to the GSL on 15 March 1911. This was the first GSL paper from Gregory since his account of the glacial geology of Tasmania (Gregory 1904a), read for him over seven years earlier. Gregory summarized the geology of Cyrenaica as being a vast block of mainly Eocene limestone which forms the main part of a great plateau of Eocene, Oligocene and Miocene marine limestone, horst-like with fault scarps to north and west and a gentle eastward dip that takes the limestones into western Egypt where they form part of the western limb of the geosyncline of western Egypt. Low-lying Pleistocene limestones fringe the Cenozoic rocks. The Miocene outcrop was very much less in area than had been previously supposed. While the echinoids were described by Gregory himself (1911a, pp. 661– 679), the mollusca were detailed by R. B. Newton (in Gregory 1911b, pp. 616– 653), and the foraminifera, ostracoda and some parasitic fungi by F. Chapman (in Gregory 1911b, pp. 654 –661). The age identification of the rocks was based on these fossil groups which all gave similar results. A letter dated 21 June 1909 from Colonel A. E. W. Gleichen (1863 –1937), staff to the Director of Military Operations, War Office, London, to Gregory acknowledges the receipt of a valuable report by Gregory on Cyrenaica and for the corrections Gregory made to a War Office ‘Military Report on Tripoli in North Africa’. This shows that Gregory, as one of the few British men then allowed into Cyrenaica, had not overlooked the military value of some of the information the expedition had acquired, such as water supply details, and had transmitted it to the War Office. The Italian invasion of Tripoli (c. Libya) in 1911 prompted Gregory (1911d) to express his views as to the negligible economic value of the country, and the Cyrenaica part in particular. He re-emphasized the poverty of the country, its lack of water, and its widespread rock and sand deserts, re-stating the reasons why he believed that even in Roman times it received little more rainfall than now, and revealing that the chief exports were of olive oil and barley, the latter mainly coming to Scotland to make malt whisky (which would not have pleased Gregory). He did not consider the oil or gas potential. Five years later (Gregory 1916a), on 1 June 1916, he returned yet again to the subject of Cyrenaica and lectured to the RGS, giving a most interesting illustrated general re´sume´ of the country and his expedition’s activity.

Third visit to Australia (1909) Although it has proved difficult to identify the precise dates, sometime between March and May 1909, Gregory returned to Australia, including Western Australia, as recorded in Gregory (1914b): ‘I had visited Lake Hannan near Kalgoorlie, five years previously’ (p. 660) and ‘In 1909 I went on a motor ride in Westralia, especially from Leonora to Wiluna with the Hon. H. Gregory, Minister of Mines for Westralia’ (p. 659). The GSG records show that the President, Gregory, was absent from the 11 March 1909

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meeting (which would have still been in term) until early October. However, Gregory (1916b, p. 328) states that ‘in 1908 I passed [. . .] between Lake Way [1208160 E, 268450 S] and Lake Kathleen’ [in Western Australia] but almost certainly this was a mistake for 1909 as he was in Cyrenaica in 1908. Even Gregory’s extraordinary memory was not infallible! He also went to Queensland, (Gregory 1925a p. 145) visiting four of the chief sugarproducing districts and no doubt also various geological sites, including the Mount Morgan mine, from where he obtained specimens of material ‘Described as Geyserite,’ which he exhibited at the 1909 BA meeting in Winnipeg, on his way home via the Pacific Ocean and British Columbia. It was not until Gregory published his textbook The Elements of Economic Geology in 1928 that it became clear that he had spent some time examining the Mount Morgan mine, and may even have acted as a consultant – speculatively perhaps to pay towards his travelling expenses. There is secondary enrichment of gold, the finest purity ever found at 998 parts of Au in 1000. According to Gregory (1928, pp. 51–53), the geyser theory was rubbish and the mine was on an ancient volcano with the supposed cavernous and stalacititic quartz described as sinter of an old geyser resting on slate and quartzite. The quartzite was actually a quartz porphyry and the slates were volcanic tuffs and altered spherulitic basalt. A series of intrusions formed a volcano and after its extinction, waters deposited Fe-sulphides and Cu rich in Au, with the presence of cassiterite (SnO2) ‘proving the ultimate plutonic origin of the water’ and a mass of pyrite being deposited in the volcanic pipe. Peneplanation was followed by the deposition of an Upper Cretaceous Desert sandstone which contains placer gold eroded from the mountain. With denudation came surface waters which dissolved the metals and re-deposited them as the rich gossan from which Au and then Cu were obtained as the Cu was carried deeper than the Au. So having started off as a gold mine, the mine ended as a copper one. The sequence was worked out by Gregory which suggests more than a casual visit but with no apparent publication until nearly 20 years later, it may have been considered confidential to his putative consultant’s report. As usual Gregory collected geological specimens whenever he could, and his field notebooks and samples in the Hunterian Museum show he stopped at Rossland [49860 N 1178500 W], close to the Canadian –USA border, between 1 –4 August 1909, so that he must have taken the direct train route from Vancouver to Lethbridge across the Rocky Mountains. His stop in Rossland was to inspect the copper and gold mines (Gregory 1928, pp. 82–83): ‘the lodes in 1909 had been worked to a depth of over 200 feet’ (60 m) and bore Cu with some Au and Ni in a monzonite. The next entries record visits much further east in Ontario, north of Lake Huron, on 16 August to Nipissing Mountain, on 17th to Tough Oaks Mine, Kirkland Lake, and then the Wright-Hargreaves Mine and Keeley Mine, on 18 August to Timmins-Porcupine Crown Mine, on 19th to Hollinger Mine, on 20th to the Sioux Lookout west of Cochrane [49800 N, 81800 W] and on the 21st to Stony Mountain, near Winnipeg. He also visited the Sudbury mines as already described. There was a strong concentration on mining geology, but as was to emerge later, also on the major stratigraphical successions. Presumably he travelled from Britain directly to Western Australia. It seems likely that he would have visited Melbourne and Sydney but no record of this has been uncovered. The Times of 5 July 1909 records that ‘Professor JW Gregory and Dr Tempest Anderson are now engaged in investigations in Australia and the Pacific Islands’ which is ambiguous as to whether Gregory also included one or more stops on Pacific Islands. However, after Gregory retired he donated a set of Pleistocene fossils (mainly corals and lamellibranchs) from Appia, Samoa, to the Hunterian Museum, so he may well have stopped there but no publication concerned with the Pacific islands has yet been found. The main publications derived from this 1909 visit were concerned with extolling the value of white labour in Australian

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sugar fields as described later (Gregory 1910d, 1912, and geographical aspects. ‘The geographical factors that control the development of Australia’ (Gregory 1910e) quickly appeared, followed by ‘The flowing wells of Central Australia’ (Gregory 1911e) as already described, but ‘The lake system of Westralia’ (Gregory 1914b) was more delayed to June 1914, just before his next visit to Australia. This explained the present lakes in Western Australia as being remnants of a dismembered Miocene river system that was later blocked in places by encroaching sand dunes caused by postMiocene desiccation. The mapping suggests he spent a few weeks in Western Australia.

Book reviews The reviews Gregory wrote generally reflected subjects in which he was interested, even if he was no longer continuing to work in the particular fields himself, such as polar exploration. They throw light on his opinions, which for instance, over continental drift, were to prove very influential. It has been difficult to identify all the book reviews Gregory published, especially as he sometimes published different reviews of the same book for different outlets. However, from the time he returned to Britain in 1904 he resumed being a regular reviewer for Nature. In addition, for over 20 years, from 1909 until his death in 1932, he acted as a Geological Magazine ‘Editorial Advisor’ and supplied summaries of lectures given at meetings. The books considered here dealt particularly, but not exclusively, with expeditions of exploration, especially the polar regions and East Africa, and also those dealing with the broad structure of the Earth and the continents. He must have provoked many a sigh of relief from the Editor of Nature for his willingness to review massive books and whole series of volumes, running to hundreds, and sometimes over a thousand, pages. Even his ability to read rapidly (for which there is good evidence, see below) must have been strained at some of the weighty volumes he reviewed. Among his reviews of Antarctic expeditionary work, reference has already been made (Gregory 1906c; 1908i) to his reviews of over 2000 pages of various Antarctic expedition reports, and in Gregory (1908j) he reviewed for Nature, under the title ‘The Geology of South Victoria Land;’ the first volume of the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901– 4 Report dealing with the geology. In 1909, under the title, Further Antarctic Results, he (Gregory 1909i) reviewed the 1897–9 voyage of S. Y. Belgica and the Deutsche Sudpolar Expedition of 1901–3 that included much geological information about Kerguelen and Heard Islands. In January 1910 he continued this theme in a review entitled ‘The Heart of the Antarctic’ in which E. H. Shackleton’s 1907–9 expedition, which reported in two volumes, amounting to over 800 pages with 273 plates, was enthusiastically reviewed with laudatory comments on its achievements, despite its failure to reach the South Pole and its continued use of ponies (Gregory 1910f). On the subject of the surface of the Earth, Gregory (1908k) reviewed Dr T. Arlt’s immense 730-page 1907 treatise in German on the evidence for the past distribution of the continents and how that distribution had determined the shape and assembly of the present continents, a topic very close to Gregory’s interests. Arlt drew on geography, stratigraphical geology, palaeontology and geology etc. in a way Gregory thoroughly approved of, and Arlt’s synthesis was part of the background of ideas being discussed in Germany that would later culminate in Wegener’s continental drift proposals. More immediately, reviewing Arlt’s work coincided with Gregory’s (1908f ) writing of Geography – Structural, Physical and Comparative and influenced the past continental reconstructions Gregory used. In June 1910, in one review, Gregory (1910g) dealt with the final 789-page part (Vol. III, Part 2, 1909) of Suess’s Das Antlitz der Erde (The Face of the Earth), the 158-page topographical index to Suess’s magnum opus, and the 673-page Vol. IV of The Face

of the Earth, which had been translated into English by Miss H. B. C. Sollas ‘under the direction of Prof. W. J. Sollas.’ Gregory was disappointed that Suess’s last-appearing volume (III, Part 2) did not have any overall theory to explain the phenomema Suess had so brilliantly described and synthesized. In particular, Gregory had hoped for a cogent reason for the cause of the differences between the ‘Pacific’ (concordant and parallel to the geological trend) and ‘Atlantic’ (non-concordant) coastlines, but the aged Suess would only venture that the Pacific coasts were somehow connected with orogeny and orogenic belts. In retrospect of course, Pacific coasts are parallel to recent and current subduction zones whereas Atlantic coasts denote passive margins, so Gregory and Suess had both perceptively identified a fundamental difference without knowing the underlying reason. Gregory was very critical of the Sollas translation and had clearly spent a long time comparing the English and German versions. He pointed out inconsistencies of translation and had even consulted atlases to complain that the translated names of places did not correspond to those used in authoritative English atlases, such as The Times Atlas. Gregory’s interest in East Africa brought him to review the 400þ page account of the Duke of Abruzzi’s 1906 expedition to climb (for the first time) and explore Mount Ruwenzori (Gregory 1909j) under the name used by Stanley, ‘The Mountains of the Moon.’ As Ruwenzori, with Kenya and Kilimamjaro were the three peaks with permanent snowfields in eastern equatorial Africa, Gregory was interested in the lowest elevation which had been affected by Recent or Pleistocene glaciation, which had not been reliably established. Nevertheless Gregory (1909j) was full of praise for the difficulties overcome and the photographs taken, in an area almost permanently shrouded in mist. Gregory’s reviewing extended far beyond the above three topics. Thus in 1908 he reviewed Peach & Horne’s great memoir (with other contributors), on the Northwest Highlands of Scotland (Gregory 1908l), spending most of the account on summarizing the history of the identification and verification of the Moine and related thrusts. Horne was particularly close to Gregory and he ensured his old department got one of only three models initially produced under the supervision of Peach and Horne to illustrate the geology of the Assynt District (University Court minutes, 15 June 1908). In 1909 Gregory (1909k) reviewed the 490-page Canadian Geological Survey memoir on The Falls of Niagara: their evolution and varying relations to the Great Lakes by Dr Joseph William Winthrope Spencer (1851 –1921) and their use as a means of dating how long had elapsed since the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, using the estimated time the falls had taken to cut back to their 1900 position. This was a clock first recognized by C. Lyell in his 1835 visit. However, it proved very much more complicated to make the calculation than Lyell had supposed. Gregory’s penchant for never dropping a subject once it had caught his interest was well shown by his comments (Gregory 1908m) on the new system of Russian transliteration that had been adopted by the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St Petersburg, harking back to his early days of Russian translation and interest in standardizing Russian transliteration (Flower et al. 1890; Gregory 1893). On Australian matters he reviewed reports on two mining fields, the Forbes-Parkes, NSW and the Tanami, Northern Territory, goldfields, and on the antiquity of Man in Australia (uncovering of ovens buried 6 m together with the bones of Diprotodon), details given in Nature, 87, 464 –465.

Dent’s scientific primer ‘Geology’ In late 1909 (booksellers’ catalogue; there is no date on the book), Gregory (1909l ) published an easy-to-read 140-page book entitled ‘Geology’ in the Dent Scientific Primer Series of small

EARLY PUBLICATIONS (1905– 10) AND RESEARCH ACTIVITY WHILE IN GLASGOW

(11  16 cm) and cheap (1 shilling ¼ 5p) books. It was arranged in five parts, starting with ‘The early history of the Earth’, including astronomical concepts and the statement that ‘geology shows that the earliest known climate was very similar to that of today’ but there have been great changes in the geography of the Earth. Part II dealt with ‘The materials of which the Earth is made’, mainly minerals and rocks, Part III was ‘Physical geology’, dealing with erosion, deposition, disturbances to rocks, and volcanoes, earthquakes and Earth movements, while the final Part (IV) described the study of fossils and summarized historical geology. The review in Nature, 84, p. 426 by ‘B. C. W.’ was complimentary except for the absence of ‘the apparatus of exercise and question for school use’, and the lack of any guidance as to practical work in the field. However, it is not apparent how such guidance could have been given when the readers would have been in localities ranging from those with no nearby solid rocks to those with little but ‘Archaean Gneisses’.

References Andrews, C. W. 1900. A Monograph of Christmas Island (Indian Ocean). British Museum Publications, London. Arrhenius, S. 1896. On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground. Philosophical Magazine, Series 5, 41, 237– 276. BA. 1906. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Seventy-fifth Meeting, South Africa 1905. John Murray, London. BA. 1907. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Seventy-sixth Meeting, York 1906. John Murray, London. BA. 1908. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Seventy-seventh Meeting, Leicester 1907. John Murray, London. BA. 1909. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Seventy-eighth Meeting, Dublin 1908. John Murray, London. BA. 1910. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Seventy-ninth Meeting, Winnipeg 1909. John Murray, London. Boswell, P. G. H. 1936. John Walter Gregory—1864– 1932. Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, 1, 53 –59. Campbell, J. M. 1910. The origin of laterite. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 19, 432–457. Chamberlain, T. C. 1897. A group of hypotheses bearing on climatic changes. Journal of Geology, 5, 676–683. Coleman, A. P. 1908. The Sudbury Nickel-Ores. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 5, 18– 19. Coste, E 1912. Fallacies in the theory of the organic origin of petroleum. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 21, 91 – 192. Dickson, C. W. 1904. The ore Deposits of Sudbury, Ontario. Transactions of the American Institution of Mining Engineers, 34, 3– 67. England, P., Molnar, P. & Richter, F. 2007. John Perry’s neglected critique of Kelvin’s age for the Earth: A missed opportunity in geodynamics. GSA Today, 17, 4 –9. Flower, W. H., Morfill, W. R., Lowinson-lessing, F. et al. 1890. A uniform system of Russian transliteration. Nature, 41, 396– 397. Frimmel, H. E., Zeh, A., Leehrmann, B., Hallbauer, D. & Frank, W. 2009. Geochemical and geochronological constraints on the nature of the immediate basement next to the Mesoarchaean auriferous Witwatersrand Basin, South Africa. Journal of Petrology, 50, 2187– 2220. Gibbons, A. St. H., Kaiser, A. & Wilbusch, N. 1905. Report on the work of the Commission sent out by the Zionist Organization to examine the territory offered by H. M. Government for the purpose of a Jewish settlement in British East Africa (In English & German). ITO office, London. Goodchild, J. G. 1892. Note on granite junction in the Ross of Mull. Geological Magazine, 9, 447–451. Goodchild, J. G. 1903. The Natural History of Scottish zoelites and their allies. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 12, 1– 68. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: A Sketch. Privately printed.

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Gregory, J. W. 1890. Friedrich August Von Quenstedt (Obituary Notice). Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 237–238. Gregory, J. W. 1890a. Melchior Neumayr (Obituary Notice). Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 238–240. Gregory, J. W. 1891. Peter Martin Duncan (Obituary Notice). Geological Magazine, Decade III, 8, 332–336. Gregory, J. W. 1893. Tables for the Determination of the Rock-forming Minerals by F. Loewinson-Lessing. Translated from the Russian by J. W. Gregory. Macmillan, London. Gregory, J. W. 1894. The natives of East Africa. Phonographic Quarterly Review, 1, 8– 13 & 72 –82. Gregory, J. W. 1896. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London. Reprinted in 1968 The Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1897. Across Spitsbergen. Transactions and Sixth Annual Report of the Council of the Liverpool Geographical Society for the year ending December 31st 1897, 41 –58. Gregory, J. W. 1897a. Some problems of Arctic Geology. Nature, 56, 301–303, 361–352. Gregory, J. W. 1902. The factors that control the depth of ore deposits. Transactions of the Australasian Institute of Mining Engineers, 8, 127– 154. Gregory, J. W. 1903. The Geography of Victoria: Historical, Physical and Political. Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd., London & Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1904. The Climate of Australasia in Reference to its Control by the Southern Ocean. Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd., Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1904a. The glacial geology of Tasmania. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 60, 37– 53. Gregory, J. W. 1905. The Southern Ocean and its climatic control over Australasia. Transactions of The Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Proceedings of Section E, 329– 349. Gregory, J. W. 1905a. The Mount Lyell Mining Field, Tasmania; with some account of the geology of other pyritic ore bodies. The Australasian Institute of Mining Engineers, 10, 26 –196. Also issued separately as a book of 172pp. Gregory, J. W. 1905b. The Imperial Geography for New Zealand Schools Standard II, 63pp; Standards III –IV, 128pp; Standard V–VI, 148pp. Geographical Readers, [for New Zealand schools] Standard III, 152pp; Standard IV, 234pp; Standard V–VI, 322pp. Whitcombe & Tombs, Christchurch, New Zealand. Gregory, J. W. 1906. The Dead Heart of Australia. A Journey Around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 1901–2 with Some Account of the Lake Eyre Basin and the Flowing Wells of Central Australia. John Murray, London. Gregory, J. W. 1906a. On a collection of fossil corals from Eastern Egypt, Abu Roash, and Sinai. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 3, 50– 58; 110– 118. Gregory, J. W. 1906b. Fossil echinoidea from Sinai and Egypt. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 3, 216– 227; 246– 256. Gregory, J. W. 1906c. The work of the National Antarctic Expedition. Nature, 73, 297– 300. Gregory, J. W. 1906d. The mining fields of Southern Rhodesia in 1905. Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers, 31, 46 –103. Gregory, J. W. 1906e. Mining in Australia. Mining Journal, 79, 273. Gregory, J. W. 1906f. The economic geography and development of Australia. The Geographical Journal, 28, 130– 145; 229–245. Gregory, J. W. 1906g. The ancient auriferous conglomerates of Southern Rhodesia. Transactions of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 25, 563– 578; discussion 579–587. Gregory, J. W. 1906h. The education of mining engineers. Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers, 31, 502– 525. Gregory, J. W. 1906i. The geological plans of some Australian mining-fields. Science Progress, 1, (New Series) 117–136. Gregory, J. W. 1906j. Climatic variations, their extent and causes. International Geological Congress, 10th Session, Mexico, 1906, 407– 426. Gregory, J. W. 1906k. The indicators of Ballarat. Mining Journal, 79, 78– 79. Gregory, J. W. 1906l. The economic geography and development of Australia. The Geographical Journal, 28, 130– 145; 229–245. Gregory, J. W. 1907. A glaciated rock surface at Lugton, North Ayrshire. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 13, 10 –18.

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Gregory, J. W. 1907a. Ore deposits and their distribution in depth. Lecture published in the Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 18, 305–321. Gregory, J. W. 1907b. The problem of the Palaeozoic glaciation of Australia and South Africa. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1906 York Meeting, 576–577. Gregory, J. W. 1907c. Gold mining and gold production. Cantor Lectures to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Journal of the Society for Arts, 55, 1003– 1014; 1022– 1032; 1037– 1047. Gregory, J. W. 1907d. The origin of the gold in the Rand banket. Transactions of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 17, 2– 41; discussion 41– 85. Gregory, J. W. 1907e. Presidential address. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 4, 409– 418; 451– 459. Gregory, J. W. 1907f. The Ballarat East Gold-Field, with plans of the mines by Wm. Baragwanath. Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 4. Gregory, J. W. 1907g. A contribution to the bibliography of the economic geology of Victoria. Records of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 2, Part 3. Gregory, J. W. 1907h. The Mount Cudgewa Tin-field. Bulletins of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 22. Gregory, J. W. 1907i. Ballarat East Goldfield and the indicators. The Mining Journal & Railway & Commercial Gazette, 82, 84. Gregory, J. W. 1907j. The Rotiform Bryozoa of the Isle of Wight. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 4, 442–443. Gregory, J. W. 1907k. Australia and the Australians. Introductory Chapter in Australasia, Vol. 1 in Stanford’s Compendium of Geography and Travel. 2nd edn. Stanford, London, 1– 32. Gregory, J. W. 1908. The great Scandinavian overthrust. Science Progress, 2, 399– 412. Gregory, J. W. 1908a. Lord Kelvin’s contributions to geology. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 13, 170– 186. Gregory, J. W. 1908b. A journey around Lake Eyre. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 24, 355– 365. Gregory, J. W. 1908c. Origin of the Sudbury nickel ores. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 5, 139–140. Gregory, J. W. 1908d. Report of Professor Gregory to the Earl of Sheffield on the prospects of iron mining and smelting in the neighbourhood of the Sheffield Park, Sussex. Southern Publishing Co. Ltd, Brighton. Gregory, J. W. 1908e. Report of Professor Gregory to the Earl of Sheffield on the prospects of finding coal in the district of Newhaven, Sussex. Southern Publishing Co. Ltd, Brighton. Gregory, J. W. 1908f. Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative. Blackie, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1908g. Review of Fifty Years’ work; Physical and Dynamical Geology. In: Macnair, P. & Mort, F. (eds) History of the Geological Society of Glasgow 1858– 1908. Glasgow Geological Society, Glasgow, 58 –74. Gregory, J. W. 1908h. Lord Kelvin and the age of the Earth. Glasgow Herald, February 22nd 1908. Gregory, J. W. 1908i. Some scientific results of the Antarctic Expeditions, 1901– 1904. The Geographical Journal, 32, 25 –47. Gregory, J. W. 1908j. The Geology of South Victoria Land. Review of National Antarctic Expedition 1901– 4. Natural History, 1, Geology (Field Geology; Petrography). British Museum, 1907. Nature, 77, 561–562. Gregory, J. W. 1908k. A History of Geographical Evolution. Review of Die Entwicklung der Kontiente und Ihrer Lebewelt ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Erdgeschichte by T. Arlt. 1907. Nature, 78, 266– 267. Gregory, J. W. 1908l. Review of ‘The Geological Structure of the NorthWest Highlands of Scotland’ by B. N. Peach, J. Horne, W. Gunn, C. T. Clough, L. W. Hinxman & J. J. H. Teall. 1907 Memoir Geological Survey of Scotland, HMSO. Nature, 77, 272– 274. Gregory, J. W. 1908m. Russian transliteration. Nature, 78, 42 –43. Gregory, J. W. 1909. The origin of the gold of the Rand Goldfield. Economic Geology, 4, 118– 129. Gregory, J. W. 1909a. The Cretaceous Bryozoa, Volume 2. Catalogues of the Fossils in the Department of Geology, British Museum (NH).

Gregory, J. W. 1909b. New species of Cretaceous Bryozoa. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 6, 61 –66. Gregory, J. W. 1909c. ‘Structural geography’. Nature, 80, 157– 158. Gregory, J. W. 1909d. The level of the sea. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 25, 311–324. Gregory, J. W. 1909e. Obituary Notice of John George Goodchild, born 26th May 1844, died 21st Feb. 1906. Transactions of the Geological Society of Edinburgh, 9, 331– 350. Gregory, J. W. 1909f. What is a mineral? Transactions of the Institute of Mining Engineers, 37 13 –42. Gregory, J. W. 1909g. What is a mineral? Geological Magazine, Decade V, 6, 520–521. Gregory, J. W. 1909h. Report on the work of the Commission sent out by the Jewish Territorial Organisation under the auspices of the Governor-General of Tripoli to examine the territory Proposed for the purpose of a Jewish settlement in Cyrenaica. ITO office, London. Gregory, J. W. 1909i. Further Antarctic Reports of the Expedition of 1901– 1904. The Geographical Journal, 34, 290–297. Also Further Antarctic Results, Nature, 79, 460– 462. Gregory, J. W. 1909j. The Mountains of the Moon. Review of ‘Ruwenzori: An account of the Expedition of H. R. H. Prince Luigi Amadeo of Savoy, Duke of Abruzzi’ by F. de Filippi.1908. Nature, 80, 281– 282. Gregory, J. W. 1909k. Niagara as a geological chronometer. Review of The Falls of Niagara: Their evolution and varying relations to the Great Lakes by J. W. W. Spencer. 1909. Nature, 79, 11. Gregory, J. W. 1909l. Geology. Dent Scientific Primer. Dent, London. Gregory, J. W. 1910. The Glenboig Fireclay. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 30, 348–360. Gregory, J. W. 1910a. Tuesite—a Scotch variety of halloysite. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 30, 361– 363. Gregory, J. W. 1910b. Work for Glasgow geologists—The problems of the South-Western Highlands. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 14, 1 –29. Gregory, J. W. 1910c. Problems of the South-Western Highlands of Scotland. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 7, 119– 121. Gregory, J. W. 1910d. White labour in tropical agriculture: a great Australian experiment. The Nineteenth Century, 67, February 1910, 368– 380. Gregory, J. W. 1910e. The geographical factors that control the development of Australia. The Geographical Journal, 35, 658– 682. Gregory, J. W. 1910f. The Heart of the Antarctic. Review of E. H. Shackleton’s ‘The Heart of the Antarctic, being the story of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1907–9. Nature, 82, 280–283. Gregory, J. W. 1910g. The Face of the Earth. Reviews of Vol III, Part 2, by E. Suess and Vol IV in translation by H. B. C. Sollas and of the Topographic Index to the volumes by L. Waagen. Nature, 83, 451– 453. Gregory, J. W. 1911. Report of the South African Strata Committee. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1910 Sheffield meeting. 123– 142. Gregory, J. W. 1911a. The fossil Echinoidea of Cyrenaica. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 67, 661– 680. Gregory, J. W. 1911b. The geology of Cyrenaica. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 67, 572– 615. Gregory, J. W. 1911c. Tripoli and Cyrenaica. Proceedings of the Glasgow Geological Society, 14, 349– 351. Gregory, J. W. 1911d. The resources of Tripoli. The Contemporary Review, 100, 768– 781. Gregory, J. W. 1911e. The flowing wells of Central Australia. Geographical Journal, 38, 34– 59, 157–181. Gregory, J. W. 1912. The employment of white labour in the sugar plantations of Queensland. Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 43, 182– 194. Gregory, J. W. 1913. The Nature and Origin of Fiords. John Murray, London. Gregory, J. W. 1914. The Rand Banket. Mining and Scientific Press, 108, 1020– 1022. Gregory, J. W. 1914a. Is the Earth drying up? The Geographical Journal, 43, 148– 172; 293–318. Gregory, J. W. 1914b. The lake system of Westralia. The Geographical Journal, 43, 656– 665.

EARLY PUBLICATIONS (1905– 10) AND RESEARCH ACTIVITY WHILE IN GLASGOW

Gregory, J. W. 1915. The reported progressive desiccation of the Earth. Scientia, 17, 328–344. Gregory, J. W. 1916. (with bibliography by C. M. Leitch). Henry Darwin Rogers. J. MacLehose & Sons, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1916a. Cyrenaica. The Geographical Journal, 47, 321– 345. Gregory, J. W. 1916b. The Central Lakes of Westrailia and the Westrailian Peneplain. The Geographical Journal, 48, 326–331. Gregory, J. W. 1917. The geology of phosphates and their bearing on the conservation of mineral resources. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 16, 116– 163. Gregory, J. W. 1922. Ore deposits and their genesis in relation to geographical distribution. Journal of the Chemical Society, 121, 750– 772. Gregory, J. W. 1925. Magmatic ores. Transactions of the Faraday Society, 20, 449– 458. Gregory, J. W. 1925a. Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative. 2nd edn. Blackie, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1926. The Sudbury nickel ores. Geological Magazine, 63, 190– 192. Gregory, J. W. 1928. The Elements of Economic Geology. Methuen & Co, London. Gregory, J. W. 1931. Dalradian Geology: The Dalradian Rocks of Scotland and their Equivalents in other Countries. Methuen & Co., London. Herries-Davies, G. L. 2007. Whatever is under the Earth: The Geological Society of London 1807 to 2007. Geological Society, London. Horwood, C. B. 1907. The occurrence of pseudomorphous pebbles of pyrites at the Crown-Reef Mine, Witwatersrand. The Mining Journal & Railway & Commercial Gazette, 81, 342. Horwood, C. B. 1917. The Gold Deposits of the Rand. Griffin, London. Ingalls, W. R. 1917. Shall Great Britain and America adopt the metric system? Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 26, 196– 111. Irving, J. D. 1904. Economic Resources of the Northern Black Hills. Professional Paper of the United States Geological Survey, 26, 109– 111. Johnson, F. D. 1907. Ballarat East Goldfield and the indicators. The Mining Journal & Railway & Commercial Gazette, 82, 8. Leake, B. E. & Bishop, P. 2009. The beginnings of geography teaching and research in the University of Glasgow: the impact of J. W. Gregory. Scottish Geographical Journal, 125, 272– 283. Lledo, H. L. & Jenkins, D. M. 2008. Experimental investigation of the upper thermal stability of Mg-rich actinolite; implications for Kuruna-type iron deposits. Journal of Petrology, 49, 225– 238.

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Lyell, C. 1868. Principles of Geology. Volume 2. John Murray, London. MacAlister, D. 1921. Geography at the University of Glasgow. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 37, 53 –56. Macnair, P. & Mort, F. 1908. History of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 1858– 1908. Geological Society of Glasgow. Milankovic´, M. 1920. The´orie mathe´matique des phe´nome`nes thermiques produits par la radiation solaire. Gauthier-Villars, Paris. Paterson, S. R., Pignotta, G. S., Memeti, V., Miller, R. B., Vernon, R. H. & Zˇa´k, J. 2008. Is stoping a volumetrically significant pluton emplacement process? Geological Society of America Bulletin, 120, 1075–1079. Perry, J. 1895. On the age of the Earth. Nature, 51, 224– 227. Perry, J. 1895a. On the age of the Earth. Nature, 51, 341– 342. Perry, J. 1895b. On the age of the Earth. Nature, 51, 582– 585. Rasmussen, B., Fletcher, I. R., Muhling, J. R., Mueller, A. G. & Hall, G. C. 2007. Bushveld-aged fluid flow, peak metamorphism, and gold mobilization in the Witwatersrand basin, South Africa, constraints from in situ SHRIMP U–Pb dating of monazite and xenotime. Geology, 35, 931– 934. Renwick, J. & Gregory, J. W. 1907. The Loch Lomond moraines. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 13, 45 –55. Rickard, T. A. 1910. The standardization of English in Technical Literature. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 19, 538– 596. Scrutton, T. C. 1906. Occurrence and treatment of Gold Ore at Bidi, Sarawak, Borneo. Transactions of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 15, 144– 184. Smith, M. P., Storey, C. D., Jeffries, T. E. & Ryan, C. 2009. In situ U–Pb and trace element analysis of accessory minerals in the Kiruna District, Norrbotten, Sweden: new constraints on the timing and origin of mineralization. Journal of Petrology, 50, 2063–2094. Suess, E. 1885. Das Antlitz der Erde; Volume 1 (Part 1, 1883; Part 2 1885); English Edition, 1904, The Face of the Earth. Volume 1, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Suess, E. 1888. Das Antlitz der Erde, Volume 2 (English Edition, 1906, Clarendon Press, Oxford). Suess, E. 1901. Das Antlitz der Erde, Volume 3 (Part 1 1901, Part 2 1909); English Editions, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Wager, L. R. & Deer, W. A. 1939. Geological investigations in East Greenland. Part III. The petrology of the Skaergaard intrusion, Kangerdlugssuaq, East Greenland. Meddelelser om Grønland, 105, 1– 352.

Chapter 16 Domestic, family and social activities and a social history intrusion

Most of the following is based on C. J. Gregory’s (unpublished mss) account of life at home in Glasgow, unless otherwise stated, except for the author’s additions in square brackets []. Although the account of social customs might seem superfluous, these have changed so much that correctly appreciating the setting in which Gregory lived and worked, requires their inclusion. There is no question that his home activities throw very significant light on his amazing continued productivity right up to, and even after, formal retirement.

Gregory’s Glasgow home [On the west, slightly less smokey, side of Glasgow, lay the new 1870 university buildings which capped Gilmore Hill. East of the university was the steep-sided Kelvin River valley and then the ground rose sharply to the next hill to the east, which was partly covered by relatively expensive] late 19th century tall solid sandstone terraces, three or four stories high (each with high ceilings) plus basements and attics and crowned by Park Circus and partly surrounded by Kelvingrove Park. Most of the terraces were divided vertically into spacious houses for the well-to-do, but along the northern edge stood a short row of tenements, Park Quadrant, including Number 4 into which the Gregorys moved. This was Gregory’s home for over 25 years (Figs 16.1 & 16.2). In Scotland, since 1693, a tenement has meant ‘a large house let in portions to a number of tenants, each portion being called a house’ that is, what would often be called a flat or apartment. [There is little doubt that Audrey would have chosen the place and Gregory concurred. High ground on the western part of the city would have been slightly less prone to the dense smog from the industrial and domestic smoke that normally hung around Glasgow at this time and which blackened the cream and red sandstones, and would have caused breathing problems to Audrey in particular. Apart from easy access to the university and the Geology Department, which was less than 700 m away, a few minutes walk, the location was near the prestigious] Park School in Lynedoch Street where both children first went to school in Glasgow from October 1906. In 1907 Ursula moved to Laurel Bank School and in 1908 Christopher moved to Glasgow Academy, both of which were within walking distance of home, and the children stayed at these fee-paying day schools for the rest of their schooling. [In keeping their children at home and not sending them to boarding schools, the Gregorys were modern in outlook, close to their children, and were following the custom of urban Scotland.] Number 3 Park Quadrant occupied the ground floor and an enormous basement, its front door opening onto the street. Number 4, next door, had a common heavy wooden door and stairs leading to the three flats above Number 3, with Number 4 being the middle flat. Off the stairs and 50 steps above the street was the front door of Number 4, opening into a dark lobby or hall. The south wall facing the door was covered with spears, paddles and other implements, horns and antlers (but no animal heads), that Gregory had brought home from Africa and Australia. Towards the north, the front, were the big dining room and drawing room, and a narrow bedroom for two maids. From the principal rooms there was a wonderful view to the north across Glasgow. On a

clear day, the Campsie Fells and even the Highland mountains were visible [as also recorded in Gregory 1910]. To the south were Gregory and Audrey’s bedroom, Christopher’s bedroom and a passage leading to Ursula’s bedroom (also the children’s playroom), a minute bathroom combined with W.C. (washing was normally by maid-filled unplumbed bowls in bedrooms), and the reasonably-sized kitchen with gas cooker and coal-fired range that heated the water, together with a coal bunker, scullery, crockery store-room and larder opening off it. Three other storerooms completed the accommodation. The coal was carried up from the street in 112 lb (51 kg) sacks and was the sole source of space heating. Lighting was by gas (until 1926 when electricity finally came to Park Quadrant) with gas chandeliers in the principal rooms with their elaborately moulded cornices, plaster decorations and high ceilings. There was no garden but Gregory was not a gardener and was often away in the summer. Then Audrey and the children would retreat to the lovely rural Bassetts [Essex] with its flower, fruit and vegetable gardens, for weeks or months at a time. The huge dining room also served as Gregory’s study, [possibly because Audrey realized from what had happened in a quite short time in Melbourne, where Gregory had his own study with a 2.45 m table, that it was impossible to ever clean or tidy such a sanctum]. One and a half long walls were shelved almost to the ceiling; dark towering cliffs of books. The few parts of the walls that could be seen were coloured terracotta. The paintwork was darkest brown with a black marble mantelpiece and supporting slabs. Over the mantelpiece was a case of Gregory’s African butterflies, duplicates which the NHM did not want, and above the case a large reproduction of ‘The Death of a Grandfather’, a vividly realistic portrayal of this sad event which came from Gregory’s parent’s home. Facing you as you entered was Mr Polietski’s portrait of Christopher with cupboards below it. The dining table was large and massive, reproduction Jacobean, with extension flaps for the top when necessary. But what most drew the eye and aroused incredulity was Gregory’s working table, even bigger than the dining table. For the whole length of one side ran a low stool heaped high with newspapers and journals awaiting attention, forming foothills to the central massif. The table itself carried a vast deposit of paper in well stratified but interlocking mounds, the highest ranges being the furthest part of the territory, from which a tumbled grouping of sloping plateaus and domes interspersed with a few faults and overthrusts, descended to a more habitable area yet nowhere reaching the datum level of the table top. In the early days, Audrey had provided a dust-cover, which Gregory gratefully accepted as a new reference stratum on which to continue depositing, after which no one could take it off again. It appeared at the sides of the mountain, rounding off the hill forms and draping down in irregular shapes beyond the sides of ‘the desk’ which it hid. Later, grieved by dirt drifting onto the papers, Audrey added a fresh dust cover; just in time she realized what was about to happen and managed to remove the new cover before it too became engulfed. You would think that when a paper, or even a clip of papers, was buried in this quagmire it would have gone for good, unless by accident; but, no, the astounding fact was that Gregory knew where everything was and by a few moments of ferreting could produce it from ‘the filing system’. Margaret Macdonald (pers. comm. 1993) expanded and confirmed this description, although some of the items must have been ‘tidied-up’ before a dinner party. ‘As a child and teenager I

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 133– 137. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.16

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Fig. 16.1. Aerial view in the early 2000s, looking south, of Park Quadrant and Park Circus (after cleaning of the stone) showing the hilltop situation. Park Quadrant is the short incomplete north-facing row in the foreground with Number 4 near the middle, being the only front slightly obscured by a tree. With acknowledgements to Colin Baxter Photography Ltd, Grantown-on-Spey, PH26 3NA.

Fig. 16.2. Close-up of the outside front of 4 Park Quadrant, taken in 2005, after the stone had been cleaned. Courtesy of Professor B. J. Bluck.

often visited the Gregory household and I have never forgotten the Professor’s study. It was so cluttered as to be unbelievable. Every here and there were rock specimens, either a chunk by itself, or heaps of smaller ones. Books, pamphlets, maps, diagrams, magnifying glasses, and so on were scattered around in reckless confusion in every conceivable situation, falling out of overflowing bookcases, completely covering the [long side] table, piled on the chairs, even stacked on the floor so that you had to watch where you walked’. Gregory seemed to be quite happy with this arrangement, never complained or suggested his Melbourne study had been a better arrangement. His actual writing was done on the cleared dining table, as described later. [So long as he had space to work he was almost oblivious to the surroundings. The existence of piles dealing with different subjects suggests he may have maintained a division of projects between those worked on at home and those worked on in the university, as he had done between NHM work in the museum and other projects at home]. The drawing room, although the same size as the dining room, was very different. It was Audrey’s own room which she kept the way her artist’s eyes wanted. If Gregory left papers or books in it, she quietly put them back in the dining room. The wallpaper was off white and faintly patterned, echoing the mainly white marble of the mantelpiece and its supports, within which were pale green tiles around the coal fireplace which itself was bounded by a gaily decorated brass fender enclosing brass fireirons. All the woodwork was white including many of the picture frames and 26 of Audrey’s water-colours were carefully grouped on the walls. On the long wall opposite the fireplace was a Dutch bureau and dwarf white bookshelves holding Audrey’s books for she had renounced the buying of more books for herself, having decided it was a pleasure there was no room for her to indulge in, in this household. On the bookshelves were a few family curios and a doll’s size display case holding a score of the most interesting thimbles from her collection which ranged from at least Roman to First World War in age. Long lace curtains were flanked by thick pink curtains with a silky surface which could be drawn across and pink silk cushions

DOMESTIC, FAMILY AND SOCIAL ACTIVITIES AND A SOCIAL HISTORY INTRUSION

covered the wide window seat. Comfortable chairs and sofas occupied most of the room, which was unused in the mornings and soon after lunch the housemaid dusted it, took off the dust covers, set out the silver objects on the bureau, and unfolded the polar bear skin Gregory had bought in Spitzbergen and let it drape over the portfolio stand that held Audrey’s unframed pictures. Possibly, what was called the Benares table by the family was also in this room (A. Mendell, pers. comm. 2009). Audrey used the room in the afternoons and the family in the evenings, but usually Gregory remained in the dining room after dinner. Later on in their time in Park Quadrant, the Gregorys rented a fine, large room in the basement of the tenement to act as a bedroom for Christopher when his bedroom was used by a visitor. It also served as a photographic developing room for Christopher and a spare workroom or an occasional bolt-hole for Gregory. It was apparent that Audrey and Gregory differed greatly in their attitudes to their environment, [expressed in summary in the differing dining and drawing rooms]. To the high-pressure worker like Gregory, the things around him were tools to help his work; what they looked like was irrelevant. To the artist like Audrey, what you saw was supremely important, worth spending time, energy and thought on shaping it to the way you chose. The difference in outlook was fundamental; yet dispute never seems to have arisen [which is almost incredible]. Gregory quickly brushed out of his mind regret for any loss of time [and left most domestic decisions to Audrey]. Audrey nearly always succeeded in keeping to herself the irritations she often felt [as Gregory must have been a most difficult person to live with in some ways]. Christopher once asked his mother if she and Gregory had ever had a quarrel. She said she did not think they ever had; but that was due to his perfect temper. [Even if that were not precisely correct, the very fact that the question had to be asked shows that quarrels must have been extremely rare, as indeed they seem to have been between Gregory’s own greatly differing father and mother]. Audrey provided the best conditions for Gregory to work in and did not nag or try to restrict his activities; she knew what he was like before she married him and respected what he was. Gregory was amenable and although in many ways an archtypical Victorian father and husband, in other ways his gentle, unruffled temper marked him as the antithesis of the Victorian martinet father.

Home life Breakfast was at eight, but Audrey took hers in bed. Gregory liked breakfast to be always the same so that he could give his mind to more interesting matters without distraction. He was punctual, but he did not like being kept waiting, so he wanted his porridge to be on the table when he came in. This was more than the maids would perform, arguing they would dish up the porridge when the Professor came in, otherwise it would be spoilt. This degenerated into a daily game of ‘last across’ which the maids usually won. Standing before the dining room fire he would rattle the keys in his pocket as if to let off energy in tune with his restless mind. The other cause of conflict was the salt in the porridge, an old Scottish requirement. The cook could not concede that porridge was fit human food without salt, so she added a small amount which went un-noticed, gradually increasing it day by day until Gregory refused to eat it and the cycle began again. The second course was toast and fried bacon, except on Sundays when fried sausages appeared. During breakfast Gregory dashed through the first delivery of mail and galloped through the Glasgow Herald propped up against the bacon dish. Then he moved to his easy chair to finish the paper and keep an eye on the children at the table. He never recovered from his boyhood training to ‘eat the good food set before you’ and not leave anything; sometimes a source of contention with his children. A few

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minutes after nine, he shot out of the house with a bag of papers on his [less than 10 minute] walk to the university at athletic speed. University lectures, but not those in geology, began at 8 am, so Gregory was not especially early. Geology was a newcomer to the university timetable, so Gregory had to accept 4.30 and 5.30 pm as the times for the first and second year lectures. [The popular story that Gregory chose these times so that he could concentrate on research while he was fresh in the day was untrue. The third and fourth year classes in the three or four year degree courses were by arrangement with the few students involved.] A little before 7 pm he could be heard coming up the stairs two at a time and the crash of his latchkey in the front door. As dinner was laid in the dining room by then, he came into the drawing room and read The [London] Times to fill in the gaps in the Glasgow Herald. He was a sensationally quick reader [which partly explains his ability to review lengthy tomes rapidly]. Usually the newsagent delivered The Times on his evening round, but when the arrangement proved too unreliable, the paper was ordered direct from London, always arriving by the last [of several] postal deliveries between 6 and 7 pm on the day of publication, for one halfpenny stamp. Dinner was at 7.30 and normally started with soup. Gregory would eat a lot of white bread; if the maid was not in the room he quickly cut irregular slabs off the loaf on the sideboard while obviously thinking of other things. During meals he was tempted to break off in pursuit of a thought; and if there was a moment to wait between courses he was likely to rise and look something up, until Audrey made a rule, No getting up from table during a meal, to which he added a rider, except to consult Webster’s dictionary. To this compromise he thereafter kept during meals shared with Audrey [who must have sometimes regretted having Gregory’s papers and books in the dining room and not only during dinner parties]. He would end the meal with an orange, peeled with a knife, and eaten in a few moments, what Audrey called ‘the Orange trick’. Normally, when the table was cleared, a drift of papers soon covered it as Gregory settled down to many hours of uninterrupted work below the one incandescent gas light, refreshed at the most by a little strong coffee. Before he went to bed he had to leave the dining table clear for breakfast. [His need for only four, or at the most five, hours sleep seems to have allowed him to continue throughout most of his life, the long hours of work that he grew accustomed to while working as a wool clerk. There is no doubt that part of his astonishing productivity in terms of output of lectures, scientific papers, books and general publications which continued unabated until his death, was due to him working largely undisturbed for five or more hours after dinner, until the early hours of the following day. Considering the interruptions likely in the university and despite his reputation for using every available moment of the typical 46 hours per week he spent there productively, the night was his ‘quality writing time’ that each week probably exceeded 30 hours in total. This is much more than a typical professor can achieve today in the whole week in a university. This was a key factor that would be difficult to sustain in today’s world of radio, television and changed marriage relationships.] Although usually preoccupied, immersed in reading, writing, revising, correcting, etc., he never protested at being interrupted by a question. True, his only answer for a while might be a grunt while he completed his train of thought. In later years when Ursula was keeping house for him, she came to recognize a relationship between the degree of stress under which he was working and the time taken to get an answer to a simple question essential to the running of the house. Apart from weekends when Gregory was leading field excursions, or occasionally doing fieldwork around Glasgow, Sunday was the day the family saw most of him. In the morning, the children were bade to take a walk by their mother, but they were allowed to accompany Gregory on any visit to ‘the Department’,

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to which he usually went for an hour or two. There he sometimes produced an entertainment. He might manipulate glass with a Bunsen burner and mouth blowpipe in the big basement lab, blowing bulbs or making T joints. Or he would offer a student’s microscope and a thin section of granite, for its changing colours to be examined in polarized light. Meanwhile the work he had come to do or collect was centred on his own room, which was far smaller than the dining room at home, though even more heavily encumbered. The return home would often coincide with the time that Kelvingrove Park was crowded with the ‘Quality of the West End’ making their dignified way home from the many churches that surrounded the park to their Sunday dinners on the other side of it. [By this period, Gregory had turned his back on religion and churchgoing, but surprisingly he often started his more discursive papers with a quotation from the Bible]. Not a vehicle was in sight as the carriageways were crowded with a throng of sedate and godly traffic on foot, the men resplendent in shining top hats and black morning coats, the women and children suitably smart to accompany them. Gregory’s irreverent speed as he threaded through the crowd, and far outpaced anyone else, drew attention to his shabby hat, old coat, its tails flying out to show a working suit, and a battered bag of papers. He was unconcerned at being the odd man out, but his son [like many teenagers] was embarrassed to be seen with him. If he recognized a friend and they exchanged a greeting, it gave him genuine pleasure. Sunday lunch was the main family meal of the week, with a roast joint of beef or leg or shoulder of mutton, not lamb. After pudding, fruit was served with finger bowls for removing fruit juice from the finger-tips and relaxed conversation was usual. On fine Sunday afternoons, Gregory would often take one or both children out for a walk (no one but Gregory would describe a walk with him as a stroll), to a place of interest, usually using a tram to get there. Glasgow had a remarkable tramway network stretching from Loch Lomond to Bothwell, all of 40 km, but the last lap to Park Quadrant involved the puff up the steep hill from the tram and, coming into the straight, Gregory would quote from Kipling’s Married Man in the Boer War, ‘An ’e want to go ’ome to ’is tea’. Sunday afternoon tea with Audrey in the drawing room was the time when Gregory switched off; the thrashing of the engine was stilled and his love for Audrey was most apparent, with his attention focused on her, at the same time the conversation ranged widely and family plans were discussed. Tea opened with thin bread and butter, or sandwiches and then a luscious bought cake. [Sunday afternoon showed that Gregory, although a chronic workaholic, was not clinically hyperactive], indeed Audrey reported that travelling with him in Australia, presumably by train, Gregory sat silently absorbing the new country so much that she thought he would never speak again. Sunday evening was a cold supper, with pickles for Gregory. Before 1915 both maids would have been out, after 1915, the one resident maid was off duty. The restrictions on one’s freedom of action and the taboos involved in employing resident servants pre-1914 are not now generally appreciated. People today assume that the family could nip into the kitchen to do a bit of cooking when the cook and the maids were out. To have done so would have been the equivalent of the maids taking tea in the drawing room. The cook ruled in the kitchen, and one could not go poking about among her supplies, utensils and stores, so she left a cold meal if she was to be out. After the 1914– 18 war, the household relied on a non-resident daily housemaid, which gave much more freedom to the family. After only a few years, even this came to an end, and Audrey and Ursula took over running the house. From about 1926, Ursula did this alone. A major part of the social scene, especially before 1914, was the giving and attending of full-dress dinner parties. For the Gregorys, this would usually have involved some university professors and their wives. The Gregorys were unusual in continuing such

formal parties after the War (pers. comm. Margaret Macdonald 1993), [in the way older people tend to continue with what was the correct procedure during their youth, which Gregory’s son details as follows.] If a man came in a dinner jacket (tuxedo) and black tie, instead of tails and a white tie, he need not expect to be invited again. A cab must trot you there on time. You assemble in the drawing room, are introduced and chat. Most emphatically there were no drinks, which would be barbarous, spoiling your palate before the meal. When all have come, a maid announced ‘Dinner is served’, and the hostess asked each man to take a lady into the dining room, starting with the host and ending with herself. Each man took a lady on their right arm, seated her on his right, and made conversation with her the main object of the meal. The dining room was transformed into a scene of delight [despite the incongruous long marginal mountain ridge of books and papers which remained; presumably some tidying up of the piles of specimens, papers and books on the chairs and floor would have taken place]. The table would be laid for about ten, with place cards to indicate to guests their seats. Shaded candles gave beams of light and the overhead gas light was turned down low. A coal fire burned brightly in the grate. The silver for six courses sparkled on the white damask and round the cunningly folded table napkins. Among the candle sticks lurked little silver salt cellars, pepper pots and antique sweet dishes, some holding crystallized pineapple or ginger, others walnut chocolate creams or nuts, for the end of the meal. Flowers and greenery were placed down the middle of the table beside menu holders which for a time had vivid water colours painted by Audrey in the Bassetts’ garden. The menus were placed where guests could discreetly glance at them, with no obvious greed-gloating. This demand for discretion was part of the taboo on mentioning the food at all. Convention required that the only notice one might take of it, no matter how exquisite, was to eat what was presented. To have praised any of it would have shown greed and shocking manners. The outlook changed about 1917 when food grew scarce. Before the First World War, well-to-do people who kept a talented cook did well to hold greed in revulsion, for overeating would have been easy, and this probably lay at the root of a taboo that later seemed absurd [but with obesity has become more understandable today]. Audrey once commented ‘If you notice, you will see that people who have many courses of rich food, eat very sparingly of each course’. One or two excellent waitresses, who would serve in grave silence, would be hired by Audrey from an agency for the evening, so that the hostess needed to make no intervention, the resident staff working in the kitchen. The guests should not poach on other people’s conversations, but the male guest must be aware of what is going on around, for sometimes a subject may become general for a while. If your hostess does her job well, she will have chosen your partner so that the conversation brings pleasure and flows easily but you must not fall behind in your eating, or go on eating after your hostess. However delicious the course, when your hostess lays down her implements, you must down yours. Soon after the middle of the meal, your hostess turns to her other neighbour for the first time and launches a new conversation. Everyone else does the same. This episode is a gesture of goodwill rather than the main act. Before the end you will have reverted to your original partner. After the maid has poured the first round of port, the hostess will find her chance to catch the other ladies’ eyes, all will rise, and she will lead the ladies to the drawing room, where she will see to their coffee being poured out and will launch into their conversations. A maid takes the men their coffee, the host passes cigars, although Gregory himself did not smoke, port circulates and nuts are on the table. Then starts the real talk of the evening, amusing or serious, instructive or fascinating and perhaps revealing, with sometimes a core to which some of the men may have been invited in order for their views to be sounded out. [All the recorded comments indicate

DOMESTIC, FAMILY AND SOCIAL ACTIVITIES AND A SOCIAL HISTORY INTRUSION

that Gregory himself was shy and retiring and certainly not one to dominate the conversation with accounts of his exploits, unlike many well-travelled hosts. He would tend to try and draw out the guests and learn as much as he could from them.] It would end with the host saying ‘Shall we join the ladies?’ Cigars would be extinguished as there was no smoking in the drawing room, and the men would adjourn to the drawing room, where they would enjoy the society of the ladies until the time came for departure. Such was the sparkle of sophisticated society that the Gregorys lived in although they knew, and it worried them, that ‘in spite of any spangles on Glasgow’s raiment, she stood in rags with her feet in the mud; and the wind was cold’ to quote the exact words of C. J. Gregory (mss). [The number of the very poor and destitute in appallingly overcrowded slums was nowhere worse than in Glasgow at this time, where large numbers of big families lived in one room, for example, in 1911, 85% of Glasgow’s accommodation consisted of three rooms or fewer and even ten years later over 1/8th of the population lived in one room (Schama 2002). Nationwide, wealth was grotesquely unevenly distributed, as factually documented by many historians (e.g. Wilson 2005). The family wished it was more fairly spread but could do little to speed the change.] Not every dinner party went according to the above idyllic scene. Margaret Macdonald (pers. comm. 1993) recorded that the first her mother attended with her father, Tyrrell, at the Gregorys’, the cook must have had a violent fit of temper over something, and had tipped the whole tin of curry powder into the soup. The first man to take a sip appeared to be having a heart attack, clutching his throat, coughing and spluttering and gasping for breath and nearly exploding in his successful attempt to avoid spitting it out. Thus forewarned, the remaining guests took the smallest of sips as it stung the lips and was absolute liquid fire. Everyone, including presumably Audrey, who would have tasted it first, without saying a word about it, left their soup otherwise untouched. The maid came in several times to see if the course was finished and eventually removed all the full plates while Audrey, completely unflustered, continued talking as though nothing whatsoever was the matter, arousing admiration among the guests for her coolness and sang froid; one of the most self-possessed of women. Twice a year an External Examiner came to share with Gregory the conduct and marking of the degree examinations, nearly always staying with the Gregorys and working at papers far into the night. At family evening dinner conversation sparkled. There was retired Professor J. W. Judd, 24 years older than Gregory, a kindly man with a great presence, who was a polished raconteur with a fund of stories about geologists. There was also Professor Grenville Cole from Dublin, a tiny man and a great friend of Gregory, who published very nearly 500 articles (Wyse Jackson 2007). He climbed in the Alps in pursuit of geology and served more than one spell as examiner. Of course Gregory participated in the conversation, but it was apparent that he continually strove to draw forth knowledge from the guest and

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store it as it flowed past. Other examiners remain unrecorded in C. J. Gregory’s mss. Audrey dealt with most of the day-to-day matters of the children and their schooling. Gregory occasionally involved himself, as when Christopher wished to join the newly-formed Boy Scout movement in 1910, but being one year younger than the officially required 11 years, and also having the rather early bedtime of 7.30 pm which, because of his small size, his mother was unwilling to change, Gregory was called in to see the Scout Leader and secured his son’s acceptance, despite the fact that Christopher was to be absent for all the summer months for two years. It was not until 1912, six years after coming to Glasgow, that Christopher stayed in Glasgow for the summer term. Until then the children had spent almost all the summer six months at Bassetts with their grandparents, and for much of this time with Audrey when Gregory was away. [One suspects Audrey did not like living in Glasgow, if only because of her breathing problems, and so took every opportunity to return to the countryside of Essex, and thought the children were better off outside the city.] [Gregory had closer contact with his children than many professional workaholic men at this time. Neither of the children were sent to boarding school and, when at home, he saw them daily. In addition, he kept in close contact with both his children as they grew up, taking Ursula to Australia with him in 1914 and later yachting, and taking Christopher with him on field trips such as to Arran on Saturday 11 November 1916; visiting NE England in early July 1915, cycling in Ireland in July 1916 (all recorded on postcards), and to Tibet in 1922]. Christopher became interested in the new subject of ‘wireless telegraphy’, initially using an induction coil he claimed Gregory had kept from his youth. He sat scout examinations in the subject in the summer of 1914 and was one of ten scouts to be awarded a certificate for proficiency and a prize, which news was picked up by the Wireless Officer on the liner Gregory and Ursula were on making their way to Australia for the 1914 BA meeting. The officer gave Gregory the news, and asked if this was his son and Gregory was pleased to confirm that it was.

References Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, J. W. 1910. Work for Glasgow geologists – the problems of the South-Western Highlands. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 14, 1– 29. Schama, S. 2002. A History of Britain; The Fate of Empire, 1776– 2000. BBC Worldwide Ltd, London. Wilson, A. N. 2005. After the Victorians. Hutchison, London. Wyse Jackson, P. N. 2007. Grenville Arthur James Cole (1859– 1924); the cycling geologist. In: Wyse Jackson, P. N. (ed.) 2007. Four Centuries of Geological Travel: The Search for Knowledge on Foot, Bicycle, Sledge and Camel. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 287, 135– 147.

Chapter 17 Activities between 1910 and 1917

Summary of activities There was a shift away from, but not an abandonment of, mining and Dalradian topics after Gregory’s January 1910 presidential address, towards geomorphological topics such as the origin of fjords, sea lochs, lakes and glacial deposits. In the summers of 1910 and 1912 he went to Spain, probably with Audrey, on holiday as no overt scientific account followed, but he included his coastal observations in Gregory (1913). In August– September 1910 he visited Sweden in connection with the International Geological Congress, returning immediately to the BA Meeting in Sheffield. From 1910–13 he was President of the Scottish Ski Club (Who Was Who, 3). In 1911 he was elected Dean of the Science Faculty (Senate minutes), presumably for three years, and he made a long holiday trip with Audrey to France, Italy and Dalmatia, returning through Germany. It was also in 1911 that Gregory became a member of the Athenaeum Club (Athenaeum records), probably in order to enjoy more comfortable accommodation and more congenial company during his visits to London. He remained a member until his death. In 1912, he led an expedition to Benguella (Angola). His movements during the summer of 1913 are uncertain. Audrey had three thimbles purchased in 1913 in Langres, France, which suggests she might have been there with Gregory; however, she sometimes went on summer painting holidays to the continent when Gregory was away. There is a letter in August 1914 from Gregory showing his concern about her getting out of France quickly at the outbreak of the First World War. In 1914 he made his fourth visit to Australia for the BA meeting in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, returning via China, Mongolia and Russia. During the first part of the war (1914 –17) he remained in Glasgow with a wide range of publications, including a joint study of Eocene corals from New Guinea and papers relating to wartime strategic minerals, but did not undertake fieldwork outside the UK in the summers of 1915 and 1916. Early on, it was generally assumed in Britain that the First World War would be won fairly easily, but as the grim total of those killed exceeded all expectation, the need for extraordinary measures became apparent. Following his completion of teaching in the October 1916– March 1917 academic year, Gregory put himself at the disposal of the War Office in early 1917 (Chapter 18).

The 1910 International Geological Congress and the iron ore resources of the world The International Geological Congress (IGC) of August and September 1910, held in Stockholm was attended by Gregory as a delegate of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) and of the Geological Survey of Victoria. This was his first attendance at the Congress since 1891, although he had been a non-attending member at the 1906 Mexico meeting. He did not attend nor was he a member again until the 1926 Congress in Spain. He showed his perennial interest in glacial features and landscape by attending a pre-Congress early August excursion to middle Sweden on ‘Quaternary Geology and morphology phenomena in Ja¨mtland and Angermanland’ (IGC records). He also further examined the major SE-directed thrusting that he had first seen in 1907. The Congress was used as an opportunity to obtain a world-wide survey of known iron ore deposits, and in particular to document in

some detail, the abundant Swedish resources. Following a circular distributed in January 1908 to all participating countries, and especially to National Geological Surveys, two massive volumes, totalling 1068 pages plus a folio atlas, were produced in 1910 for the Stockholm meeting. The Geological Survey of Victoria asked Gregory (or more likely he offered) to prepare their contribution despite it being several years since he had left the Survey. Gregory (1910) wrote about ‘The Iron Ore deposits of Victoria,’ which were almost non-existent, being confined to a few ironstones associated with Cenozoic basalts and some Lower Cenozoic sedimentary ironstones. The IGC project prompted Gregory (1911) to write a summary for the readers of Science Progress under the title ‘The iron-ore supplies of the world’ in which he tried to estimate the available world resources of this metal so vital to modern civilization. In this last account he revealed that it was on his initiative (as President of Section C of the BA) that he had asked Prof. Stens Anders Hjalmar Sjo¨gren (1856 –1922) to read a paper on the iron-ore reserves of Scandinavia to the 1907 BA Leicester Meeting; this in turn had prompted Sjo¨gren to suggest the world-wide study to the IGC. The conclusion was that there were ample reserves of workable iron-ore, with the probability that large undiscovered reserves existed in countries then poorly explored. This prediction turned out to be correct for example, the rich banded ironstones of Western Australia that were found long after Gregory’s death.

More on ‘Australia’ On 7 February 1910 Gregory lectured the RGS on The geographical conditions which affect the development of Australia (Gregory 1910a) eliciting as enthusiastic a response, as shown by the written discussion, as he had in 1906. The main point of contention over Asiatic immigration to Australia was that many held that the wet tropical parts of Australia, such as Queensland and the Northern Territory, which were suitable for growing tropical agricultural products such as sugar cane, could only be exploited by the use of indigenous labour from tropical countries used to working outside in the heat, which was claimed to be impossible for most whites. It was therefore with great glee that Gregory was able to report that using published figures up 1908, whites had been successfully undertaking sugar production in Queensland after the use of coloured South Pacific islanders, who had previously worked the crop, was banned in 1901 and whites took over the work. Production, yield, area under cultivation and profits had increased, so that instead of importing some sugar, Australia now supplied all its own needs and exported a small amount. The results were cited as due to the greater efficiency of white labour. Contrary to prediction, mortality rates among the workers had fallen. However, the crucial fact was that most of the white labour was peripatetic and moved in, like sheep-shearers, just during the harvest time and did not have to be paid all the year, nor did they live all the year in the climate concerned, unlike the previous workers. Gregory examined the ‘Queensland sugar experiment’ figures in the meticulous, almost obsessive, detail of a professional economist, perusing the Parliamentary Budget papers of the Commonwealth and the Australian Sugar Journal as cited in Gregory (1910b) and this reference he quoted in his RGS lecture. His writings relied on the published figures; however, he took great pains to uncover them and then repeatedly publish them,

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 139– 154. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.17

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which showed a considerable emotional involvement which even impelled him to visit the Queensland sugar plantations for himself in 1909. In Gregory (1912), he reiterated the above figures, lecturing for the first time to the Economic Section of Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (RPSG), and also emphasizing the extreme humidity of the regions concerned. In Gregory (1912a), he concluded that hot dry places are healthy but ‘the industrial development of any locality where the wet-bulb temperature commonly exceeds 808 [F] will be almost, and if it exceeds 888, quite impossible’. The last paper is interesting for the experimental accounts of regular human activity for periods of several minutes in rooms at temperatures up to 170 8C. He continued to press the point about the adaptability of white labour and support the ‘Keep Australia White Campaign’ more and more with age and, for instance, in 1925 he published a whole 364-page book devoted to the topic of ‘The Menace of Colour’ (Gregory 1925). Gregory’s enthusiasm for Australia and Australians is further supported by his endorsement in March and in April 1911 of a proposal for Glasgow University to award an Honorary LL D to the Honourable Andrew Fisher (1862 –1928), the Scottish-born, three times Prime Minister of Australia (GU archives; 22359 –60). Gregory’s next book on Australia was named just that (Gregory 1916) and was mostly written on his way home from Australia during August –October 1914 with some last minute additions after June 1915 (as the Great War had delayed publication); the Preface was written in October 1916. This was a small 16  12 cm (c. 612  512 inches) book of 156 pages, entirely nongeological, specifically addressed to a British readership, describing the main features of Australian life and geography, as the following chapter headings show. ‘The discovery, exploration and population of Australia; General description of Australia; The physical geography of Australia; Relations of the fauna and flora of Australia; The Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia; The products of Australia; The Government of Australia; The Australian budget; The defence of Australia; Land tenure; Industrial and social legislation; Conclusion’. The longest chapters are those on the governance of the States and the Commonwealth and on industrial and social legislation, in which he goes into some detail, particularly on industrial peace, the minimum wage and the setting of fair wages, probably because such matters were of direct concern in Britain at the time. Generally, he writes in an approving tone of Australian practice, such as the introduction of referenda and arbitration. Gregory’s overall conclusion is one of admiration for Australian life, its fairness to the worker and approval of the State intervention in social matters and the infrastructure (railway development, etc.), and he believed Australia had a very bright future ahead. Gregory’s next publications on Australia were on the lake system of Western Australia and are dealt with later under BA activities.

Visit to Dalmatia in 1911 On Wednesday 20 April 1911, Gregory and Audrey began a holiday by crossing the English Channel from Dover to Calais and then going by train to Paris and on to Sens for the night before proceeding to Lausanne for Thursday night. The next day they continued across Switzerland by train through the Simplon Tunnel to Milan, which Gregory had visited a few years before. Here they paused for a few hours to see the cathedral before continuing to Verona for the Friday night, making liberal use of their Bradshaw not only to make connections but also act as a travel guide to sights such as Milan cathedral. After a look at Verona they went on to Venice for Saturday and Sunday nights (23rd) with Audrey preferring not to go out in the heat and glare of the sun (because of her eyes) until the afternoon (letter of 23 April 1911 from Audrey in Venice to her mother). From Venice they travelled to Croatia (Dalmatia) and Bosnia at the end of April and the

beginning of May 1911, partly by steamer, with Gregory going exploring while Audrey rested. Audrey was not a good traveller, and did not have the energy that Gregory possessed but she did not hold him back and was happy for him to venture forth without her, presumably filling in some of the time painting. The exact details of the later parts of the trip are unknown but visiting Sebenico, Trau` and Spalato are mentioned in letters, and thimbles were purchased in Mostar (Bosnia), Regusa (Croatia?) and in Nuremburg (Germany), so the return was via a more northerly route. Gregory identified what he called ‘constructive waterfalls’ at the Kerka Falls and the Topolje Falls, both on the Kerka River in Dalmatia and at the famous Jajce Falls on the Pliva River, a tributary of the Urbas River, in Bosnia. He pointed out that although waterfalls are usually destructive in cutting through the landscape, there are ones which are constructive and deposit material, infilling old valleys. The examples he described involved barriers across the rivers over which the waterfall descends while behind it tufa is deposited because of the calcareous nature of the water. The tufa builds up beneath the lake formed by the barrier, depositing itself on the top and behind the barrier over which the water falls. These waterfalls were briefly described by Gregory on 1 September 1911 at the BA Meeting (Gregory 1912b), in an address to Section E (Geography), the full account being published in Gregory (1911a). Gregory also visited the coast of Dalmatia (now Croatia) near Trebinje (and Dubrovnik), and especially near Cattaro and Regusa he thought how similar many of the topographic features were to those found typically in glaciated areas and yet there was good evidence that there had been no Pleistocene glaciation in the low ground near to the sea, so he wrote an account of the ‘Pseudo-glacial features in Dalmatia’ (Gregory 1915). The features that he saw which are often taken as evidence of glacial activity included the absence of spurs from the walls of valleys and any that do remain are truncated and faceted, hanging valleys where tributary valleys join major ones, and the troughshaped form of many of the valleys, all of which Gregory explained by various non-glacial factors such as faulting and solution of carbonate rocks.

Continued contributions to the Geological Society of Glasgow and Scottish geology Gregory’s interests in geology ranged world-wide and he brought much of this to the attention of the Geological Society of Glasgow (GSG). However, he also faithfully continued to research local and Scottish geology. By 10 November 1910 Gregory was adding to his account of three years earlier with a lecture to the Society on ‘Further Notes on the Scandinavian Overthrust’ following a return visit (in connection with his attendance at the IGC) in 1910 to Scandinavia, in which he had examined the evidence further. He remained convinced of the southeasterly movement, but now wondered if the postulated 225 km of movement might not be excessive (TGSG, 14, 170). Gregory’s second Presidential address (Gregory 1911b), delivered on 12 January 1911, concerned ‘The Glasgow Earthquake of 14th December 1910,’ which since it had only occurred less than a month before the lecture, required some nimble work, gathering the evidence c. 100 letters from the public by means of an appeal in the Glasgow Herald. From this evidence, still preserved in Glasgow University MS Gen 535, plus that from signal boxes on the railways which gave accurate timings, he was able to narrow the epicentre to the northwestern part of the city, deduce the intensity (5.5 on the Rossi-Forel scale) and from his supposition of an east –west fault being involved, identify which fault had probably moved and make some observations of the probable direction of movement of the first pulse, which took place at 8.54 pm. The

ACTIVITIES BETWEEN 1910 AND 1917

Coats Observatory at Paisley recorded the shock on a Milne horizontal pendulum seismograph and it was recorded as far away as the Isle of Wight which was then effectively a centre of earthquake-related studies under John Milne (1850 –1913), who lived there (Kabrna 2007). Gregory consulted Milne about this earthquake and also later about other ones elsewhere (Fig. 17.1). The same Glasgow earthquake was later discussed in a lecture to the Institute of Mining Engineers with the emphasis on the earthquake’s effects on mining; a matter of some importance in view of the number of coal mines in the Midland Valley of Scotland (Gregory 1911c). From the time of this Glasgow earthquake, Gregory became interested in the interpretation of earthquake activity and published on the matter, including a book on Earthquakes and Volcanoes (Gregory 1929), and articles such as one on ‘Italian Earthquakes’ in the Manchester Guardian of 15 January 1915. This followed a major shock a day or so earlier, which he declared arose from the usual cause of Italian earthquakes, tectonic movement near the crest of the Apennines, as distinct from the less common earthquakes related to Italian volcanism. Gregory was succeeded as President of the Glasgow Geological Society on 9 November 1911 by John Horne; he became Vice President. A few days later on 20 November, at a joint meeting with the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (RPSG), Gregory (1911d) lectured on Tripoli and Cyrenaica but because of the

Fig. 17.1. Professor John Milne FRS, whom Gregory consulted over the interpretation of various earthquakes. (With acknowledgements to the Geological Magazine, 1912, Decade V, 9, 337).

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public interest engendered by the recent invasion of the country by Italy, the lecture included a good deal of the political history in addition to the geology. Gregory continued to lead field excursions. In 1910 he led excursions to Glenboig and Garelochhead, and on 10 June 1911 to Luss and Loch Lomond, but none in 1912 and a long walk of 21 km on the Campsie Fells on 20 May 1913 when Corries of Balglass was visited (TGSG, 14, 344 –366; 15, 102 –120). On the same King’s Birthday in 1914, May 19th, he led a party to Crianlarich to see the Dalradian Loch Tay and Ben Lawers Series; on 5 April 1915 Gregory and others led a joint excursion with the Geologists’ Association to Glen Douglas and then Garabal Hill and jointly wrote the Excursion Guide to the Glasgow District (Gregory et al. 1915). In 1916 he led excursions to the kames of Carstairs (24 April), and the Auld Wives Lifts of Milngavie (14 October) following a more gentle tour of the department and Hunterian Musuem on 18 March (TGSG, 15, 410– 428; 16, 100–114). On 9 May 1912 Gregory read a paper on the Polmont kame (Gregory 1912c) after reading out, as Vice President, a letter from Professor Lapworth of Birmingham, stating how pleased he was to have been offered the honorary degree of LL D by Glasgow University (no doubt as result of Gregory’s nomination) (TGSG, 14, 344–366). Gregory’s study of the 13 km long Polmont kame, near Falkirk in Central Scotland, had caused him to read widely and point out the prevailing use of the word kame as synonymous with esker was undesirable and he had proposed (Gregory 1912d), in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society that was much the same as the one to the GSG, that the word esker should be used for ‘a fluvio-glacial ridge formed of sand and gravel which has been laid down along the course of a glacial river. The deposition has taken place mainly where the river emerged from the glacier, and the course of the esker is usually at a high angle to the edge of the glacier.’ ‘Kame should apply to a mound or ridge of gravel or sand, deposited by water on the margin of a melting glacier, or formed by denudation from a sheet of fluvio-glacial gravel or sand.’ There were, he wrote (Gregory 1912d), three types of kames, fluvio-glacial, glacieluvial (which is what he claimed the Polmont kame was) and residual, where the last was a remnant left by denudation of fluvio-glacial material. Gregory did not even justify the undesirability of basing the names of these topographic features on the supposed former position and arrangement of a long-since vanished icesheet, so that naming had to be preceded by identification of the position of the ice-sheet. A more experienced mapper would have chosen non-genetic, purely descriptive, definitions. Although Gregory supposed the Polmont kame preserved its shape as it was when deposited, he controversially maintained that many of the nearby drumlins owed their shape to extensive denudation, and did not preserve the original shape as deposited. Gregory’s lectures to the Society a year later, continued on glacial topics. On 8 May 1913 he talked on ‘The Fjords of Dalmatia’ in which he stressed that features like those produced by glacial action were found in Dalmatia but have been produced by non-glacial agencies (TGSG, 15, 114–115). On the same night, in preparation for the excursion to Balglass noted above, he also lectured on ‘Corries, with Special Reference to those of the Campsie Fells’ (Gregory 1913a). He argued that corries were not produced by the action of glacial plucking, as glaciers would have only removed loose material and smoothed and rounded off the topography by erosion. A ‘meteoric origin’ was the cause, by the action of alternate freezing and melting of water under night frosts and daytime warming, which caused shattering and wedging out of blocks in a pre-existing topography, the blocks falling onto the glacier which covered and protected the floor of the valley. This view is not generally accepted today and fails to appreciate the erosive power of a basal moving ice layer loaded with erosive debris (Evans 2008), that Gregory (1897, p. 57) himself wrote that he had learnt about in Spitzbergen, but seems to have forgotten.

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By the next year, 14 May 1914, he was lecturing on ‘The Red Sandstone of Arran’ (TGSG, 15, 174; 280) and towards the end of the year, on 12 November 1914, Horne stood down as President and Gregory took over again. As President for the second time, Gregory (1915a) first lectured on 14 January 1915 on ‘The age of Loch Long and its relation to the valley system of Southern Scotland’ (TGSG, 15, 417–418). This, and a subsequent article in The Scottish Geographical Magazine (Gregory 1915b), were devoted to arguing that in Eocene or Oligocene time, certainly prior to the Pleistocene glaciation, the River Clyde and its tributaries to the north and NW, including Loch Long and even Loch Fyne, were about 330 m or more higher than today and consequently the Clyde discharged to the SE via the Biggar Water into the River Tweed (which flows into the North Sea at the Scottish –English border). This was caused by the present outlet to the west being blocked by high ground along the west coast resulting from the Tertiary (Paleocene) volcanic and plutonic magmatic centres, including that of Arran. This was not a new theory, as Geikie had proposed it in 1864, but Gregory was anxious to point out that the apparently too narrow part to take the volume of Clyde water, at the Biggar Water – Upper Tweed valley join, had only been narrowed by glacial deposits, and was perfectly adequate as a Clyde outflow before then. He had clearly visited almost the entire Tweed valley. He also slipped in his view that the accepted direction of movement of the Pleistocene ice in the wide basin of the lower Tweed below Dryburgh was nearly at right angles to the alignment of the drumlins, which, he stated, showed that their present shape was due to post glacial denudation. Gregory next gave a joint paper on 13 May 1915 (Horne & Gregory 1916) on ‘The Annan Red Sandstone Series of Dumfriesshire’ (TGSG, 15, 374). Gregory’s Presidential address on 14 October 1915 reflected the increasing public alarm at what had initially been expected to be a short war, ‘Geological factors affecting the strategy of the war and the geology of the potash salts’ (Gregory 1916a), which appeared also in summary in Gregory (1915c, d, 1917, 1917a). Briefly, Gregory surveyed the mineral resources of the principal protagonists in the war, emphasizing that Germany had more than a half of the European coal reserves which, being the main source of energy at the time, was very important. He also considered the distribution of European oil fields, of iron ore, especially the Lorraine iron field which lay across the French –German border, and the Mansfeld copper mines, SE of the Harz Mountains. Most alarming was Germany’s near monopoly of cheap potash salt production, and a short geological summary of the Stassfurt deposits was included. Potash was a crucial fertilizer and also used in the manufacture of glass, gunpowder, and soap. The Allies had an acute shortage of potash during the First World War and a sub-department was established to seek out new sources (Lewis 2000). This theme was repeated in a less technical way in a more widely read publication, The Contemporary Review (Gregory 1915d). By 11 May 1916 he was giving an account of the remnant blocks left after weathering at Milngavie, on the northern fringe of Glasgow, under the title ‘The Auld Wives Lift’ preparatory to leading an excursion there the following Saturday. A full account was given in the June 1916 issue of The Scottish Geographical Magazine where Gregory argued that it was an erosional relic of Carboniferous sandstone rather than the commonly held view that it constituted a megalithic tor of human origin (Gregory 1916b). Gregory’s final presidential address, given on 9 November 1916, on ‘The mineral phosphates and their bearing on the conservation of mineral resources’ (Gregory 1917b) summarized a wealth of published literature on the critical role of phosphorus in soil fertility which due to food shortages, was even more important than before the war. Gregory turned his mind to the pre-war sources of a range of strategic materials, and alternative sources that would be available in wartime. This followed naturally from his

earlier concerns about the depletion of the Earth’s resources by industrialization. The extent of the detail given suggests he was examining how best to augment the nation’s main phosphorus supply, which was normally obtained from basic slag. Gregory reviewed the whole range of sources, including phosphate nodules in the Cambridge Greensand, guano deposits, the North American deposits of Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and the Rocky Mountains, the North African sources, the European ones and the West Indian and Pacific Ocean sources, concluding that world-wide there were abundant reserves, but not in Britain. He describes how in the spring of 1916 he examined an uneconomic phosphate layer, reported by the Geological Survey to be in the Torridonian Sandstone, near Caillach Head, at the end of the peninsula between Lochs Broom and Little Broom in NW Scotland. This address was given at a time when the war had caused the flow of papers to dry up and some of the Society’s meetings were given to extended discussion of papers already given. Among a number of short talks, Gregory (1917c) spoke on 8 February 1917 on ‘Thomson’s genera of Scottish Carboniferous corals (TGSG, 16, 220– 243). This was his last recorded attendance at Society meetings for several years as wartime work in London, his long absence in India on the University of Calcutta Commission, and then his visit to East Africa kept him away from Glasgow. The variety and range of his contributions to the Glasgow Society is the noticeable factor rather than the depth, novelty or importance of the conclusions.

‘The Making of the Earth’ In August or September 1912 Gregory’s next book ‘The Making of the Earth’ (Gregory 1912e) appeared in the ‘Home University Library of Modern Knowledge Series’. It had a small page size (c.10  19 cm), 256 pages, was priced at one shilling (5p) and no date of publication was given. It was probably largely written as evening work over the autumn to winter of 1911 because a late added footnote on p. 34 referred to the destruction by a meteorite of the Lloyds Signalling Station at Finisterre in NW France on 23 January 1912. It was completed just before he left for Angola; the last line of the text ended with the date July 1912. The Geological Society copy was received on 18 September 1912. He almost certainly interrupted its completion as he was thinking and writing papers, and perhaps starting his book about the origin of fjords in the first half of 1912. The Making of the Earth has four parts and 13 chapters. Part I ‘The origin of the Earth’ includes an introduction, the nebular origin and then the evidence of ancient climates; II ‘The growth of the Earth’s surface’ has chapters on the formation of the crust, the evidence of earthquakes about the internal structure of the Earth, the beneficial (to life) influence of segregation of sediments from igneous rocks, and the uplift of the land; III ‘The plan of the Earth’ considers the inconstancy of oceans and continents, the plan of the Earth (Tetrahedral Theory), the deformation of the Earth and its geological history and then the geographical elements in the existing oceans and continents; IV ‘The share of life in the preparation of the Earth’ contains chapters on the biosphere and protobion (the first life on Earth). The Making of the Earth Gregory wrote ‘has always been a problem to thoughtful minds. The simple solution of the writer of Ecclesiastes that ‘the earth abideth for ever’ has been rejected even by early thinkers as in Job’. He supposed that the nebula from which the Earth formed was a swarm of meteorites so the Earth began cold, not hot, as was shown by the Precambrian ice ages and this explained his early discussion of ancient climates, with his familiar conclusion that the Earth’s climate, considered over long periods of time, had not significantly changed with time. Segregation was the term he used for the process of

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producing sedimentary rocks from primary igneous rocks, mainly granite and basalt, which was described, as was the making of soil on which plants could grow and therefore ultimately animals live. He did not know how life started, rejecting Kelvin’s view that a spore from another world brought on a meteorite was responsible, in favour of a speculation that a carbonaceous jelly and some sort of catalyst were involved. The most notable chapter contained his descriptions of the distribution of gecko lizards, blind snakes (Typhlopidae), the tree snakes of the Dipsadomorphidae, frogs of the Cystignathidae, butterflies of the Acræidæ and of marsupials with two large front teeth in the lower jaw (Diprotodonts), all of which are only found in the Southern Hemisphere, whereas the true stag beetle (Lucanus) is only found in the northern hemisphere. This evidence he used to support the ephemeral existence of a former Gondwanaland continent, now foundered beneath the oceans. Years later the same evidence would be cited in his addresses on the history of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, so that the gist and germ of these addresses went back many years in Gregory’s thinking and ultimately were sourced in Suess.

Visit to Benguella, Angola According to Gregory (1916c), from which most of the following is taken, during 1912, and in response to another invitation by Israel Zangwill, Gregory went to Benguella (a city and region) in the Portuguese West Africa, now Angola, to report on its economic and agricultural suitability as a Jewish refugee colony. Gregory’s field notebooks show that he was in Angola on 22 August and stayed there until some unrecorded date after 12 November 1912, so missing most, or all, of the first teaching term by the time he returned. His absence from Glasgow must have been from July (see later) to December 1912. Gregory asked his old Melbourne friend, Charles J. Martin FRS, then Director of the Lister Institute in London, to accompany him in order to report on the healthiness of the country. Gregory’s 50-page report (Gregory 1913b) on the prospects of Jewish settlement was delivered promptly but was again negative.

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A brief summary of the geology and places visited started with landing at Lobito Bay, the terminus of the uncompleted Benguella Railway, although the Hunterian Museum holds ore samples from Grand Canary, collected by Gregory while travelling either to, or from, Lobito Bay, and thimbles were purchased for Audrey in Lisbon and Las Palmas in 1912. Gregory and Martin first sailed up the coast northwards towards Hanha River and landed at intervals before turning south to Benguella, from where the General Manager of the Benguella Railway kindly arranged that a motor trolley be available to them so that they could proceed inland quickly, while being able to stop and observe the country and its geology at will. By this means they expeditiously reached Lepi, c. 200 km east of the coast, and as far as the railway had then reached. At Lepi they organized a caravan, marching to Huambo, then to an American Mission station in Bailundo, then NE into the Cutato Valley to the Ochilesa Mission Station, about 250 km east of the coast, but over 400 km as travelled. The route then went south to the Bulu-Vulu plains and to some of the headwaters of the eastward flowing Zambezi, before turning west and returning via Huambo. Gregory then spent a few days near Quingenge, NW of Lepi, while Martin visted Cubal and then they both returned to Lobito Bay by the railway (Fig. 17.2). Geologically Gregory (1916c) reported that a narrow coastal plain of Cretaceous limestones over 1000 ft (300 m) thick, including Lower Cenomanian, had a base of boulders, and in places contained gypsum-bearing marls and limestones. Under the Cretaceous rocks were biotite –hornblende gneiss and then further inland granite. Landward of the coastal plain, a series of plateaus of older rocks rose successively higher from the first at 150 ft (46 m) to the second at c. 500 ft (150 m) to the third at 2970 ft (900 m). The steps were so steep that parts of the railway had to be with rack and pinion. Red and white sandstones overlying rhyolites and rhyolitic tuffs which themselves were underlain by granite were described, and from Lepi to Huambo, greywackes, quartzites, chert and shales, and a massive olivine dolerite sheet. North of Huambo there were quartzites, sandstones, gravels and interesting alkaline volcanic rocks with shonkinite and sodalite syenite and even some charnockite near Ochilsea plus sodalite syenite.

Fig. 17.2. Route of Gregory’s 1912 Benguella, Angola, Expedition. Simplified and redrawn from Gregory 1916c by Alun Rogers, cartographer.

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The details of the geology are not now worth reporting but Gregory’s (1916d) examination of the echinoids from Lobito Bay led him to conclude that the rocks there were probably Cenomanian in age. Subsequently the age of the rich cephalopod collection made from the coastal plain, which had not been examined in detail by 1916 because of James Mann Wordie (1889 –1962)’s prolonged incarceration in the Antarctic with E. Shackleton, was reported in detail to Gregory in 1920 by Leonard Frank Spath (1882 –1957). Spath (1922) showed in an over-70 page account that the supposed Cenomanian contained only Albian cephalopods, which agreed with Gregory’s recognition of the most distinctive echinoid in it, which was Albian. This led Gregory (1922) to reject the existence of any Cenomanian rocks, the identification of which he admitted had been partly based on less reliable molluscs and partly on Suess’s supposed world-wide Cenomanian transgression! The realization by Spath that similar Albian deposits occurred in the Gulf of Brazil, but with different fossils (no Elobiceras), led Gregory (1922) to produce a map (Fig. 17.3) showing the supposed extent of the Albian Sea and clearly recognizing a ‘BrazilioEthiopian continent’ of South America and Africa, thought to predate the opening of the South Atlantic, although we now know this ocean was well developed by Albian time. Figure 17.3 has heavy reliance on a speculative north –south marine connection across the present Sahara between Angola and the Mediterranean, and it was postulated that the Albian Sea depicted was followed by an Upper Albian to Cenomanian recession of the sea from West Africa and Brazil. Figure 17.3 shows some of Gregory’s embryonic thoughts that later formed the basis for his highly regarded (at the time, but not now) GSL presidential addresses on the history of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (Gregory 1929a, 1930).

The classification of coast types, the nature and origin of fjords and lochs In 1912 Gregory (1912f ) published a 30-page account of the classification of coast types, prompted by Suess’s 1885 and 1888

differentiation of Pacific Ocean coasts, in which the strike of the rocks and the mountain ranges are parallel to the coastline, from Atlantic coasts in which the coastline cuts across the geological structure. This distinction, which is of fundamental importance, and which we now know corresponds to continental edges with subducting oceanic crust and passive margins facing to new opening ocean, was recognized by both Suess and Gregory as an important genetic difference, but the tired, 80-year- old Suess (extant letter from Hungary to Gregory of 13 September 1911) was reluctant to speculate as to the cause of the difference, other than to agree that the Pacific coasts were connected with folding and mountain building whereas Atlantic coasts were not. Gregory (1912f ) tried, by considering all the coastlines around the world, to show that most of the world’s coasts can be classified into Pacific or Atlantic types, albeit with some qualifications, but he too did not give the cause of the differences. He also soundly attacked Alfred Harker (1859 – 1939)’s (1896) attempt to show that there were consistent petrographic differences between the igneous rocks exposed in and adjoining the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. This world-wide survey of coastal types was but a spin-off from another substantial book that rapidly followed. In April 1913, Gregory (1913) completed the writing of the 542-page book, The Nature and Origin of Fiords, a subject he had considered and worked on for some time. The first chapter is largely a repetition of Gregory (1912g) on the problem of fjords in relation to Earth movements and had been abridged from a lecture given by Gregory to the Midland Institute of Birmingham on 22 January 1912 (Nature, 89, 179 –183). Chapter 2, the classification of coast types, had already appeared in Gregory (1912f ), and his cited personal observations extended back to at least 1895 and 1896. The book was primarily concerned with the origin of fjords, defined as ‘an arm of the sea, which lies in a long deep valley, with steep parallel or subparallel walls . . . a trough-shaped valley and limited to highlands and districts with dissected plateaus’. The main debate was whether they were caused by glacial gouging of hard rock, or, as concluded by Gregory, resulted from fractures, faults or joints, which were exploited by streams and rivers to give valleys that sometime later glaciers (usually Pleistocene in age) used and modified. But

Fig. 17.3. Supposed extent of Albian Sea and the postulated existence of a ‘Brazilio-Ethiopian continent’ (Gregory 1922).

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crucially, some fjords in Gregory’s view had no glacial involvement (Gregory 1915). Arguments about the efficacy of glacial erosion was ‘one of the most disputed questions of contemporary geology’ (Gregory 1913, p. 399), dating back to at least 1827, and had intrigued Gregory for nearly 25 years (Gregory 1888, 1889), and indeed has continued to be discussed even today. Thus Koppes & Montgomery (2009) show that fluvial and glacial processes can each erode at 1 to .10 mm per year, matching or exceeding the highest normal rates of tectonic uplift, which is a controlling factor on erosion rate. Gregory was persuaded that to form fjords, pre-existing fracture systems were essential because the valleys of many of the fjords predate glacial action and were often subparallel to each other; regions of soft rocks in general lacked fjords whereas hard rock regions, such as Antarctica, had abundant glaciers but few fjords. He also invoked later glacial action to explain the U-shaped cross-sections, and the fact that many fjords were deepened far below sea-level (e.g. Sogne Fjord in Norway reaches 1244 m below sea level), which neither river nor sea erosion could achieve. Even some linear freshwater lakes were similarly overdeepened, for example, Loch Morar, south of Mallaig in western Scotland, which reaches 300 m below sea level, a depth the sea does not now reach within 190 km of the shore. The high surrounding topography around fjords required recent or active uplift or else fiards result which were defined as lacking surrounding high topography and having a more sinuous course than fjords; rias were merely drowned river valleys, due to subsidence of the land, or sea level rise. The book described the fjord, fiard and ria systems of the world, a remarkable achievement, almost Suess-like, based on the scrutiny of books and maps but with personal observations by Gregory of those in Spitzbergen in 1896, the West Indies in 1899, New Zealand in 1904, in Norway and the Baltic in 1907 and 1910, Brittany in 1907, British Columbia in 1909, Spain in 1910 and 1912, Dalmatia (Adriatic coast) in 1911 and various visits to Scottish lochs since 1904. He stated that the book was a sequel to that of The Great Rift Valley in showing again that the topography of the Earth was more influenced by Earth movements than had been generally admitted and denudation had played a less important role, a theme he would return to years later (Gregory 1926). There is evidence of haste in writing and inadequate (any?) editing with missing references etc. Gregory’s (1913) identification of the importance of fractures in determining the locations of fjords, combined with the general recognition by the late 19th century (e.g. Joseph Beete-Jukes (1811 –1869) 1872) that Norway had been eroded to a flat tableland, reduced to base level in the late Mesozoic or early Cenozoic time and then been uplifted in later Cenozoic time (Dore´ et al. 2002), deduced as Late Miocene or Early Pliocene by Gregory (1913), was found to be significant when offshore petroleum exploration started in Norway. The locations of the faults, which often extended from the mouths of fjords, confirmed Gregory’s views that had not generally been accepted, and became an important factor in locating different sedimentary successions. ‘Gregory’s conclusion (of Late Miocene or Pliocene uplift) was very close to that reached independently, and much later, from analyses of modern seismic data which show the offshore clastic sequence derived from the uplifting landmass. It is a testimony to the deductive abilities of the early geologists’ (Gabrielsen & Dore´ 1995). However, in fairness, Gregory’s views of the importance of fractures in fjords were not invariably correct, nor the thought (Gregory 1913) that ‘circumpolar oscillation of the land’ up and down, was responsible for the uplift of the northern fjords and the drowning of non-fjord areas. Again, following ideas developed in The Making of the Earth (Gregory 1912e), ‘every great elevation on the Earth’s surface is antipodal to a depression [so] while the region around the North Pole has foundered beneath the Arctic Ocean, a corresponding region around the South Pole has been

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raised’ (Gregory 1913, p. 24). This was of course part of his quaintly, and very individually, retained view of the Tetrahedral Theory of the Earth. Inevitably in a world-wide survey there were errors, as for instance in his account of Alaska (which he had not visited) which Martin & Williams (1924) pointed out. Finally, on page 413 he revealed that, sometime between 1909 and 1913, he had pored over the India Office 1: 63 360 map of the Irrawaddy River in Burma, which may have raised questions resulting in a later expedition. The fjord book sold very well, and even as late as 1968 the publishers, John Murray, who had recently sold 32 copies over an unspecified period, paid royalties to the Trust Fund of the late Ursula Gregory (who died on 17 July 1959; correspondence in author’s possession & Ann Mendell, pers. comm. 2008). Lapworth, with whom Gregory kept in touch, wrote in December 1913 to congratulate him on such an excellent book (Lapworth archives, J59). As usual with Gregory, he continued to work on the structural origins of fjords and lake basins, with an account of ‘The Loch Morar Basin and the tectonic associations of the Scottish sea lochs’ following a visit to Loch Morar in the autumn of 1913 (Gregory 1914). In this paper he showed that there was definite evidence of faulting along 42 out of the 51 lochs in NW Scotland and the Outer Hebrides. Much the same account was read to the RPSG on 25 February 1914, under the title ‘The Scottish lochs and their origin’ (Gregory 1915e), when he divided the lochs into arms of the sea and freshwater lakes, dependent largely on whether their rims were above or below sea level, with three main directions of faulting in the NW Highlands, east – west (Loch Morar), NE –SW (e.g. Great Glen) and NW – SE (e.g. Loch Broom). Even as late as 1926, he returned yet again to the same theme in lectures to the GSG (Gregory 1927) and the RGS, the latter on 20 December 1926, after he had sailed up and photographed many of the Hebridean and NW Scotland sea lochs (Gregory 1927a). In the vigorous discussion afterwards, Sir John Flett, Director-General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, represented what was probably the commonly held view then and more recently, that glaciation was essential for fjord formation. Gregory agreed as regards over-deepened and U-shaped cross-sectional lochs and fjords, but argued that since fjords were found along the Adriatic coast where there had been no glaciation, glaciation was not always essential, but a structural weakness was. The exploration for oil off the Norwegian coast together with much recent work (e.g. Osmundsen et al. 2010) has vindicated Gregory’s insistence on the importance of fracture zones in controlling fjords, at least in Norway, but the whole question of Gregory’s views on the origin of fjords is explored further in Leake & Bishop (2009). The study of the origin of the Scottish lochs illustrates a common tendency of Gregory, to lecture to several societies on virtually the same topic, while it was fresh in his mind, and to publish variations on the same theme; what would today be described as ‘shingling’. However, as a lecturer in great demand, who did much to popularize geology, he received many requests to lecture and the societies concerned would often expect a published account for members to read in their journal or magazine, and were not concerned if the material had in part appeared elsewhere. On 30 May 1914, just four weeks before leaving for Australia, Gregory lectured on ‘The relative distribution of fjords and volcanoes’ to the Royal Institution resulting in a paper which appeared in the ‘The Scottish Geographical Magazine’ (Gregory 1915f). In a series of sweeping generalizations, he pointed out that fjords were characteristic of coasts facing west, that these west-facing coasts were uplifted, while eastern ones were depressed, so that the major drainage of the continents generally flowed eastwards, and that the rotation of the Earth was responsible for these facts. The upper solid western edges of the continents lagged behind the deep eastward plastically-moving parts under the continents

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(what today would be called the asthenosphere), causing uplift on the western edges and the outbreak of volcanism from the melting of the foundered (into the asthenosphere) western edges of the continents.

South Georgia In 1913 or early 1914, Gregory and Tyrrell became involved in the delayed examination of the fossils and rocks collected by David Ferguson (c. 1857 –1936, a former mature student taught by Gregory in 1905 –8), from South Georgia (Ferguson et al. 1914) on the 1902– 4 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition based on the vessel Scotia. Gregory was interested in the results because he wanted to know if South Georgian geology was similar to that of the Andes. Suess had supposed that the Andes continued southwards in a great horseshoe-shaped bend through South Georgia to the South Orkneys and Graham Land. Tyrrell’s work on the alkaline igneous rocks did not confirm this view, nor did Gregory’s examination of the scanty fossils, which uncertainly suggested only that Ordovician or Silurian rocks and marine Mesozoic with volcanic tuffs were present (Gregory 1915g). There were no Cenozoic volcanic rocks. Gregory (1915h) undertook an examination of the geological photographs that Ferguson had taken of the scenery, concluding that the topography did not reflect the geological structure – ‘the folds have no direct relation to the existing topography, as the country had been planed down to a peneplain’ (p. 816). The photographs from which he made his deductions were published in the account and it is clear (Fig. 17.4) that Gregory was mistaken. In particular, they reveal Gregory’s poor knowledge of structural geology. Figure 17.4 shows a fairly tight synform which dominates the structure of the mountain. Gregory describes the rocks as ‘crumpled’ with no recognition of the main structure, which must be part of a major fold phase whose axial planes controlled, or at least influenced, the strike of the rocks. The photographs show clearly that the fold patterns do still influence the topography.

The educational value of the cinema An International Kinematograph Exhibition and Conference was held in Glasgow between 17– 26 February 1914 and on 19 February (Glasgow Herald, 20 February) Gregory addressed the gathering with a talk on ‘The educational value of the kinematograph’, which was subsequently published in The School World (Gregory 1914a). In this he stated that the first time he went to ‘a modern picture palace’ was when he was in Lisbon on a hot July evening (presumably on his way to Angola in July 1912) and the educational possibilities of silent films, with a well prepared commentator or instructor speaking, were very real for a subject like geography, where seeing views of the surface of the Earth, vegetation, and especially say, a geyser, was an enormous help to instruction, so long as not too many movie sequences were shown. Gregory was an enthusiast for using the new method. One of the early uses of movie film was at the Birmingham BA meeting in 1913 which Gregory had also attended.

The Carlisle– Solway Basin At the end of 1913 or early in 1914, Gregory turned his attention to the geology of the Carlisle –Solway Basin. What exactly caused this interest is uncertain, but it may have been his discovery in the 1812 Singer’s Agricultural Survey of the County of Dumfries of an overlooked 84 m 1794 borehole for coal at Redkirk, near Gretna, that Gregory thought showed white and grey Carboniferous rocks at the surface, rather than the generally accepted PermoTriassic red sandstone. On 29 April 1914, Gregory gave his view to the GSL that the Carlisle –Solway Basin could not be a simple syncline with a great thickness of Triassic rocks if Lower Carboniferous rocks were at the surface (summary in Gregory 1914b, c, 1915i). He thought there was a great thickness of Permian rocks with much reduced Triassic sandstone. This required reconsideration of the generally accepted Permo-Triassic sequence and especially the position of the Abbeytown gypsiferous shales.

Fig. 17.4. A mountain in Leith Harbour, South Georgia reaching to 1100 feet (337 m) which is a clear tight synform with an inclined axial plane and probably an axial plane cleavage. (Gregory 1915h; Fig. 2 of Plate 85. With acknowledgements to the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.)

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However, all five speakers at the GSL meeting disagreed with Gregory’s views, especially his view that a borehole which disproved his theory had been misinterpreted, and presumably the paper was rejected, because apart from the extended abstract (Gregory 1914c), the account appeared in the Geological Magazine (Gregory 1914b). On making inquiries of a commercial boring company, Gregory was given details of a 3200 ft (980 m) borehole made between 1906 and 1909 at Seascale in Cumberland (Gregory 1915j) that essentially went through red sandstone, generally thought to be the Bunter St Bees Sandstone. However, Gregory noted that the succession was nearly double the supposed maximum thickness of the St Bees Sandstone and the characteristics of the St Bees Sandstones, namely red shales intercalated between thick beds of red sandstone, were only found in the lower part (.634 m) of the bore. Accordingly he thought the upper part was Kirklinton Sandstone, a Keuper Sandstone, but unfortunately no specimens of this upper part of the bore were available. Gregory either noted an actual outcrop on the beach at Seascale, presumably while passing in a train, or found out by other means, because he got the stationmaster to make a collection of rocks from the outcrop. Examination of these samples in Glasgow convinced Gregory that they were Kirklinton Sandstone and not St Bees (1915j). Twelve years later (Gregory 1926a) he returned to the same theme when the new Geological Survey Memoir of the district did not accept his views. The study of the New Red Sandstone basin of the NE Irish Sea ‘which contains deposits of salt and gypsum, and cover rocks containing coal and haematite’ (Gregory 1920) prompted Gregory to research for existing boreholes and he reported the results to the AGM of the Mining Institute of Scotland on 10 April 1920 (Gregory 1920). He found a series of six boreholes near the Point of Ayre, the northern end of the Isle of Man, which had been published between the years 1894 and 1903. These bores had discovered commercially-workable salt which was pumped as brine to Ramsey by the Manx Salt and Alkali Company. However, a seventh unpublished borehole which reached 2888 feet (884 m) had been drilled between 1904 and 1907. This revealed upper saltbearing marls down to 331 m which contained 28 distinct rock salt (NaCl) beds overlying what Gregory thought was Keuper Sandstone, correlated with the Kirklinton Sandstone, down to 618 m, overlying Bunter Sandstone, correlated with the St Bees Sandstone to the base of the bore. Significantly there were no gypsiferous shales between the Keuper and Bunter Sandstones, and the upper salt marls Gregory correlated with those in the Keuper of Carrickfergus, 95 km to the WNW in Northern Island. Gregory (1920) got permission to publish the borehole results. It is possible that he discovered the borehole during the war when shortage of potash led to the establishment of a Sub-Department of Potash Production and an obvious first step would have been to find as many existing boreholes made into Triassic Sandstones as possible in the search for potash salts such as carnallite. The correlation and naming problems were really only solved when offshore Irish Sea oil- and gas-seeking boreholes provided complete sections and the Triassic stratigraphy of the Carlisle Basin was systematized as late as 2008 when reference was made to Gregory’s only-partly correct views (Holliday et al. 2008).

BA involvement and Gregory’s fourth visit to Australia At the 1910 BA Sheffield Meeting, in early September, Gregory read a paper on the ‘Geology of Cyrenaica’ and presented the final Report of the South Africa Strata Committee and was immediately appointed a member of a new committee set up, under the chairmanship of Prof. P. F. Kendal of Leeds, to prepare ‘A list of characteristic fossils,’ presumably of each geological system (BA 1911). This committee took more than a decade to conclude its business, with an interim report being

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presented to the 1915 BA Manchester Meeting, when a list of 624 species was produced of which 375 were accepted without any dissent, and the remainder were challenged by only one or two critics. Two subcommittees were then set up to resolve which of the disputed fossils should be included, one of northern members, including Gregory, and one of southern members, presumably so that each could conveniently meet. The war and other matters dragged out agreement on the final list until at least 1923 and possibly 1924 when it ceased to be listed as a BA research activity. In late 1910 Gregory’s concern at the different use of terms, particularly between the United States and Europe, but also generally between scientists, engineers, miners and the general public, which had been with him for some time (e.g. Gregory 1909, 1909a), boiled over into his publications. He felt that it was leading to an ambiguity of meaning, such as the use of ‘erosion’ for ‘denudation’. After describing the origins and definitions of a number of words, he carefully defined, denudation, erosion, corrosion, abrasion and solution, and rejected corrasion (Gregory 1911e). Later in 1911 at the BA Portsmouth Meeting (BA 1912), he developed the same topic in his ‘Address to the delegates’ but concentrating on the scientific misappropriation of popular terms (Gregory 1912h) which was followed by correspondence in Nature (Gregory 1911f ) on the same topic. Gregory’s next visit to Australia was in connection with the 1914 BA meeting in Australia. Although most of the planning was done from Australia, a committee to assist and coordinate from the British side was appointed at the 1912 Dundee Meeting (BA 1913) and this included four FRS men with Australasian connections, Gregory, his old Melbourne friend and Benguella co-expeditioner, C. J. Martin, Ernest Rutherford (1871 –1937) and Archibald Liversidge (1847 – 1927), one time Professor of Geology and Mineralogy, later of Chemistry, at Sydney University. The 1914 meeting started in late July in Western Australia and included an early August meeting in Perth, WA, an excursion to Kalgoorlie, return to the coast and travel by ship to Adelaide (the east – west Australian railway connection was not yet complete). Here further meetings and excursions were held, and then the party went by rail to Melbourne and Sydney, where the main meetings were held and to which many came directly, with the final meetings being held in Brisbane. There was also an optional trip to Hobart (Branagan 2005). The First World War, which started on 3 August 1914, overshadowed the event, but did not cause its cancellation as most of the participants were already en route by the date of its outbreak. Unless otherwise noted, the information that follows is derived from the BA (1915) record of the 28 July to 31 August 1914 meeting. According to the Ocean Steam Ship Co. records, Gregory and his daughter Ursula left Liverpool on 27 June 1914 on the Blue Funnel Line’s passenger and cargo ship Ascanius for Fremantle. They arrived on 28 July together with the rest of the advance party, which would have given scientific company on the voyage. They were intent on seeing as much as possible of the western part of the continent, rather than proceeding by a later steamer directly to eastern Australia (West Australian July 29th). The Western Australia excursions included a visit to the zoo on 29 July and one to Kalgoorlie by express train on 30 July to see the gold mines (West Australian 29 July). Gregory, who had just published a paper on the lake system of Western Australia, based on his pre-1914 observations (Gregory 1914d), was taken privately by motor car south from Kalgoorlie to see the north shore of Lake Lefroy (1218400 E; 318210 S), which was a dry bed of clay, and also to a new mine about 125 miles from Kalgoorlie, through the kindness of the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Kalgoorlie (Gregory 1916e; letter to Audrey of 2 August). The 1914 visit to Western Australia was to result in two papers on the lake system, one read to the BA in 1915 and described below (Gregory 1916e) and Gregory et al. (1917). The party returned to Fremantle and travelled to Adelaide on the Orvieto, arriving on 8 August 1914.

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Branagan (2005) has suggested that the most important geological discovery of the BA excursion programme in eastern Australia was the first unequivocal recognition, under Edgeworth David and confirmed by many foreign experts, of late Palaeozoic tillite in New South Wales. The existence of glacial deposits of this age had been known there for some time, and were, for instance, referred to by Gregory (1907), but apparently an actual tillite had not been recognized before. This extended the area in the southern hemisphere of the, by then well accepted, late Palaeozoic Gondwana glaciation. At the Melbourne meeting, Gregory read a paper on ‘Deserts’ on 18 August during a discussion on ‘The Physiography of Arid Lands’ (BA 1915, p. 366), the only full record of which is in an extended abstract in The Scottish Geographical Magazine for May 1915 (Gregory 1915k). Gregory pointed out that a rigid definition of deserts as having, say ,10 inches (25 cm) of annual rain was unhelpful as the season of the rain, the geography, topography and other factors were equally significant, including the P2O5 content of the soil. Using chemical analyses collected by a Prof. Thomas Cherry (1861 – 1945) of Melbourne University, and 220 assembled from the literature by Mr P. Brough for Gregory, he noted that Australian soils were particularly deficient in P and did not follow the usual rule of the soil being richer in P than the subsoil, allegedly, according to Cherry, due to the poverty of mammalian life in Australia to manure the soil, leading to Gregory to suppose that adding P to some Australian soils could reduce the extent of the deserts there. On the following day, August 19th, Gregory read a paper on ‘The correlation of the Australian marine Kainozoic deposits –evidence of the echinoids, bryozoa and some vertebrates’ in which he argued for a major marine transgression in SE Australia in the Miocene, mainly based on the echinoid evidence. A summary of this paper also appeared in the Geological Magazine (Gregory 1914e). The reading by E. F. Pittman in Sydney on 25 August of a paper on ‘The Great Australian Artesian Basin and the source of its supply’ in which Gregory was correctly said to have misunderstood hydrologic theory, had been preceded by the distribution by Pittman (1914) of a special booklet printed by the Department of Mines of the Geological Survey of New South Wales entitled ‘The Great Australian Artesian Basin and the source of its water,’ putting Pittman’s point of view. This was a renewal of Gregory’s disagreement with David and Pittman over the source of the artesian well water in central Australia. Pittman (1914) documented the facts of the water table heights diminishing westwards from the high altitude, over 600 m, of the porous sandstones of the intake area in the Main Dividing Range, to the lower topography of the Central Basin, and rebutted each of Gregory’s arguments in favour of a plutonic origin. The result was as inconclusive as previously because each side remained unchanged, but the general impression for example, Branagan (2005), is that Gregory’s views were not widely accepted by Australians, probably because of the lack of any signs of active plutonism or volcanism in the Great Artesian Basin. If these had been present opinion might have swung in favour of Gregory’s plutonic water source although there is no doubt that some of Gregory’s objections were erroneous, such as the pores in the rocks being completely closed by the pressure. Gregory did not defend his views in print in the BA proceedings, but did so later in the Queensland Geographical Journal (Gregory 1916f), adjoining Pittman’s New South Wales domain and Pittman duly responded, again refuting Gregory’s proposals (Pittman 1917). The argument in Australia would probably have moved more quickly to Pittmann’s view but for the unexpected intervention in 1917 of Alexander Logie Du Toit (1878 – 1948) who in a very long paper of 295 pages (Du Toit 1917) concerned with ‘The Problem of the Great Australian Artesian Basin’ concluded that both sides were correct! The waters were composite in origin with residual water of Mesozoic age, plutonic water, and rainfall

of an earlier epoch (Tertiary), as proposed by Gregory, but the bulk of the water was of meteoric origin as supposed by Pittman. This might have encouraged Gregory to retain his plutonic water theory but he probably needed no such encouragement and he continued to support plutonic water for the rest of his life (e.g. Gregory 1923, 1927b). Although there is no precise record of Gregory’s activities at the 1914 BA Meeting, his visit to Melbourne would surely have included showing Ursula the house they had lived in, which she remembered, according to C. J. Gregory (mss), and renewing contacts with some of his former Melbourne colleagues such as David Orme Masson (1858 –1937), Professor of Chemistry (1886 –1923) who, with Edgeworth David, was heavily involved in arranging the BA Meeting. Following the end of the Brisbane meetings and an associated Great Barrier Reef excursion on 3 September 1914, Gregory and Ursula had planned, months before the outbreak of war, to return to Scotland via China, Siberia and Russia and so they adhered to this plan, although Gregory seriously considered changing their route and going by neutral ships first to Japan and then across the Pacific to the USA and finally across the Atlantic (letter to Audrey of 8 August in which he also expresses his horror at the prospect of war). They started from Brisbane on a Japanese registered steamer for Hong Kong, as detailed by Gregory (1914f ) from which the following is derived, unless otherwise stated. The first delay took place at Thursday Island, which is north of Cape York, the NE point of Australia, where the steamer was stopped for four days. Because the Australians did not want the Japanese to learn about the defences of Thursday Island, permission to lower a boat or visit any of the nearby coral reefs or islands was refused. Gregory had set himself to write a book on Australia, while Australian matters were still fresh in his mind, and he recorded in the preface to Gregory (1916) that he completed the book during the return journey from Australia. So although the return was prolonged, Gregory made good use of the time. In addition, he probably drafted his Kynuna Wells paper, which appeared in December 1914 (Gregory 1914g). Ursula practised typewriting so she must have had a portable machine (letter with A. Mendell to Audrey dated 21 September while off Luzon). When the steamer was allowed to proceed it passed through the Torres Strait west of New Guinea and headed for Manila in the Philippines, sometimes proceeding at night with all the lights out so as to pass Dutch lighthouses unobserved, the captain having no confidence in the neutrality of the keepers. They were twice stopped by British warships and allowed to proceed, reaching Manila and then Hong Kong. Here they were delayed by a disorganized steamer service but eventually arrived at Shanghai, only to be compulsorily relieved, albeit with many Chinese smiles and some Russian roubles, of their rail tickets to Harbin and the Trans-Siberian railway, which they had booked several months earlier. They shortened their stay in China to allow for possible delays in obtaining tickets on the Trans-Siberian railway and in the train journey, although Gregory still managed to find time to collect samples from China to add to those brought from Australia for the Hunterian Museum. According to Audrey Gregory’s thimble record, purchases of thimbles for her collection took place in September in Hong Kong and Canton (Guangzhou), in October in Nanking (Nanjing) and Peking (Beijing) and in November in Petrograd (St Petersburg), so Ursula and Gregory must have had some time in each of these places. It took them three weeks to travel from Peking to the newly named Petrograd, then the capital of Russia, because the express and international trains had been stopped to allow the transport of Siberian troops to Poland. The eastbound trains were filled with Austrian and German prisoners of war, each train carrying about 950, no doubt counted by Gregory or Ursula as valuable military information. They could only get on a daily post train, not an international sleeping car train, so presumably had no bunks, and there were long stoppages, as for instance, when the

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troop train ahead of them halted to exercise the horses or before each bridge, which was heavily guarded, and guards mounted the train for the crossing of the bridge. Gregory was impressed with the comfort provided by the wide gauge which must have assisted his writing and he lapped up the scenery in Siberia and ‘the impressive unrolling of a great continental panorama displaying the varied land forms and type of country that lie between the Pacific and the Baltic.’ The final part of the journey from St Petersburg was not mentioned, but his account to the Glasgow Herald (17 November 1914), presumably just after arriving home, states he took the train from Petrograd to Raupuo (?Rauma) and thence to Stockholm from where he crossed the North Sea by Norwegian vessel using a circuitous route not identified as it was considered sensitive military information. Gregory was the last to return of the three Glasgow Professors who had been at the 1914 BA meeting; Tyrrell would have stood in for his lecturing where he could. Gregory’s next involvement with the BA was to be appointed Vice-President of the Geographical Section (E) for the 1915 Manchester meeting at which he lectured to that Section on ‘The relations of the central lakes of Westralia’ (BA for 1915, p. 490), based on his 1914 visit to Western Australia. The published paper (Gregory 1916e) re-iterated the conclusion that the present lakes were remnants of a former river system, but emphasized the relatively recent regional uplift of much of Western Australia, assisted by more up-to-date contoured topographic maps produced for the 1914 BA meeting. The publication was delayed while he examined some Bryozoa from the Norseman Limestone of Western Australia, sent to him by Edward Sydney Simpson (1875 –1939), which Gregory (1916g) thought were Miocene, thus dating a widespread uplift of well over 330 m since the Miocene. Although not a member initially, Gregory became a member of the BA Committee on ‘Nomenclature of the Carboniferous, Permo-Carboniferous and Permian rocks of the southern hemisphere’ under the Chairmanship of T. W. Edgeworth David, and including (among others) Gregory’s Melbourne successor, E. W. Skeats, and A. C. Seward. The initial report of the committee (without Gregory’s involvement) was produced at the 1915 meeting (BA 1916, pp. 263– 282). More observations to supplement the initial report appeared in the 1918 BA report of the abandoned 1917 meeting (BA 1918, pp. 105–120), with Gregory’s contribution dealing with the nomenclature of the Australian Permian and Carboniferous successions on pp. 115 –120. In 1916, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne he delivered one of the Citizen Lectures to the public entitled ‘The evolution of the map of the world’ (BA 1917) which was later published in The Scottish Geographical Magazine (Gregory 1917d). This was a survey of how human knowledge of the geography and maps of the Earth developed, largely through trading, from the earliest trading of Baltic amber, Cornish tin, Chinese silk, Zimbabwean gold, etc. right through to the conquests of the Vikings, Romans, Crusades, and Mongols, to the voyages of the Portuguese navigators, Christopher Columbus, Magellan and Captain Cook among others. The 1917 meeting was cancelled because of the war, but Gregory was then appointed to a Section C committee chaired by Prof. William Savage Boulton (1867 –1954) ‘To investigate the geology of coal-seams’ (BA 1918, p. xii) no doubt intended to help coal production.

Other activities Gregory continued unabated his reviewing, writing and lecturing within, and without, the University on a wide range of topics in addition to those dealt with above. The following first gives the flavour of his lecturing activities and then goes onto other topics. The lectures mentioned do not include the many unpublished ones he is reputed to have given to universities and societies

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outside of Glasgow, because of the difficulty of identifying them, but it is likely that most of these were either repetitions of those noted below or of a similar range of topics. On 15 December 1910 Gregory lectured the Geographical Section of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, with Captain Lyons presiding, on ‘Water supply’, maintaining that although most fresh water comes from rain or snow, there is another source coming from the interior of the Earth namely the disputed plutonic water he had proposed in Australia. On 22 February 1912 at a meeting of the West of Scotland Branch of the British Astronomical Association, Gregory lectured on the ‘Planetesimal theory of the Earth’s origin’. In this he argued that Laplace’s theory of the formation of the solar system by condensation of hot gas was unlikely because the early Earth was not a hot molten mass, with continuous volcanism, based on the known early geological record which did not show extensive volcanic rocks but there were widespread ice ages in its early history. So Gregory favoured the Lockyr-Chamberlain meteorite hypothesis of planets and planetesimals being formed from aggregations of meteors (Glasgow Herald, 23 February 1912). On 14 March 1912 he addressed a well attended meeting of the Glasgow University Company of Honourable Alchemysts on the topic of the origin of Life, under the title ‘Life as a catalytic process’, in which he proposed that life originated in a carbonaceous mud in a lagoon or on the seashore, pointing out that bringing Life to the Earth on an extra-terrestrial body only pushed the origination of that life to another planetary body (Glasgow Herald, 15 March 1912). One week later he lectured the Economic Science Division of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow on ‘White labour in the Queensland sugar field’ (Glasgow Herald, 21 March 1912). One hundred years after the birth of the Scotsman, David Livingstone (1813 –73), a one-time student in Glasgow, Gregory delivered an appreciation in the university on 18 March 1913 (account in Glasgow Herald, March 19th), that was later published as a 38-page booklet entitled ‘Livingstone as an Explorer; an Appreciation’ (Gregory 1913c). The lecture concentrated on describing what was known geographically before Livingstone, and what Livingstone discovered about the inland geography of southern Africa during the 46 000 km that he traversed across the continent in several expeditions, the accuracy with which he fixed his positions, and his topographic observations and rivers traced: ‘no single explorer ever did as much for African geography as Livingstone’. Gregory had done a fair amount of digging in the historical literature and certainly understood the practical difficulties Livingstone faced. More background and technical aspects were detailed in Gregory (1913d) and in the preceding year, Gregory had written a newspaper article on the topic to arouse interest in the centenary, and also to propose that memorial funding be raised to advance the University Lectureship in Geography to that of a Chair, the proposed ‘Livingstone Memorial Chair in Geography’ (Glasgow Herald, 18 May 1912). The appeal raised only £400, which was inadequate, but the sum was invested (MacAlister 1921) and eventually became part of the Geography Chair endowment in 1947. No one did more than Gregory to promote the subject of geography in Glasgow. On 7 November 1913 Gregory gave the opening address of the session to the Glasgow University Jewish Society on ‘Two schemes of Jewish colonisation’ (Cyrenaica and Angola). Three days later he gave the first of a series of ‘Monday Free Lectures’ in the University on ‘Problems of Central Australia’ (Glasgow Herald, 7 & 11 November 1913). A letter (in the Hunterian Museum) dated 16 April 1914 from William Speirs Bruce (1867 –1921) (polar explorer, a long-time friend and Gregory’s best man at his wedding) indicated that Gregory was on holiday in Yorkshire, but from specimens in the Hunterian Museum, it seems he collected clasts from the Boulder Clay of Robin Hoods Bay and ironstones, perhaps from Staithes, where there were working coastal mines at that time.

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On 15 February 1915 he lectured the Egyptian Research Students Association in the university on ‘The climate of ancient and modern Egypt’, maintaining it was practically unaltered, even though during the glacial period Egypt had had a pluvial period (Glasgow Herald, 16 February 1915). By 4 March 1915 he was lecturing the RGS on ‘Suess’s classification of Eurasian mountains’ (Gregory 1915l) being his first lecture on Suess since the latter’s death in 1914 for which Gregory (1914h) wrote a laudatory obituary notice. The lecture on the Eurasian mountains covered the major orogenic belts of the two continents, with Gregory generally supporting Suess’s views, except where Suess ‘represents the Alps as closer akin to the hills of Brittany than to the Himalayas, and makes the Dinaric Mountains and hills of Crete the European equivalents of the Himalayas’. Importantly, in view of Gregory’s later alternative to continental drift, is his acceptance of Suess’s proposed ‘Asiatic edifice.’ This broadly included most of Europe and Asia and ‘extended westward across the Atlantic to include Newfoundland and the Atlantic coasts of Canada and the United States, and also extended eastwards across the Pacific to include Alaska and the eastern part of the western mountains of Canada.’ The southern and eastern margins of Asia were fringed by seas ‘due to foundering of the former margins of the continent’. As a life-long teetotaller, Gregory was naturally appalled at the prevalence of drunkenness, especially during the early days of the First World War, which galvanized him into action over the matter. On 18 December 1914 he addressed a meeting in the Hillhead United Free Chapel, Glasgow, describing the benefits that imposed temperance regulations in the Russian and Australian armies had brought about, and calling for a ban on the sale of distilled liquors during the war (Glasgow Herald, 19 December 1914). He also wrote this up in Gregory (1915m) and returned to the same theme on 5 May 1917 when Gregory (Gregory et al. 1917a) circulated a statement on Food Waste and Hoarding in Alcoholic Beverages. This was the first of a number of accounts written to support the war effort (e.g. Gregory 1915c, d). In 1914 Gregory instituted a new Glasgow University publication of bound ‘Papers from the Geological Department Glasgow University’ which served to promote the departmental image and bring in offprints for the Departmental Library. The first volume, which appeared in 1915 but was dated 1914, contained 20 papers (nine of which were by Gregory), the first of which was his ‘Livingstone as an Explorer: an Appreciation’ (Gregory 1913c). The series continued for many years with Gregory’s last paper that was bound into the octavo-sized series appearing in Volume 15 in 1934, the final volume being 28, produced in 1970, of papers published between 1967 and 1969. By then photocopying was becoming generally available, making offprint circulation less important than in Gregory’s time, when good offprint collections were enormously valuable in avoiding handwritten copying.

‘The First Inhabitants of the World’ and ‘Geology of Today’ Gregory continued to write for the general public, producing a chapter entitled ‘The First Inhabitants of the World’ in Harmsworth’s Natural History (Gregory 1910c). The next general introduction to geology appeared in 1915 in a substantial book with 328 pages, under the title ‘Geology of Today: A Popular Introduction in Simple Language’ (Gregory 1915n). In the Preface, Gregory expressed a dislike for the title: ‘The title appals me. Modern geology is the result of more than a century’s work by innumerable and indefatigable pioneers working in all parts of the earth’ . . .‘the Geological Society London library in 1911 lists articles added in 582 serials and over 2500 books added in 1911 alone’ . . .‘the reader has to accept the limitations . . .’ Predictably, it was favourably reviewed (in Nature, 94, 666–667) by Gregory’s old friend Grenville Cole, who commented that ‘The alarming illustration

with which it opens, representing a statue of Louis Agassiz plunged head-downwards in the ground, is not symbolical of the tendencies of the text’. The book must have been successful as a second edition was printed in 1919.

The Danbury Gravels In school holidays, Audrey Gregory and the children spent much time at Little Baddow in Essex and Gregory often joined them out of university term. Probably during the summer of 1915, when because of the war, foreign travel was limited, or in the spring of 1914 following the April GSL rejection of his views on the river origin of certain gravels, as described below, Gregory (1915o) completed a field project around Little Baddow that he had pursued ‘at intervals during many years’. This involved examining the gravels which capped the c. 300 m high London Clay plateau of Danbury, about 8 km east of Chelmsford, and which extended on a ridge going north to Little Baddow and then to Tiptree. The origin of the gravels had been controversial; some thought them glacial in origin, others that they were fluviatile and older than the Pleistocene glaciation. Gregory took an auger out to obtain samples to supplement the available exposures and then counted the different types of pebbles found at each locality, of which about two dozen results were tabled, showing mainly subangular flints, Eocene flints, quartz and quartzites and very rare Lower Greensand cherts. There was no Boulder Clay. From the absence of Jurassic sandstones, large irregular unrolled flint nodules and even rare pebbles of basalt, all of which characterized the glacial and postglacial gravels of the district, he concluded the Danbury gravels were pre-glacial (Gregory 1915o). The quartzites matched pebbles in the Bunter pebble-beds of the Midlands, suggesting their derivation from the NW, which agreed with their diminishing size to the SE in the Danbury Gravels. The rare Lower Greensand cherts only matched those derived from The Weald to the south, which must have been exposed to erosion during the Eocene. Gregory deduced the gravels could not be later in deposition than the end of the Miocene, ruling out the Pliocene because Boswell (1915) had shown there was garnet in Pliocene deposits and none was found in the Danbury gravels. This assumed all Pliocene deposits contained garnet. The unanimous opinion in 1985 was that the gravels were Pleistocene in age, albeit that they were slightly unusual and at least partly under the Springfield Till (Bristow 1985). This subject was dealt with further by Gregory in 1922.

The Fly River Eocene corals Towards the end of 1916 Gregory & Jean B. Trench (1916) submitted a description of the Eocene corals from rolled pebbles collected south of Macrossan Island in the delta of the Fly River, the largest river in Central New Guinea, by Sir William MacGregor (1846 –1919) in 1889–90. Gregory had been asked to identify the corals and had presumably passed them on to Jean Trench to work on under his supervision. There were also some chert pebbles containing corals which Gregory thought were of Upper Cretaceous age. Six new species of Eocene age were identified and described, but the precise age within the Eocene had to rely on R. B. Newton’s identification of the foraminifera as being of Lutetian (Middle Eocene) age. The corals included so many new species that the assemblage confirmed the opinions of those who held that the Eocene fauna of the Malaysia region showed remarkable isolation. The presence of Montipora antique, n.sp. was particularly significant in that respect as Eocene Montiporids were unknown in either Sind (now in Pakistan), the nearest well-known fauna of Eocene reef corals, or Europe, although Gregory (1898) had found one in the Pleistocene of the Red Sea.

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This led him to suppose they originated in the Western Pacific and migrated slowly westwards, not having reached even India by the Miocene. In the course of the Fly River study, Gregory (1917e) noticed a specimen that closely resembled Octotremacis hochstetti. Gregory (1900) had renamed the genus 17 years earlier because the previous name, Polysolenia was already occupied when originally proposed. Although Gregory (1900) had grave doubts about whether this coral was a Miocene Helioporid, as originally described, the original technical description of a tubular cœnenchyma was so positive that he quelled his doubts, despite the uncertain evidence of the original figure. The Fly River specimens included one that showed beyond any doubt the features of Octotremacis but it had a clear trabecular, not tubular, cœnenchyma, which made it allied to the genus Astræpora and not a Helioporid, nor was it Miocene, but Middle Eocene on the same basis as noted above. Gregory’s erudite discussion of the significance of the above corals brings home the loss, through non-use, of so much laboriously acquired expertise in palaeontology which his turning to other matters entailed, and it also emphasizes his remarkable memory to pick it up again after 17 years.

sometime afterwards completed a paper on the pre-glacial valleys of Arran and Snowdon, but because of other work and his two years abroad, the paper was not submitted until after his return in 1919 (Gregory 1920a). Gregory often visited Arran with classes and on day trips for example, 31 January 1916 (letter from Ursula to her cousin Alicia Percival) (Fig. 17.5 and Gregory 1914i). The gist of the paper was to argue that both in Arran, particularly on the Goatfell Granite, and on Snowdon, the main valleys were pre-glacial and were formed due to erosion along fractures that formed when the whole region was uplifted in the Pliocene. Gregory maintained his familiar belief that the Pleistocene glaciers had merely cleaned out and smoothed off the topography, and were not the main, or original, cause of most of the valleys. This view was repeated in Gregory (1914j). The Hunterian Museum (HM) collections show that in 1915 Gregory examined and collected from the Carboniferous Limestone of Little Island, Barry, in South Wales, his field notebook giving the date as 4 June 1915. It is possible he also spent time in Ireland in summer 1915, as discussed later. He revisited Wales in 1916 judging from the microgranite collected for the HM from Mynedd Mawr.

The Corrieyairack Road, Scotland

Henry Darwin Rogers

Gregory’s travels about Scotland by train and then bicycle (Gregory 1977) made him familiar with many roads which gave access to remote Scottish areas, and in the summer of 1916 he submitted a very readable account to The Cyclists’ Touring Club Gazette entitled ‘By General Wade’s Road over Corrieyairack’ (Gregory 1916h). This was a description of his attempt to cycle the road made by General George Wade (1673 –1748) in 1735 from Loch Uanagan (elevation 40 m) near Fort Augustus, over the Pass of Corrieyairack to the upper Spey River near Laggan Bridge, which as it reached a height of 2519 feet (770 m), was the highest ‘road’ in Britain. Gregory was interested to see the great Corrieyairack which was most unusual for facing south, whereas most of the Scottish corries face north or NE. He used the road one May, probably 1915 or 1916, when he had been six months without serious exercise, the barometer had been falling for 30 hours and he had cycled into Fort Augustus the previous evening. Presumably he left Glasgow by train c.4.47 pm, arrived at Glen Spean at 9.03 pm and cycled the 37 km in the two hours before darkness. However, Gregory’s account of trying to use the track with an ordinary bicycle involved long walks pushing, or even carrying, the bicycle because the road had fallen into disuse, and did not appear to have been repaired ‘since it was built’. There were very steep unrideable stretches, boulders lying on the track, tight zigzag bends, 13 in one place which reduced the gradient of 1 in 412 to one of 1 in 8, broken bridges that required fording swollen streams, and snow drifts covering the road, which at one point he slid down using his bicycle as an alpenstock. He estimated a total ascent of 3200 ft (c. 982 m), allowing for the undulations. Eventually he arrived at Loch Laggan to find the hotel closed, and had to cycle a further 16 km on Wade’s old road in the direction of Dalwhinnie, finally reaching the welcome hotel at Loch Ericht, a considerable ride and walk for one day. The route was not recommended, although it was easier the opposite way, but he was clearly amused at the overt objections of the 1735 Highland chiefs to the building of bridges over the streams which would ‘render the ordinary people effeminate, and less fit to pass the waters in other places where there are’ [no bridges]. The total distance must have been at least 65 km which shows Gregory was still a tough traveller in his fifties.

Fifty years after the death in 1866 of Henry Darwin Rogers (1808 – 1866), FRS, Hon. FRSE, Hon. LL D, Regius Professor of Natural History (1857 – 1866) in the University of Glasgow, Gregory (1916i) took the opportunity on 20 January 1916 to address the

Preglacial valleys Part of Gregory’s 1915 summer was spent in Wales, and he recorded that in September 1915 he revisited Snowdon and

Fig. 17.5. Gregory (on the left) and Tyrrell on Arran, possibly with Goatfell in the background. Probably taken in the 1920s. Courtesy of the Lapworth Archives, University of Birmingham.

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Glasgow University Geological Society with an account of the life of Rogers, and in particular of his very substantial geological contributions. This address was subsequently printed by the University of Glasgow. Rogers, an American, and one-time State Geologist of Pennsylvania, had, with his famous brother, William Barton Rogers (1804 –82)(founder and twice President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, and one-time State Geologist of Virginia) compiled the first geological map of the Appalachians and had recognized and explained the classic length-parallel anticlinal and synclinal folding. H. D. Rogers identified the isoclinal folding and was the first to recognize the NW overfolding and the resultant overthrust faults ‘shoved forward over the inverted side’. H. D. Rogers (1858) published this monumental 1631page memoir with accompanying atlas of maps in Edinburgh during his time in the Chair in Glasgow. It was ‘an epoch-making work, and beyond question the most important document on the geology of America that had appeared up to the date of issue, with the possible exception of the New York Surveys, issued in 1842–3’ (Merrill 1904). Gregory dealt with the many contributions of H. D. Rogers, including his astonishingly prescient recognition as early as 1860, that petroleum oil first drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859 had a quite distinct origin from that of the Carboniferous coal and derived gas (Rogers 1860). Gregory had hoped that Geikie, who was acquainted with Rogers even before he became Professor at Glasgow, could give him some personal impressions of Rogers, but Geikie, in a letter dated 6 November 1915, was unable to add anything of value. Gregory seems to have kept in touch with Geikie for many years, congratulating him on being made KCB on 17 August 1907, and again on 2 January 1914, after Geikie’s award of the Order of Merit had been announced (extant copies in the Geikie Haslemere archives).

References BA. 1911. The British Association for the Advancement of Science. Report of the Eightieth Meeting, Sheffield 1910. John Murray, London. BA. 1912. The British Association for the Advancement of Science. Report of the Eighty-first Meeting, Portsmouth 1911. John Murray, London. BA. 1913. The British Association for the Advancement of Science. Report of the Eighty-second Meeting, Dundee 1912. John Murray, London. BA. 1914. The British Association for the Advancement of Science. Report of the Eighty-third Meeting, Birmingham 1913. John Murray, London. BA. 1915. The British Association for the Advancement of Science. Report of the Eighty-fourth Meeting, Australia 1914. John Murray, London. BA. 1916. The British Association for the Advancement of Science. Report of the Eighty-fifth Meeting, Manchester 1915. John Murray, London. BA. 1917. The British Association for the Advancement of Science. Report of the Eighty-sixth Meeting, Newcastle 1916. John Murray, London. BA. 1918. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1917. John Murray, London. Beet-Jukes, J. 1872. The Student’s Manual of Geology. 3rd edn. A & C Black, Edinburgh. Boswell, P. G. H. 1915. Differentiation movement in East Anglia in Tertiary times. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 198–206. Branagan, D. F. 2005. T.W. Edgeworth David A Life. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Bristow, C. R. 1985. Geology of the Country around Chelmsford. Memoir for 1:50 000 Sheet 241. British Geological Survey, HMSO. Dore´, A. G., Cartwright, J. A., Stoker, M. S., Turner, J. P. & White, N. J. 2002. Exhumation of the North Atlantic margin: introduction and background. In: Dore´, A. G., Cartwright, J. A., Stoker, M. S., Turner, J. P. & White, N. J. (eds) Exhumation of the North Atlantic Margin: Timing, Mechanisms and Implications for Petroleum Exploration. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 196, 1– 12.

Du Toit, A. L. 1917. The problem of the Great Australian Artesian Basin. Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 51, 135–430. Evans, I. S. 2008. Twentieth century thought on glacial erosion. In: Burt, T. P., Chorley, R. J., Brunsden, D., Cox, N. J. & Goudie, A. S. (eds) A History of the Study of Landforms or the Development of Geomorphology, Volume 4: Quaternary and Recent Processes and Forms (1890 –1965) and the Mid-Century Revolutions. Geological Society, London, 413– 494. Ferguson, D., Tyrrell, G. W. & Gregory, J. W. 1914. The Geology of South Georgia. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 1, 53– 64. Gabrielsen, R. H. & Dore´, A. G. 1995. History of tectonic models on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. In: Hanslien, S. (ed.) Petroleum Exploration and Exploitation in Norway. Norwegian Petroleum Society, Special Publication, 4, 333–368. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: A Sketch. Privately printed. Gregory, J. W. 1888. The geology of Puffin Island. Proceedings of the Liverpool Biological Society, 1, 78– 94. Gregory, J. W. 1889. Recent theories bearing on glaciation in Britain. Abstracts of the Metropolitan Scientific Association, No 32. Gregory, J. W. 1897. Across Spitsbergen. Transactions and Sixth Annual Report of the Council of the Liverpool Geographical Society for the year ending December 31st 1897, 41 –58. Gregory, J. W. 1898. A collection of Egyptian fossil Madreporaria. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 5, 241– 251. Gregory, J. W. 1900. Polytremacis and the ancestry of the Helioporidae. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 66, 291– 305. Gregory, J. W. 1907. The problem of the Palaeozoic glaciation of Australia and South Africa. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1906 York Meeting, 576–577. Gregory, J. W. 1909. What is a mineral? Transactions of the Institute of Mining Engineers, 37, 13– 42. Gregory, J. W. 1909a. What is a mineral? Geological Magazine, Decade V, 6, 520–521. Gregory, J. W. 1910. The iron ore deposits of Victoria, 875– 877. In: Andersson, J. G. (ed.) The Iron Ore Resources of the World. International Geological Congress 1910, Stockholm, 2 vols. Gregory, J. W. 1910a. The geographical factors that control the development of Australia. The Geographical Journal, 35, 658– 682. Gregory, J. W. 1910b. White labour in tropical agriculture: A great Australian experiment. The Nineteenth Century, 67, February 1910, 368– 380. Gregory, J. W. 1910c. The first inhabitants of the world. In: Lydekker, R., Johnston, H. & Ainsworth-Davis, J. R. (eds) Harmsworth’s Natural History. Harmsworth, London, 1, 13– 25. Gregory, J. W. 1911. The iron-ore supplies of the world. Science Progress, 19, 371–382. Gregory, J. W. 1911a. Constructive waterfalls. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 27, 537–546. Gregory, J. W. 1911b. The Glasgow earthquake of 14th December 1910. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 14, 89 –114. Gregory, J. W. 1911c. The Glasgow earthquake of 14th December 1910 in relation to mining. Transactions of the Institute of Mining Engineers, 41, 1 –9. Gregory, J. W. 1911d. Tripoli and Cyrenaica. Proceedings of the Glasgow Geological Society, 14, 349– 351. Gregory, J. W. 1911e. The terms ‘Denudation’, ‘Erosion’, ‘Corrosion’, and ‘Corrasion’. The Geographical Journal, 37, 189– 195. Gregory, J. W. 1911f. The scientific misappropriation of popular terms. Nature, 88, 7. Gregory, J. W. 1912. The employment of white labour in the sugar planations of Queensland. Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 43, 182– 194. Gregory, J. W. 1912a. The wet-bulb thermometer and tropical colonisation. Journal of the Meteorological Society, Series 3, 16, 3– 9. Gregory, J. W. 1912b. Constructive waterfalls. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Portsmouth Meeting, 445– 446. Gregory, J. W. 1912c. The Polmont Kame and on the classification of Scottish Kames. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 14, 199–218.

ACTIVITIES BETWEEN 1910 AND 1917

Gregory, J. W. 1912d. The relations of Kames and Eskers. The Geographical Journal, 40, 169–175. Gregory, J. W. 1912e. The Making of the Earth (Home University Library Series). Williams & Norgate, London. Gregory, J. W. 1912f. The structural and petrographic classifications of coast-types. Scientia, 11, 36 – 63. Gregory, J. W. 1912g. Fjords in relation to earth movements. Nature, 89, 179– 183. Gregory, J. W. 1912h. The scientific misappropriation of popular terms Address to the Conference of Delegates, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Portsmouth Meeting 1911, 6pp. Gregory, J. W. 1913. The Nature and Origin of Fiords. John Murray, London. Gregory, J. W. 1913a. Corries, with special reference to those of the Campsie Fells. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 15, 84 – 98. Gregory, J. W. 1913b. Report on the work of the Commission sent out by the Jewish Territorial Organisation under the auspices of the Portuguese Government to examine the Territory proposed for the purpose of a Jewish settlement in Angola. ITO, London. Gregory, J. W. 1913c. Livingstone as an Explorer; an Appreciation. James MacLehose, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1913d. Livingstone as an explorer: An appreciation. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 29, 225– 242. Gregory, J. W. 1914. The Loch Morar Basin and the tectonic associations of the Scottish sea lochs. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 30, 251– 259. Gregory, J. W. 1914a. The educational value of the kinematograph. The School World, 16, 132– 134. Gregory, J. W. 1914b. The structure of the Carlisle– Solway Basin. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 1, 286–287. See also 287–288 (Correspondence). Gregory, J. W. 1914c. The structure of the Carlisle –Solway Basin, and the sequence of its Permian and Triassic rocks. Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Geological Society, 958, 93– 96. Gregory, J. W. 1914d. The lake system of Westralia. The Geographical Journal, 43, 656– 665. Gregory, J. W. 1914e. The correlation of the Australian Marine Kainozoic deposits—evidence of the Echinoids, Bryozoa and some vertebrates. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 1, 516– 517. Gregory, J. W. 1914f. Home by Siberia in war time. Glasgow University Magazine, 27, 94 –95. Gregory, J. W. 1914g. The Kynuna Wells—a test case of rock pressure. Economic Geology, 9, 768–775. Gregory, J. W. 1914h. The obituary of Eduard Suess. The Geographical Journal, 43, 701– 704. Gregory, J. W. 1914i. The Permian and Triassic Rocks of Arran. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 15, 174– 187. Gregory, J. W. 1914j. The Chiltern Wind Gaps. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 1, 145–148. Gregory, J. W. 1915. Pseudo-glacial features in Dalmatia. The Geographical Journal, 46, 105–117. Gregory, J. W. 1915a. The age of Loch Long, and its relation to the valley system of Southern Scotland. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 15, 295–310. Gregory, J. W. 1915b. The Tweed Valley and its relations to the Clyde and Solway. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 31, 479– 486. Gregory, J. W. 1915c. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war and the geology of the potash salts. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 71 –72. Gregory, J. W. 1915d. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war. The Contemporary Review, 600, 769– 779. Gregory, J. W. 1915e. The Scottish Lochs and their origin. Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 45, 183– 196. Gregory, J. W. 1915f. The relative distribution of fjords and volcanoes. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 31, 257– 261. Gregory, J. W. 1915g. The geological relations and some fossils of South Georgia. In: Ferguson, D. (ed.) Geological Observations in South Georgia. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 50, 817– 822.

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Gregory, J. W. 1915h. The physiography of South Georgia as shown by Mr Ferguson’s photographs. In: Ferguson, D. (ed.) Geological Observations in South Georgia. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 50, 814– 816. Gregory, J. W. 1915i. The Solway Basin and its Permo-Triassic sequence. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 241–249. Gregory, J. W. 1915j. A deep bore at Seascale in Cumberland. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 146–149. Gregory, J. W. 1915k. Deserts. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 31, 241– 244. Gregory, J. W. 1915l. Suess’s classification of Eurasian Mountains. The Geographical Journal, 45, 499–513. Gregory, J. W. 1915m. Temperance Regulations in the Russian & Australian Armies. Walter Black & Co., Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1915n. Geology of Today: A Popular Introduction in Simple Language. Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd, London. Gregory, J. W. 1915o. The Danbury gravels. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 529–538. Gregory, J. W. 1916. Australia. Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature, 90, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gregory, J. W. 1916a. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war and the geology of the potash salts. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 16, 1 –33. Gregory, J. W. 1916b. The Auld Wives’ lifts—A pseudo-megalithic tor. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 32, 279– 282. Gregory, J. W. 1916c. Contributions to the geology of Benquella. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 51, 495– 536. Gregory, J. W. 1916d. On some Cretaceous Echinoida from the neighbourhood of Lobito Bay. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 51, 585–587. Gregory, J. W. 1916e. The central lakes of Westrailia and the Westrailian Peneplain. The Geographical Journal, 48, 326–331. Gregory, J. W. 1916f. The flowing wells of western Queensland. Queensland Geographical Journal, 30, 1 –29. Gregory, J. W. 1916g. The age of the Norseman Limestone, Western Australia. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 3, 320–321. Gregory, J. W. 1916h. By General Wade’s road over Corrieyairack. The Cyclists’ Touring Club Gazette, 35, 170–172. Gregory, J. W. 1916i. (with bibliography by C. M. Leitch). Henry Darwin Rogers. J. MacLehose & Sons, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1917. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war and the geology of the potash salts. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 4, 84. Gregory, J. W. 1917a. Mineral fields of the Franco– German borderlands. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 33, 358– 363. Gregory, J. W. 1917b. The geology of phosphates and their bearing on the conservation of mineral resources. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 16, 116– 163. Gregory, J. W. 1917c. Thomson’s genera of Scottish Carboniferous corals. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 16, 222– 243. Gregory, J. W. 1917d. The evolution of the map of the world. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 33, 49 –65. Gregory, J. W. 1917e. Octotremacis, its structure, affinities, and age. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 4, 9– 12. Gregory, J. W. 1920. The Red Rocks of a deep bore at the north end of the Isle of Man. Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers, 59, 156– 168. Gregory, J. W. 1920a. The preglacial valleys of Arran and Snowdon. Geological Magazine, 57, 148– 164. Gregory, J. W. 1922. Supplementary note on the geology of Benquella in relation to its cephalopods and the history of the South Atlantic. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 53, 161– 163. Gregory, J. W. 1923. On recent records from the Flowing Wells of Eastern Australia. Proceedings of the Pan-American Science Congress Australia, 1291– 1296. Gregory, J. W. 1925. The Menace of Colour: A Study of the Difficulties due to the Association of White & Coloured Races, with an Account of Measures Proposed for their Solution, and Special Reference to White Colonisation in the Tropics. Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd, London.

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Gregory, J. W. 1926. The relative influence of denudation and Earthmovements in moulding the surface of the Earth. Scientia, 40, (October 1926) 218–230. Gregory, J. W. 1926a. The Carlisle Basin. (Review of Dixon et al. 1926). Geological Magazine, 63, 377–379. Gregory, J. W. 1927. The sea lochs of the Outer Hebrides. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 18, 27– 39. Gregory, J. W. 1927a. The fjords of the Hebrides. The Geographical Magazine, 69, 194–216. Gregory, J. W. 1927b. Origin and distribution of underground water. British Waterworks Association Circular, 69, 644– 671. See also Sources of underground water, Nature 120, 383. Gregory, J. W. 1929. Earthquakes and Volcanoes. Benn’s Sixpenny Library, No. 97, Ernest Benn Ltd, London. Gregory, J. W. 1929a. The geological history of the Atlantic Ocean. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 85, lxviii–cxxii. Gregory, J. W. 1930. The geological history of the Pacific Ocean. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 86, lxxii –cxxvi. Gregory, J. W. & Trench, J. B. 1916. Eocene Corals from the Fly River, Central New Guinea. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 3, 481– 488; 529– 536. Gregory, J. W. with others. 1915. The Geology of the Glasgow District. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 26, 151–194. Gregory, J. W., Evans, J. W., Lamplugh, G. W. & Freshfield, D. 1917. Erosion and resulting land forms in sub-arid Western Australia, including the origin and growth of dry lakes: discussion. The Geographical Journal, 50, 434– 437. Gregory, J. W., Paton, D. N. & Millar, J. D. 1917a. Food Waste & Hoarding in Alcoholic Beverages. Glasgow Citizens’ Committee for War-time Prohibition, Glasgow. Harker, A. 1896. The natural history of igneous rocks: 1. Their geographical and chronological distribution. Science Progress, 6, 12 –33. Holliday, D. W., Jones, N. S. & Mcmillan, A. A. 2008. Lithostratigraphical subdivision of the Sherwood Sandstone Group (Triassic) of the northeastern part of the Carlisle Basin, Cumbria and Dumfries and Galloway, UK. Scottish Journal of Geology, 44, 97 –110.

Horne, J. & Gregory, J. W. 1916. The Annan Red Sandstone series of Dumfriesshire. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 15, 374– 386. Kabrna, P. 2007. John Milne: the man who mapped the shaking Earth. The Craven and Pendle Geological Society, Leeds. Koppes, M. N. & Montgomery, D. R. 2009. The relative efficacy of fluvial and glacial erosion over modern and orogenic timescales. Nature Geoscience, 2, 644– 647. Leake, B. E. & Bishop, P. 2009. The beginnings of geography teaching and research in the University of Glasgow: the impact of J. W. Gregory. Scottish Geographical Journal, 125, 272– 283. Lewis, C. 2000. The Dating Game: One man’s search for the Age of the Earth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Macalister, D. 1921. Geography at the University of Glasgow. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 37, 53 –56. Martin, L. & Williams, F. E. 1924. An ice-eroded fjord: the mode of origin of Lynn Canal, Alaska. Geographical Review (N.Y.), 14, 578– 596. Merrill, G. P. 1904. Contributions to the history of American Geology. Annual Report of the Board of Regents Smithsonian Institute for year ending June 1904. Osmundsen, P. T., Redfield, T. F. et al. 2010. Fault-controlled alpine topography in Norway. Journal of the Geological Society, London, 167, 83– 98. Pittman, E. F. 1914. The Great Australian Artesian Basin and the source of its water. Department of Mines, Geological Survey of New South Wales. Pittman, E. F. 1917. Note on the Great Australian Artesian Basin. Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 51, 431– 434. Rogers, H. D. 1858. The Geology of Pennsylvania. Vol. I, Vol. II, Part 1 & Part 2, W. Blackwood & Son, Edinburgh; J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia. Rogers, H. D. 1860. On the distribution and probable origin of the petroleum or rock-oil of Western Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio. Proceedings of the Glasgow Philosophical Society, 4, 355–359. Spath, L. F. 1922. On Cretaceous Ammonoidea from Angola, collected by Professor J. W. Gregory, D.Sc., F.R.S. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 53, 91– 160.

Chapter 18 1916– 1919: work for the Government

By 1916 Gregory’s enthusiasm for the Empire, and his writings on mining and mineral resources stretching over 10 years, plus his presidential addresses to the Glasgow Geological Society on geological factors and mineral resources of strategic importance in the pursuit of the War (Gregory 1915, 1915a, 1916) were beginning to be noticed in Whitehall. So when a Committee on Mineral Resources within the Empire was established in 1916 by the Imperial Institute, with a view to drawing more effectively on all the available Empire raw materials, Gregory was appointed a member together with Lord Rhondda (1856 –1918; wartime Food Controller and Colliery owner), Sir Robert Hatfield (1858 – 1940; steelmaster), Dr F. H. Hatch (mining geologist), George Thomas Holloway (1863 – 1917) (chemist and the authority on Canadian nickel) and representatives of the Home Office and the Board of Trade (The Times, 17 October 1916). Shortly after this, on 30 November 1916, Gregory was elected to the Council of the Royal Society of London (RS), attending his first Council meeting on 7 December 1916. The records show he attended all but one (on 21 June 1917) of the eight meetings up to 5 July 1917 but not thereafter. His only recorded contribution was to propose T. G. Bonney for a medal and then later withdraw the nomination. He was also appointed to the RS Geology Committee for two years. In addition, he became a member of the Committee set up by the Conjoint Board of Scientific Societies in 1916– 9 to report on the Place of Science in Education (Boswell 1936). In view of the serious position of the war, from early 1917, after completing his essential teaching for the 1916–17 session, he left the Glasgow Department in the charge of Tyrrell and put himself at the disposal of the War Office.

Wartime work in the War Office 1917 From before October 1916, and certainly after that date, between his normal teaching, Gregory became occupied with assessing Empire and home sources of strategic materials needed in the war effort, and also what should be done to ensure continued supplies after the war, so that the UK would not be so vulnerable in future as it had been in 1914. Most of this activity is not known in detail. As an example, a letter from Gregory, who was then staying at the Athenaeum, his usual short-term base in London, dated 8 May 1917, to Mr Harrison of the Chemical Section of the Royal Society’s War Committee, is preserved in the Royal Society archives (CD924), although Gregory was never a member of the Royal Society’s War Committees. This concerned supplies of bromine, much of which had previously come from Germany from the Stassfurt salt deposits, as did no less strategically important potash. Gregory argued against a future prohibitive import tax being imposed on such chemicals so that home producers would be encouraged to manufacture the chemicals, because he thought there would be the real possibility that the firms which needed the chemicals would instead move abroad to countries where the raw materials were cheaper. Gregory’s interest in boreholes into the Permo-Triassic rocks, already described, was probably connected with the wartime search for potash in salt deposits of this age. After the Glasgow University teaching session of 1916–17 (perhaps even before the end, as Gregory did not attend the Glasgow University Senate between 8 February 1917 and 20 April 1920; GU Archives), he worked in the War Office in

London until September 1917. This was confidential geological work, often compiling information from publications in the Geological Society, London (GSL) and Natural History Museum (NHM) libraries. Only one project has come to light. In Gregory’s (1929), ‘The Structure of Asia’, described later, reference is made in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s contribution to Gregory (1918), a slim 116-page book on the ‘Geology of Mesopotamia and its Borderlands’. Two copies of this are in the GSL library. The first is printed (not stamped) ‘For Official Use Only. This book is the property of HM Government. Its contents are not to be communicated . . . to anyone not holding an official position in HM Service.’ No author is given, it being ‘Prepared on behalf of the Admiralty’ by the ‘Admiralty Naval Staff, Intelligence Department, May 1918’. This copy went to the library of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co., which after the war gave it to the GSL library. The second GSL copy is identical except for the title pages and is still without a named author, but was published by HM Stationery Office without any reference to the Official Secrets Act, being received by the GSL library before 23 February 1921 (the date stamped in it), indicating that it had been released after the war. The source was now stated to be ‘The Geographical Section of the Naval Intelligence Division, Naval Staff, Admiralty’. It is certain that this book was written by Gregory, largely based on published works. It suggests how at least some of Gregory’s time in 1917 was spent, but it is also known from C. J. Gregory (mss) that Gregory additionally worked for the Air Board around this time, but on what has not been uncovered. The evidence of the authorship of the book is first that the geological staff of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co., in which the British Government had a controlling shareholding, knew Gregory was the author and cited him, which Gregory, as General Editor of ‘The Structure of Asia’ did not change. Secondly, Gregory himself declared he was the author in the discussion of Harrison’s (1932) paper on the geology of SW Persia. Specific references in the book reveal emphases that are known to be peculiar to Gregory. For instance, on page 31, under ‘The structure and Earth movements of the Zagros arc’, great concern is shown to establish that the deforming ‘pressure had come from the northeast’ despite the original author claiming the opposite. This accords with Gregory’s view, described later, that in the Cenozoic, Asia moved southwards against Arabia and India, not the reverse, as is now believed. The book covered the geology and mineral resources of the ground now within eastern Turkey (called Armenia in the book), Iran (Persia) and Iraq, the last not then being a political entity. The account was undoubtedly prepared in 1917 when the British army under General Sir Frederick S. Maude (1864 –1917) conquered what is now Iraq, and its potential industrial development and its known oil resources, particularly for the navy, became of interest in the war effort. About half of the book dealt with the economic geology, including soils, minerals and above all, oil, which was the main interest. There was one entry, of potential interest to the navy, which detailed how the flood plains of the Euphrates and Tigris (i.e. southern Iraq) were being extended into the Persian Gulf ‘more rapidly than any other known delta . . . a mile every 30 years’, or well over 160 km since the earliest reliable record in 696 BC. Surprisingly, nothing was mentioned about water supply, which suggests this strategic matter was dealt with separately. This book is the sole identified publication of Gregory in 1918.

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 155– 162. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.18

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On 13 and 27 March 1917 Gregory lectured at the Royal Institution on ‘Geological war problems’ (The Times 13 March 1917). On 7 May 1917 Gregory’s contribution to the Imperial and Foreign Trade Supplement of The Times was published in which he described the rich mineral resources of Australia and suggested that if these were fully used the British Empire would be independent as regards the chief metals. During Gregory’s 1917 time working in London, his son records that he met his father on a number of Sundays and went for walks and visits to museums with him. This suggests that Audrey, Ursula and Christopher probably spent the school holidays at Bassetts. However, he was not long in London before another Government appointment took him abroad for two years. Either just before he left the UK in early October 1917, or possibly sent back by post en route, Gregory submitted an account of ‘The volcanic eruption of 1913 on Ambrym Island, New Hebrides’ (Frater & Gregory 1917) which the Rev. Maurice Frater (active 1900–39) had left with him to publish. Frater & Gregory considered the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) volcanic islands to be part of a line of volcanoes from New Guinea, through the Solomon and New Hebrides Islands to New Zealand and Mount Erebus in Antarctica. The eruption of December 1913, dramatically described by Frater, started near the centre of Ambrym Island and worked westwards with a series of new volcanoes erupting along an east – west fissure, which unfortunately underlay the settlement of Lon-wol-wol and its Mission Station and Hospital, all of which were completely destroyed. Lava, ash, floating pumice, boiling sea, lava bombs, steam rising over 6 km high in the air, lightning and the formation of a new volcano in the sea, which extended the size of Ambrym Island westwards, were observed. Eight major lava streams were later found to have issued, including those from the central volcano of the island. Gregory, with Tyrrell’s help, described the lavas as basaltic, and outlined the earlier volcanic history of the island from published sources, noting that Sir Douglas Mawson (1882 –1958) had already determined the limestones of the island as Miocene underlain by a possible Oligocene foundation.

The Calcutta University Commission, 1917 –19 On 26 September 1917 The Times recorded the members and the terms of reference of the Calcutta University Commission. The Commission was to ‘inquire into the working of the present organization of the Calcutta [now Kolkata] University and its affiliated colleges, the standards, the examinations, and the distribution of teachers; to consider at what places and in what manner provision should be made in Bengal for teaching and research for persons above the secondary school age; to examine the suitability of the present situation and constitution of the University and make such suggestions as may be necessary for their modification; to make recommendations as to the qualifications to be demanded of students on their admission to the University, as to the value to be attached outside the University to the degrees conferred by it, and as to the relations which should exist between the University and its colleges or departments and between the University and the Government, and to recommend any change of constitution, of administration, and educational policy which may appear desirable.’

Clearly with Bengal having a population of 40 to 45 million, this was a major undertaking which would involve at least many months of work. Unless otherwise noted, what follows is abstracted from the first five volumes (of 13), running to thousands of pages, of the Calcutta University (Sadler) Commission Report (1919). It is given in some detail as it throws light on aspects of Gregory’s beliefs about tertiary education and on a part of his activities not detailed anywhere else. The report was immensely influential and in fact set the pattern for secondary as well as university education throughout British India (ODNB 2004). The Chairman was the Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, Dr Michael Ernest Sadler (1861 –1943) CB and the Commission had three other UK members, Mr Philip Joseph Hartog (1864 – 1947), Academic Registrar of the University of London, (John)

Ramsay Muir (1872 – 1941), Professor of Modern History in Manchester University, and Professor J. W. Gregory, of Glasgow University, with three members appointed in India, Sir Ashutosh Mukharji (1864 –1924), Judge of the High Court and ViceChancellor of Calcutta University, Mr W. W. Hornell, Director of Public Instruction, Bengal, and Dr Zin-ud-din-Ahmed (1878 – 1947), Professor of Mathematics in the Mahomedan AngloOriental College, Aligarh. Gregory was no doubt appointed because of the many statements he had made about the value of technical and sandwich training in science and engineering being a good training for the mind, and far more useful, than the study of classics in the Oxbridge system, as instanced by his published views on university education going back to Gregory (1905, 1906). It is significant that Oxbridge was not involved. Gregory was granted two years leave of absence from Glasgow University. The members appointed in the UK left England together about 10 October (Letter MC 17113 of 4 October in RS, which also shows Gregory only expected to be away about 6 months). In Gregory’s typical mode of using every spare moment, he had fitted in some fieldwork in Ireland on his way to London as he sent a letter (now in Hunterian Museum) to Tyrrell from London, dated 4 October 1917, ‘Landed safely from Ireland’. The party arrived in Bombay (Mumbai) on Sunday October 28th 1917, having used the time together to plan how best to tackle what was an horrendous task involving far more than 6 months. For the purposes of comparison, the journey from Bombay to Calcutta was delayed by visits to the University of Bombay and then by visits to a series of colleges at Poona (Pune) and Allahabad on the way to Calcutta, which the party reached on Sunday 11 November. The first formal meeting (of what were to be 191 formal meetings) was held the next day in the Old Legislative Council Chamber, in which the Commission was also accommodated during the cold weather of winter 1918– 19. The task the Commission faced was enormous. Bengal and the UK had similar populations of c. 45 million but Calcutta University, the only one in Bengal, was then the largest in the world with 26 000 students, almost the same as were then distributed among the 18 British universities. It included the first medical school in Asia and had been set up in 1857 following the federal form of London University. Such was the esteem in which education was held in Bengal that over half of all Indian university students graduated from Calcutta, despite fewer than one in ten of the Bengal population being able to read and write. But Calcutta University students were distributed around a series of 51 scattered colleges, some ‘Affiliated,’ in all of which the curriculum was determined entirely by the university, which also conducted and marked the examinations and generally supervised the colleges. In addition to this workload, the university also determined the curriculum and conducted the examining of 854 high schools, involving over 288 000 students. In general the standards of training and teaching, at all levels, were inadequate. One of the first steps was to agree a long questionnaire of hundreds of questions, which was sent out to obtain factual information; 412 replies were received. Statistical information was obtained from all the Indian universities to assist in comparisons, and the Government Department of Public Instruction also provided information. February and part of March 1918 were spent interviewing 91 witnesses in Calcutta. Most time consuming was the visitation of all the colleges and many of the schools, hostels and other educational institutions in the city of Calcutta and also many of those in Bengal and in other parts of India. Gregory was by far the most active member at making such visits and the following summarizes the extent of his travelling and places visited where this can be unravelled from the record of the Commission’s visits. The various centres of higher education teaching in the mufassal (Moslem Community) were visited. The whole Commission visited Dacca, Berhampur, Cooch Behar (Koch Bihar), Rangpur, Serampore and Rajshahi and all the collegiate centres in Bengal

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except the colleges at Pabna, Hetampur and Narail which were visited by only some members of the Commission. Four un-named members spent a few days visiting Gauhati and Shillong in Assam, but Burma was not included in the Commission’s brief. For South India, for comparison purposes, the Commission visited Hyderabad, Bangalore, then spent four days in Madras (Chennai) and briefly visited Saidapet. Special attention was given to student hostels. In NW India, Gregory, Hartog and Ahmed visited Benares, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Roorkee, Lahore, Delhi, Aligarh, and Agra, and (without Hartog), Patna. In addition, Gregory, alone of the Commission, visited a number of places without other members of the Commission, namely Pusa, Dhanbaid, Ranchi, Jharia, Giridih, Sakchi, Dishergarh and Nagpur. Although Gregory’s exact timings and movements, which must have been largely, but certainly not entirely, by rail, have not been established, the above was an exhausting programme of inspections as many of the places visited had several educational institutes. In addition, the Indian heat and the inevitable bowel infections would have been regular debilitating factors. In a short time Gregory would have gained an impression of the vast country, its geomorphology and its teeming population and their customs and castes, albeit from the sheltered exclusive position of the ‘white ruling caste’. It was to confirm his opinions – or prejudices, as some would aver – that had so far been mainly expressed in his support for restricting emigration into Australia to Europeans. Gregory spent Christmas 1917 in Southern Sakkim, Eastern Himalaya, obviously making use of the Christmas break to visit the eastern Himalayas, during which he spotted a glaciated surface at Chakung at about 3600 feet (1100 m) above sea level, far lower than any recognized before in the region and showing that the glaciers of Sikkim once extended some 72 km further south of, and descended 5000 feet (1530 m) lower, than the then lowest recorded ancient moraines (Gregory 1919). It is not known whether Gregory used the visits of the Commission to Cooch Behar or Rangpur, which are comparatively near to Southern Sakkim, as ‘jumping off points’ over Christmas, or whether he was one of the four who visited Assam, which was another possible departure point, although less favourable, or whether he went to Sakkim directly from Calcutta. The main part of the Commission’s recommendations were agreed and signed on 18 March 1919 in Calcutta, after which the Commission spent time completing the report in Calcutta, or from early April in Darjeeling (Darjiling), presumably because of the cooler working conditions there, than in Calcutta. The exact date of completion of the writing is uncertain but it was not later than July 1919. The Report of the Commission was published on 9 August 1919 in 13 stout volumes, the first three giving a detailed survey and criticism of existing conditions, the next two listing and arguing for the proposed far-reaching programme of reform, while the remaining volumes detailed the evidence contained in the questionnaires, that given by witnesses, and statistical information of a remarkably detailed kind. To give but one instance of the last, there are graph plots of the distribution of matriculation marks in examined subjects at Calcutta University compared with the same subjects at other Indian Universities, the results appearing to show that standards of entry to Calcutta were below those elsewhere. The Times (9 August 1919) noted the thoroughness of the inquiry and the deplorable state of inefficient schools and colleges, the subjection of scholarship to examinations, the prevalence of illhealth and disease among the students, and the limited horizon of thought and interests and the realization that the root of the problem was in the schools and the intermediate classes in the colleges. Among the reforms were the call to establish a new type of institution called an intermediate college in every district in the Bengal Presidency, a wholly new system of administration for secondary and higher secondary education, and the professional training of all teachers. The intermediate colleges, being intermediate

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between secondary school and university, would prepare not only for university entrance but also for vocational training. The college at Decca was proposed to be become a new university, and the complete re-organization of the teaching resources and methods in Calcutta University was intended. It is not relevant to list all the proposals, especially as Gregory was involved in writing two minority reports which will be summarized and these in themselves give enough detail. These minority reports show that Gregory had thrown himself whole-heartedly into trying to understand the current problems, and had appreciated at least a number of the difficulties in implementing a number of the report’s majority proposals. The first minority report suggests that Gregory and Ahmed had, probably through travelling together, become quite close, and presumably Ahmed had briefed Gregory in some detail on the practical difficulties in implementing some proposals. The first minority report, signed on 18 March 1919, was entitled ‘Notes by Dr Zia-ud-Din Ahmed and Dr J. W. Gregory’ (in Volume 5, p. 352 –395), presumably so as not to appear confrontational and avoid seeming to challenge the main report. The 43-page length was in itself typical of Gregory’s writings. In drastic summary but retaining the original words as much as possible, the ‘Notes’, under 11 headings (I to XI) start with: I.

An introductory disclaimer: ‘It is with great reluctance that we find ourselves unable to concur entirely with the proposals. We are glad to concur with the report in what seems to be its essential recommendations viz: 1. Transfer of the University from the jurisdiction of the Government of India to that of Bengal; 2. Removal of the intermediate classes from the University to the proposed Intermediate colleges; 3. The institution of a Board of secondary and Intermediate Education; 4. The establishment, as soon as possible, of a teaching University at Dacca; 5. The reconstitution of Calcutta University as a teaching University; 6 & 7. Administrative changes in Calcutta University; 8. The provision of much larger numbers of trained school teachers; 9. The improvements of the conditions of student life.

Then follows a statement that Calcutta University requires drastic remedies for its overgrown size and too varied functions, but such was the demand for educated manpower (very few women were students, but the majority report did deal at some length with the education of women) that the task of the Commission was not to reduce the graduate output, but to maintain or increase it, so as, for instance, to increase the number of school teachers, while improving standards of teaching and research. (In effect the Commission resolved the perennial disagreement between the ‘more means worse’ and endeavouring to raise the educational level of the largest possible number of people, by favouring the latter.) II. Regarding the proposed Board of Secondary and Intermediate Education, different arrangements are proposed to ensure Moslem interests are adequately represented, and that the administrative problems of dealing with so many schools (698 High schools alone are instanced) are possible, which the writers do not think the main report’s recommendations are workable in practice. III. The Government colleges, especially Presidency College, should not be transferred from the Department of Public Instruction to non-official governing bodies in order to ensure that some of the best teachers, and some Europeans, are retained as almost none of either is currently employed in non-official colleges.

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IV.

The Government Educational Services should be maintained and the staffing of the Government colleges and high schools should be by Government servants as security of tenure, higher salaries, safe pensions, chances of promotion in a large service, long furlough, easy conditions of sick leave, and the high social prestige of the Government service, ensure that good teachers can be attracted and retained. V. A smaller and more effective Mufassal Board was recommended. VI. Over the distribution of teaching between the University and the colleges, a certain amount of specialization of subjects between the different colleges would reduce the present rivalry between colleges. The instance of this supposedly working well in the University of Durham, England was described. The recently founded ‘University College of Science’ should be developed as a ‘College of Applied Science’. There is then (pp. 376–377) a long footnote (1 page) describing the difference between ‘Science’ and ‘Applied Science’, which was almost certainly written by Gregory as it instances the difference between a university pure geology course and an applied one. ‘Some of the results gained by mining geology . . . and on building stones, soil and water supply should be included in the pure course but detailed descriptions of mining fields, prospecting . . . should be left to technical institutes and mining departments’. VII. Various proposals regarding the Postgraduate System. VIII. It is pointed out that proposals for inter-collegiate lectures are impracticable because the colleges are not near to each other, the climate for several months is one of pouring heavy rain so students moving between colleges would be soaked, and there are too many students to be accommodated in the lecture rooms available. IX. MSc courses standards must be maintained. X. Dacca University should have a medical college. XI. Various matters of procedure and finance were enlarged on and the necessity was urged of spending at least 60 lakhs (6 000 000 rupees) more in order to implement satisfactorily the proposals. It seems unlikely that the Government would have welcomed the commitments involved in implementing the above III, IV, and XI, as the Commission’s majority report obviously tried to reduce the Government of India’s involvement, in favour of devolution to the Government of Bengal and unofficial bodies, and this may have been one of the reasons for setting up the Commission, which the Chairman would have been briefed on. The second minority report was by Gregory alone being entitled ‘Note by Dr J. W. Gregory’ (pp. 399–423), and was also signed on 18 March 1919. It contains three main headings: I.

Discusses examination standards and the existing nonrepresentation of most of the teachers on the Boards that determine curricula and the role this has in the unpreparedness for University work of most of the scholars from the schools. II. Discusses the relationships of the University and the colleges and states that the Commission were unanimous that Calcutta University must be organised as a multi-collegiate University with the colleges divided into two groups, a teaching division of the University and Affiliated Colleges. Ensuring adequate staffing numbers and quality of staff is crucial and various proposals are made. III. Vehemently opposes the proposal that there should be no examination in Science in the High School introductory course in Science. Without some kind of an examination there would be no incentive to work. A similar decision made in 1912 regarding Geography and History was disastrous; the subjects were neglected and student numbers

taking them fell markedly. Gregory then states what subjects he thought the final High School Examination should include. These were five compulsory subjects of English, Vernacular language, Elementary Mathematics, Geography and an introduction to Natural Science (including some Hygiene), and a sixth subject chosen from a Classical language, History, Additional Mathematics or an approved Science subject. [As Gregory was the only scientist on the Commission, presumably these latter proposals, which downgraded the study of a Classical language and History, were not generally agreed with by the Commission]. The report thanked many people for acting as hosts and hostesses and virtually all of these Gregory would have met, including the Nizam of Hyderabad (ruled 1911–67), the Maharaja of Mysore (ruled 1902–40), several British lords and ladies, including the Governor of Bengal, Lord Ronaldshay (1876 –1961) and Lady Ronaldshay (1886 – 1973) for ‘prolonged and generous hospitality in Calcutta which enabled the Report to be completed in India’. There is no doubt that Gregory met and became acquainted with a large number of people and although he obviously threw himself whole-heartedly into the Commission’s work, he did not switch off entirely from his scientific writing. His son (Gregory mss) records the astonishment of a hostess that when there were only a few minutes before a reception started, Gregory retired to ‘start writing a book’ (Which one? A paper?) that had evidently been on his mind, so as, in typical Gregory style, not to waste a moment. It is likely that during his extensive travels across India, in addition to his ‘homework’ on Commission documents, and observing the country and its peoples, he would have been writing something, if only his lecture on ‘The Genesis of the Earth’ (Gregory 1919a) given to the Astronomical Society of India on 10 February 1919. The actual implementation of the report’s recommendations was long delayed due to government financial problems but Gregory did not lose interest in the matters involved and there are letters extant dated 10 October 1921 and 3 November 1928 (with A. Mendell) from Lawrence John Lumley Dundas, Earl of Ronaldshay, a senior government administrator in India, later Secretary of State for India and one-time President of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), who complains in the last letter that ‘It is a Herculean task to get a move on in connection with Calcutta University!’

Awards During Gregory’s time in India he was not forgotten by his friends, Martin Conway and Captain Henry George Lyons, FRS (RGS archives), who successfully nominated him for the Victoria Medal of the RGS, awarded in Gregory’s absence on 2 June 1919. Captain Lyons had been effectively Director of the Meteorological Office during the war. The RGS President, Colonel Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich (1843 –1929), said ‘The Victoria Medal is awarded to Prof. J. W. Gregory FRS, of Glasgow University for his many important contributions to Geographical Science. He received the Cuthbert Peek Grant in 1894 in recognition of his admirable journey of exploration in East Africa; he accompanied Sir Martin Conway to Spitsbergen in 1896; he has contributed several valuable papers which have been either read to the Society or published in the Geographical Journal, dealing with important questions of physical geography; he has also written other papers of like character, in geological and other journals, and done first-rate research work in connection with surface terrestrial forms. I regret very much that Prof. Gregory is not able to be here himself to receive this medal, being still away from England on official business. We all know him well by name; he is by no means a new friend to us, and I trust that this recognition of his services will be of permanent satisfaction to himself and his family’.

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The 1918 and subsequent Yearbooks of the Royal Society of London record Gregory as being an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of Australia and an Honorary Member of both the Geological Society of South Africa and of the Liverpool Geological Society, so these awards must have been made sometime before the end of 1918, possibly some years earlier.

Return to British East Africa (Kenya) in 1919 and the following related studies By the time the Commission’s work was finished, Gregory had received (or had engineered), an invitation from the Governor of British East Africa, General Sir Edward Northey (1868– 1953), to visit Kenya on his way home to advise on water supply and certain projected borings for water, and perhaps also, in view of his experience re-vitalizing and heading the Geological Survey of Victoria, on the establishment of a Geological Survey. He was still appealing for the latter in Nature in 1925 (Gregory 1925) as well as pleading for the retention of the Amani Institute (for research set up in German East Africa (now Tanzania) before the 1914– 18 war. Gregory was accompanied by Hon. C. W. Hobley, his old friend from his first Rift Valley expedition who had since written papers on the geology of East Africa, supplied some samples for Gregory’s (1900) paper and continued to provide collections for Gregory (now in the Hunterian Museum), the Hon. William Macgregor Ross (1876– 1940), an engineer, presumably included because of the proposed borings for water, and Captain H. L. Sikes for protection (Gregory 1920). The party explored at some time between April and September 1919. Several rapid traverses were made, some by motor car, and the results were summarized in a substantial book of 479 pages (Gregory 1921), over 400 of which were written by Gregory with the title of ‘The Rift Valleys and Geology of East Africa.’ This title was followed by an extraordinarily long sub-title of ‘An account of the origin & history of the Rift Valleys of East Africa & their relation to the contemporary earth-movements which transformed the geography of the World. With some account of the Prehistoric stone implements, soils, water supply, & mineral resources of the Kenya Colony with appendices on the edible earths, soils, fossils, rocks, and Masai place-names by Prof. E. P. Cathcart, FRS, Prof. R. A. Berry, R. B. Newton, Esq., Miss Agnes Neilson, & A. C. Holles, Esq., C. M. G.’ The last five had studied the materials collected by Gregory. In effect, the book was an update of his earlier account of the Rift Valley (but with mineral resources included) and was in itself a magnum opus, although the labour involved in the field was nothing like that in 1893, as the country’s infrastructure had progressed so greatly with a railway and roads, that travel was transformed. David Boyd (pers. comm. 2006), whose father knew Gregory, and thought he looked like a bank clerk, recalled the story of Gregory travelling by train from Mombasa to Nairobi in 1919 (nearly 500 km occupying 20 hours), in a compartment with a ‘tough’ colonial man who was out to impress the mild little man and told him how unpleasant the journey had been in the old days before the new rolling stock had arrived. ‘Oh’, said Gregory. ‘There wasn’t a railway the last time I came here’. Nevertheless, Hobley revealed (in Gregory 1920), that Gregory had had ‘a very narrow escape from a bad-tempered rhino’, so exploration still had some hazards. During his time in British East Africa, Gregory lectured in Nairobi to the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society (on 31 May 1919), and wrote a photographically-illustrated account of the Rift Valley for their Journal (Gregory 1919b), arguing for a pre-Miocene start of the rifting movements. An initial account of the results obtained and the conclusions were presented to the RGS on 5 January 1920 (Gregory 1920),

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when General Northey himself was present and spoke in the discussion, saying among other matters, how Gregory ‘used to make little trips and come and tell me about them; and everything he tells one is of the most extraordinary interest, and he has a pithy way of explaining and putting his points’. Hobley, who was by now a close friend of Gregory and stayed with him on visits to Glasgow (letter from Ursula Gregory, 15 June 1920) made the comment that with Gregory’s second examination of the geology of the Rift Valley, the time was now past for expeditionary work and systematic large-scale geological mapping was now required (i.e. a Geological Survey). The President commented on the breadth of Gregory’s grasp of Earth tectonics, but it is notable that no one spoke acclaiming their support for the more speculative, antipodal theories with which Gregory ended the lecture. A succinct summary of the lecture, including the supposed tectonic picture, was written by Gregory for Nature (Gregory 1920a). The introduction to the book (Gregory 1921) contains the following cautionary words, which explain quite a lot of Gregory’s approach, not only in this particular book, but in general. ‘Pioneer geology has to choose between the rashness of using imperfect evidence or the sterility of uncorrelated, unexplained facts’. ‘These sentences must be remembered by the reader; otherwise he may sometimes be startled at the big leap, taken with a bold “therefore” from the narrowness of the stated fact to the breadth of the deduction.’ Naturally, problems arose when this approach was also used in areas that had been relatively well studied. The book had 32 chapters allocated to four parts. Part 1 with Chapter 1 only, outlined the discovery and range of the Rift Valley. Part 2, comprising chapters 2 to 22, dealt in 230 pages with the basement rocks (‘Eozoic (Later Precambrian) and Archeozoic (Older Precambrian) Geology’) through to the Jurassic, Cretaceous and Cenozoic geology, fossil corals, the volcanic successions and history, the Rift Valley and their flanking successions, the tectonic structure, prehistoric Man in BEA, including Man and the origin of the BEA caves, water supply, mineral resources and soils. Part 3 (chapters 23 to 31) was a survey in c.100 pages of the geology of East Africa in relation to the Great Rift Valley, including Uganda, the western branch of the Great Rift Valley, German East Africa – Tanganyika, the southern end of the Rift, Madagascar, Somaliland, the Abyssinian Section, the Nile Valley and Red Sea and the Rift Valley in Palestine. Part 4 comprised Chapter 32, the relations of the Rift Valley to contemporary Earth-movements, and the appendices. Part 3 extended far beyond the ground actually inspected by Gregory and it is hardly surprising that some of his sweeping generalizations for these areas met with disapproval, for example, as regards Ethiopia, Somalia and the Afar volcanism, by Professor Giotto Dainelli (1878 –1968) (Mohr 1993). Naturally the book included much work published by others since Gregory produced his 1896 book, but the account was an important geological advance with new and synthesized information and confirmed yet again how Gregory rarely seemed to drop a subject that he had once worked on. The masterly regional geological survey and description of the Rift Valley formation would in themselves have given Gregory almost guru status as regards East Africa, the Rift Valley and major Earth tectonics. The significant advance referred to above was not the broad supposed tectonic picture, but the details of successions, volcanism and synthesized factual geology. With hindsight, we know his main thesis, that the Rift Valley was formed by peripheral fractures opening parallel to, and transverse to, the NE –SW edge along the East African coast of the foundering Indian Ocean, was wrong (Fig. 18.1). Nevertheless he correctly retained his earlier identification of an initial period of uplift, deduced from the drainage pattern, before relaxation of the uplift caused what he regarded as the equivalent of the keystone at the apex of the arch to fall in, and this faulting dropped down the Rift Valley block. Essentially this gave a tensional origin to the faulting. He thought that the downward sinking of the block

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Fig. 18.1. Diagonal tectonic lines of East Africa, and their influence on the supposed sinking of the site of the present Indian Ocean (Gregory 1921). This illustrates the Suess-like sweeping generalizations Gregory made from reconnaissance data.

caused the gushing out of lava along the marginal faults to give the volcanic rocks, each episode of rift sinking being followed by renewed volcanism. He considered that the initiation of this activity was contemporaneous with the end-Cretaceous Deccan Plateau volcanism in India, the withdrawal of so much magma leading to the foundering of the Indian Ocean, although he supposed there was an even thicker Deccan basalt succession under

the Indian Ocean immediately west of India. However, he recognized that most of the African Rift Valley fracturing and volcanism was much younger, between the Oligocene and the Pliocene, which he connected, in a complicated explanation, with the Alpine to Himalayan Miocene mountain building (Fig. 18.2). He correctly supposed that the Alps were formed by the northward movement of Africa against Europe while less correct in

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Fig. 18.2. Supposed cross-section of a sinking ocean and connected marginal volcanism, such as the Indian Ocean and the Deccan basalts. Volcanic eruptions due to the plastic material (black) displaced by the sinking of the floor of the ocean basin rising up the step faults (F) and escaping through the volcanoes (V). From Geology of Today (Gregory 1915b).

detail, but right in concept, the Himalayas were produced by the southwards movement of central Asia against India. He thought these movements were accompanied by the sinking of the Indian Ocean, with the Great Rift Valley forming the roughly north – south line between the northward moving Africa and the southward pushed crust to the east (although this would have suggested wrench faulting, not pull-apart extension along the Rift Valley). Overall, he still retained his quaint antipodal theories, viewing Africa as a stable continental block under tension because it was antipodal to the sinking Pacific Ocean, which caused compression of the crust under it and ‘buckled the western edge of the (American) continent’ (Gregory 1920) giving the marginal parallel fold mountains and characteristic Pacific coast. Considering its 479 pages, the book was produced surprisingly quickly – in only a little over two years after Gregory’s return. It was reviewed in early 1922 in Nature by ‘G. W. L.’ (George William Lamplugh (1859 –1926) who had worked in East Africa), who correctly thought that the geological sketch maps and sections were roughly drawn, poorly printed and with much exaggerated vertical scales, but there were some excellent scenic photographs. He was not certain that Gregory was correct in ascribing the Rift Valley to tension, as compression had been suggested in Uganda, but history has vindicated Gregory’s view. The account is among the last major scientific contributions made by Gregory, as his account of the geology stands independent of the putative causes, and while his later addresses on the histories of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans made more scientific impact, they erroneously synthesized existing information, whereas the second Rift Valley book added much primary geological information that was not overtaken until the much later systematic mapping of Kenya was undertaken. In closing this brief summary, it is worth noting that in Bill Bryson’s (2004) ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’, Bryson considers that in 1919 Gregory made one of the most important discoveries that helped to elucidate the origins of the human race. On p.560, Bryson wrote ‘This is the Great Rift Valley, which arcs across 3,000 miles of east Africa, marking the tectonic rupture that is setting Africa adrift from Asia. Here, perhaps 65 kilometres out of Nairobi, along the baking valley floor, is an ancient site called Olorgesailie, which once stood beside a large and pleasant lake. In 1919, long after the lake had vanished, a geologist named J. W. Gregory was scouting the area for mineral deposits [sic] when he came across a stretch of open ground littered with anomalous dark stones that had clearly been shaped by human hand. He had found one of the great sites of Acheulean tool manufacture . . .’ [and recognised it]. ‘After its discovery by the geologist Gregory, Olorgesailie lay undisturbed for over two decades before the famed husband and wife team of Louis and Mary Leakey began an excavation that isn’t completed yet. What the Leakeys found was a site stretching to ten acres or so, where tools were made in incalculable numbers for roughly a million years, from about 1.2 million years ago to two hundred thousand years ago.’

This opinion about Gregory was corroborated by an earlier statement on 15 January 1929 by Professor Hans Reck (1886 – 1937)

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of the Geological-Palaeontological Institute of the University of Berlin, who according to Mary Leakey (1913 – 96) (1978), discovered the first skeleton of a Stone Age man in East Africa in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Reck is reported as stating that Professor J. W. Gregory is ‘the father of prehistoric anthropology in Africa’ (The Times, 16 January 1929), presumably referring to Gregory’s 1896 reports. What needs to be added to put Gregory’s Olorgesailie find in Kenya in the correct perspective is that because Gregory thought the beds on which he found the ‘stone picks’ were Miocene in age, he understandably thought the picks represented diatomite mining tools of Stone Age men, superficially left on the surface, rather than archaeological relicts that had been stratified within the Pleistocene Olorgesaile Formation, and re-exposed by erosion (Isaac 1978). Only shortly after the appearance of Gregory’s second Rift Valley book, he reviewed Prof. E. Krenkel’s (1922) ‘Die Bruchzonen Ostafrikas: Tektonik, Vulkanismus, Erdbeben und Schwereanomalien’ for Nature (Gregory 1923) which he did at some length, but summarized the position thus: ‘Between Suess’s simple theory of the Rift Valley formed from a single series of fractures in the uppermost Kainozoic and my more complex classification with its three different series of fractures separated by four volcanic periods, Prof. Krenkel adopts an intermediate position’. But by this time Teale & Campbell Smith (1923) had independently confirmed Gregory’s deduction that the earliest lavas in the Rift Valley were Cretaceous in age. During parts of 1920 to 1921, the completion of the updated account of the African Rift Valley and the description of the material collected during his 1919 visit to BEA occupied much time with Ursula Gregory typing most of the book. The lecture to the RGS (Gregory 1920) and then publication of this book (Gregory 1921) confirmed Gregory as an authority on the geology of East Africa. It was therefore natural that when The Times sponsored the first aeroplane flight from Cairo to the Cape, it was Gregory who was asked to comment on the findings made from the air (The Times, 21 February 1920). As flying was confined to daylight hours, the terrain could be inspected and Gregory was highly enthusiastic about the possibilities opened up. In particular the discovery of a new volcanic field in the Bayuda desert between Merowe and Berber in the Sudan was of especial interest to Gregory, as being just west of the Red Sea, it conformed to the Gregory expectation that as the Red Sea was part of the Great Rift Valley, it too should have contiguous volcanic rocks. Gregory spasmodically continued to publish on the geology of East Africa in the 1920s as new collections became available, but instead of doing everything himself, he began to farm out material to experts, either in Glasgow University or outside, such as in Gregory (1927) on ‘Further Jurassic fossils from Kenya Colony’ based on collecting by Edward James Wayland (1888 – 1966), ammonite identification by L. F. Spath and bivalve identification by J. Weir, or Gregory (1925a) in Wyllie & Smellie (1925).

References Boswell, P. G. H. 1936. John Walter Gregory-1864 –1932. Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, 1, 53 – 59. Bryson, B. 2004. A Short History of Nearly Everything. Black Swan, London. Calcutta University (Sadler) Commission Report. 1919. 1 –5, Report; 7– 13, Evidence. Superintendent of Government Printing India, Calcutta. (Vols 1 –5 were also published in British Parliamentary Papers, 1919). Frater, M. & Gregory, J. W. 1917. The volcanic eruption of 1913 on Ambrym Island, New Hebrides. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 4, 496– 503. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession.

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Gregory, J. W. 1900. Contributions to the Geology of British East Africa—Part III. The nepheline-syenite and camptonitic dykes intrusive in the Coast Series. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 56, 205– 222. Gregory, J. W. 1905. The Southern Ocean and its climatic control over Australasia. Transactions of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Proceedings of Section E, 329– 349. Gregory, J. W. 1906. The education of mining engineers. Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers, 31, 502– 525. Gregory, J. W. 1915. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war and the geology of the potash salts. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 71– 72. Gregory, J. W. 1915a. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war. The Contemporary Review, No. 600, 769–779. Gregory, J. W. 1915b. Geology of Today: A Popular Introduction in Simple Language. Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd. London. Gregory, J. W. 1916. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war and the geology of the potash salts. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 16, 1– 33. Gregory, J. W. 1918. Geology of Mesopotamia and its Borderlands. The Geographical Section of the Naval Intelligence Department, Great Britain; HMSO. Gregory, J. W. 1919. A low-level glaciated surface in the Eastern Himalayas. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 6, 397–406. Gregory, J. W. 1919a. The Genesis of the Earth. Popular Lectures of the Astronomical Society of India, Session 1918–19, 11 –20. Gregory, J. W. 1919b. The geological history of the Rift Valley. Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society, 6, 429– 440. Gregory, J. W. 1920. The African rift valleys. The Geographical Journal, 56, 14 –47. Gregory, J. W. 1920a. The African rift valley. Nature, 104, 518–519. London, Series B, 210, 115– 151. Gregory, J. W. 1921. The Rift Valleys and Geology of East Africa. Seeley, Service & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1923. The structure of the Great Rift Valley. Nature, 112, 514– 516. Gregory, J. W. 1925. Science and administration in East Africa. Nature, 115, 753– 755.

Gregory, J. W. 1925a. Introduction and also the fossil corals. In: Wyllie, B. N. K. & Smellie, W. R. (eds) The collection of Fossils and Rocks from Somaliland made by B. N. K. Wyllie and W. R. Smellie. With an account by them of the Geology of part of Somaliland, an Introduction –the Geology of Somaliland and its relations to the Great Rift Valley by J. W. Gregory (p. 1– 7) and descriptions of the Collections by E. D. Currie, W. N. Edwards, J. W. Gregory (Fossil Corals, p. 22 – 45), A T. Neilson, R. B. Newton, L. F. Spath & J. Weir. Monographs of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University, 1. Gregory, J. W. 1927. Further Jurassic fossils from Kenya Colony. Geological Magazine, 64, 325. Gregory, J. W. (Editor & Contributor) 1929. The Structure of Asia. Methuen, London. G. W. L. 1922. The structure of East Africa. Nature, 109, 233–234. Harrison, J. V. 1932. The Bakhtiari Country, South-Western Persia. The Geographical Journal, 80, 193–210. Isaac, G. L. L. 1978. The Olorgesailie formation: stratigraphy, tectonics and the palaeogeographic context of the Middle Pleistocene archaeological sites. In: Bishop, W. W. (ed.) Geological Background to Fossil Man. Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, 173– 206. Mohr, P. 1993. The half-centenary of the publication of ‘Geologia dell’Africa Orientale by Giotto Dainelli: an attempted assessment. Bulletin of the Italian Geological Society, 112, 635– 646. Teale, E. O. & Campbell Smith, W. 1923. Nepheline-bearing lavas and intrusive rocks from south of the Zambezi River, with a note on an outcrop of Karroo lavas in the Buzi valley, Portuguese East Africa. Geological Magazine, 60, 226–237. Wyllie, B. N. K. & Smellie, W. R. 1925. The collection of Fossils and Rocks from Somaliland made by B. N. K. Wyllie and W. R. Smellie. With an account by them of the Geology of part of Somaliland, an Introduction –the Geology of Somaliland and its relations to the Great Rift Valley by J. W. Gregory (p. 1– 7) and descriptions of the Collections by E. D. Currie, W. N. Edwards, J. W. Gregory (Fossil Corals, p. 22 – 45), A T. Neilson, R. B. Newton, L. F. Spath & J. Weir. Monographs of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University, 1.

Chapter 19 1919 –29: return to Glasgow and subsequent activities

Gregory, now aged 55, returned to Glasgow at an unascertained date in the summer of 1919 to resume his teaching duties. Gregory’s publications in the decade 1920–30 are now chiefly remembered for his opposition to continental drift and to a lesser extent, the two monumental presidential addresses to the Geological Society (GSL) concerning the histories of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, all of which are dealt with in Chapter 20. Quite remarkable was the continuing volume and increasingly wide scope of his publications, an entry into pure geology textbook writing (as distinct from geography and popular elementary geological summaries), and a renewed burst of work on Pleistocene glacial deposits, geomorphology and racial matters, combined with continuation in broadly the same fields as previously. At least 15 publications have been identified, including one book, in 1927 alone, when he was aged 63. However, some of the papers in this decade’s work displayed rapid, careless studies that did not meet the increasing standards of contemporary knowledge and specialization. During the ’twenties Gregory visited Burma in 1921, SE Tibet with his son in 1922, Canada and some of the southern states of the USA in 1924 when he was President of the BA (Section E), probably Switzerland at Christmas 1925 for skiing (29 November 1925 letter from Ursula to A. Percival), Spain with Ursula in 1926, and in 1928 and 1928–9 France and Switzerland. In 1920, he acquired a yacht which he sailed around the coast of western Scotland carrying out geological and geomorphological studies during part of most summers. So his restless travelling continued unabated and much of this was probably self-financed, especially in the British Isles, assisted no doubt by royalties received from his books. Shortly after his return to Glasgow, on 1 December 1919, he was again elected to the Royal Society (RS) Council with the burden of travelling to and from London. Starting on 11 December 1919, he attended all but three of the 14 Council meetings between then and 30 November 1920, and was on the Geology Committee for three years until December 1922. The University Court minutes show that on Gregory’s return from Africa he increased the departmental staff by four ‘temporary’ appointments, purchased furniture and made improvements to the collections. In the museum, an assistant curator was approved and the purchase of cabinets and fossil collections and part of the Grey Collection was received. Subsequently, on 26 April 1920, he pointed out that his salary as professor had been paid for nearly two years by the India Office, thus relieving the University endowment fund, which could therefore pay for him to have an assistant. So by 8 March 1922, two lecturers, John Weir and Agnes Neilson, were appointed in the department on salaries of £370 per year, and four demonstrators at £50 each, Tyrrell by this time being on £700 (so Gregory must have been on over £1000 a year), with Benjamin Hilton Barrett (1896 – 1947) being Carnegie Trust funded on £400. In the museum, an Assistant Curator, Ethel D. Currie, was appointed on £300. By November 1923, two research rooms had been taken from zoology and 27 additional microscopes purchased to cope with the increasing student numbers. There is good evidence that Gregory had a friendly relationship with his staff and was informed about matters involving their families. His 3 March 1922 letter to W. R. Smellie (UG Archives ACCN3299) starts by congratulating him on his engagement although his later words in the letter that ‘I have been growing

here more and more of a hermit so as to enjoy the more the joy of home life’ would probably not have been recognized by his own wife and family! On 20 January 1921, Professors Gregory and Kerr (zoology) were appointed by the Senate to give evidence to the Lord Chalmers Committee on the protection of the inhabitants of the Colonies and Protectorates against disease. Considering that many academics in their sixth decade retreat from research into administration and committee work, Gregory’s continued output is notable even if more of it comprised broad generalizations, rather than detailed laboratory and fieldwork, although some of both were maintained and he had a revival of coral publications towards 1930. Additionally, he organized small expert research teams whose results appeared in the Gregory-inspired series of Monographs of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, the first of which was Wyllie & Smellie (1925). Gregory’s son Christopher who was studying for BSc degrees in engineering and in mining engineering had to defer completing the required six months of underground work planned for the summer of 1921, because of a national coal strike, and instead did it over the winter of 1920–21 at the Hamilton Palace Colliery. (C. J. Gregory mss). Although this delayed his graduation, it enabled him to spend several weeks in the summer of 1921 sailing with his father on their yacht.

Energy studies The war had emphasized how dependent Britain was on remote sources for oil. Consequently, the Government allocated £1 000 000 for drilling and the search for oil onland in Britain. Gregory’s very first paper (Gregory 1919) on his return to Glasgow, which appeared in December 1919, considered ‘The prospects of oil wells in Britain’ and where these speculative oil wells might be drilled. It seems likely that he was one of several geologists whose opinions were sought, perhaps through the Royal Society. Although Gregory made it clear that he agreed with ‘the overwhelming balance of British geological opinion that . . . is pessimistic as to the prospects of success’, nevertheless he argued that the places selected for boring, near Edinburgh and south of Sheffield in the Derbyshire Coalfield, gave the best chance of striking oil and he argued why this was so. It is clear from this account that Gregory had become knowledgeable about the British historical records of oil and gas discoveries, albeit that they were all trivial ones. The Government borings were unsuccessful, but Gregory had become interested in the search for oil and was aware that oil reserves were much more limited than those of coal. Partly because of his wartime work on sourcing raw materials for the nation, he had become alerted to the prodigious rate at which some natural resources were being used, and on 10 March 1920 he addressed the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (RPSG) on ‘The conservation of our coal supplies’. In this (Gregory 1920), and in a similar article published in June 1920 (Gregory 1920a), he pointed out that the UK in 1800 produced two thirds of the world’s coal output, by 1860 60%, and by 1913, the UK, USA and Germany produced 87% of the world’s output, and at that rate of production there was enough coal in the UK for 600 years. But presciently, he pointed out that if the

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 163– 185. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.19

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cost continued to rise, cheaper imports would undercut and destroy home output. The later headings of his account give the flavour of the paper: the maintenance of our coal supplies; discovery of concealed coalfields, national boring and notification of private bores and wells; working of deeper seams; working of thinner seams; the working of thin seams at a loss; other sources of power; economy in the use of coal. The same theme, but internationally, of how to extend the life of the world’s coal resources in the face of increasing costs of mining deeper seams, was stressed in the March 1921 Scientia (Gregory 1921) when economy in the use of coal was emphasized. Gregory also revealed his support for nationalizing the coal mines. In a surprisingly modern theme, he also considered the use of hydropower, wind, tides, sunlight, the interior heat of the Earth, hot water in volcanic districts, and warned of the limited supplies of oil compared with increasing demand. By 14 October 1920, Gregory was lecturing the Geological Society of Glasgow (GSG) on the related theme of ‘The future of oil supply’, emphasizing that the use of oil was increasing at a rate far in excess of the rate of discovery of new reserves (TGSG, 17, 152), a warning repeated in Gregory (1921a).

Glacial studies Gregory’s interpretations of the Pleistocene glacial deposits of the British Isles were in general idiosyncratic, erroneous, and significantly different from most others both in his time and since. For instance, he stated that although the material of drumlins was due to glacial deposition, the shape of many of them was due to post-glacial erosion, a view first expressed in his description of The Geology of the Glasgow District (Gregory with others 1915, p. 160) but later (Gregory 1926) expressed as wind erosion with respect to the Scottish drumlins. He seemed to have a fixation in regarding so many characteristic features of glacial topography as not glacially related at all but due to later erosion. He was also reluctant to recognize eskers as sub-glacial river deposits, preferring to ascribe many of them to marginal ice sheet deposits. Even more surprising was his belief that much of the boulder clay was a glacial marine deposit. Consequently, despite the amount he published on glacial studies, he is not generally referenced today. Who refereed some of the papers discussed below is unknown, but is an intriguing matter. Somewhat unexpectedly, in view of his readiness to generalize and synthesize the big picture from his studies, Gregory does not appear to have got involved in the arguments about what today we would call the Permo-Carboniferous Snowball Earth Theory being pressed by Coleman (1908, 1926; full review in Eyles 2004) or the problems of the global limits of the Pleistocene glaciation.

Irish eskers One of Gregory’s first papers submitted after his 1919 return was on The Irish Eskers (Gregory 1920b), submitted on 6 February 1920. It is uncertain when the fieldwork was done for this account, probably over some time because quite extensive travelling around Ireland was involved, but he states the main effort was in two bouts separated by ‘a few months,’ which must therefore have been before he went to India. Certainly some of the work was carried out in July 1916 with his son, using bicycles (postcard record of a three day stay at Clara by Christopher), and some in September to early October 1917 as already recorded by his letter to Tyrrell of 4 October 1917. It is possible that he carried out a spell earlier in that year between jobs at the War Office, especially as there are specimens in the Hunterian Museum from Tyrone and Ballinasloe (Co Galway) dated 1917. Disarray in Ireland over independence increased markedly after the war, in

1919 and 1920, so Gregory may have decided to complete the study with what fieldwork he had already done, as he makes no mention of any problems of access that would have existed in 1919. The other possible time for most of the work was the summer of 1915, alternating with fieldwork in Wales, already described, as war restrictions prevented him making his usual summer trip abroad. However, Gregory also reported that he had ‘made many visits to Irish eskers’ so he may have been in Ireland in the summer of 1913. Since he described eskers from Woodlawn (Co Galway), to Ballinasloe, to Clara, to Streamstown, near Tullamore and Kilbeggan, Athlone, Athenry, Ballyhaunis –Dunmore, Ross –Gortachalla (Co. Galway), and Greenhills near Dublin, and he also visited Co. Tyrone and the north, considerable travelling was involved. He pointed out that the main eskers were transverse to the alignment of the drumlins and he thought the eskers had four different origins. He emphasized the number supposedly formed along the margins of glaciers, rather than from rivers under ice sheets, as was the favoured explanation, as it remains today. However, the work was superficial, almost entirely based on topography, but glacial studies had moved on from their early beginnings whereas Gregory’s work had not. His son records from Ireland what presumably Gregory had told him that ‘the eskers are composed of boulder clay of which the boulders . . . have marine incrustations on top of glacial scratches’ which was part of Gregory’s evidence for a late Pleistocene marine inundation across Ireland (postcard c. 14 July 1916). The glacial expert, Professor Percy F. Kendall (later FRS, Fig. 19.1), a more senior man than Gregory and then near retiring, took him to task in over five pages of criticism, some of which is quoted below because it shows quite serious objections, that Gregory was undertaking more than he could achieve to a high standard, and also shows why polymathic studies became unsustainable as knowledge made such great advances that superficial expeditionary-type work led to serious errors and generally only experts could sustain first class researches. Kendall (1921) wrote: ‘Of Professor Gregory’s paper entitled ‘The Irish Eskers’, it is difficult to express my exact sentiments, for, despite the dignity of the Philosophical Transactions quarto, I feel it does less than justice to the subject, the author’s position as a geologist, and to the large public to which his writings appeal. Of new field observations there are very few, and those few are susceptible of other interpretations than those the author puts upon them. The citations of the literature of British Glacial Geology are almost confined to a bygone generation; and the illustrations, where original, rarely exhibit features that are truly diagnostic, while in more than one instance the text is directly contradictory of the figure. The proposition which the author sets out to establish is that . . . the Irish eskers are mainly marginal – a species of well-washed bank laid down parallel to the edge of a dwindling ice-sheet that terminated in a rather shallow sea. Others he regards as the products of glacial rivers, but he combats the opinion that they were laid down either beneath the ice or in ice canons . . . As the author himself remarks, ‘The first test, whether the eskers were due to sub-glacial rivers or were deposited as marginal banks, is the sources of the esker materials’, yet he has made no attempt whatever to accumulate this vital evidence beyond a few casual references; nor has he even used the data already provided by the Geological Survey and by other workers.’

This last point, which was true, must have particularly rankled with Gregory because, as his account of The Geology of the Glasgow District (Gregory with others 1915) showed, he had had class exercises on day excursions counting the numbers of the various types of boulders in the boulder clay near Glasgow, for example, at one site alone up to 700 in total, classified into seven groups. Other criticisms, not all repeated here, were made, including the fact that Gregory sometimes concluded the direction of ice flow was the opposite of that deduced by others, but Gregory was accused of providing little or no evidence for his conclusions. The principal disagreement, however, was with Gregory’s view that the whole of central Ireland was submerged below the sea by up to 400 feet (122 m), and that the widespread boulder clay was formed by deposition from icebergs melting in this sea. The marine origin of the boulder clay was based on a few marine fossils in less than a handful of sites, plus the supposed difficulties

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almost no reference to Gregory’s work. ‘Professor J. W. Gregory’s conclusions were totally at variance with the results here submitted’ except that most of the Central Plain eskers were marginal formation features. As regards the major Evishanoran Esker, Co. Tyrone, ‘To suppose that glaciers issued from hills only six miles to the south and some 1400 feet [430 m] lower, as suggested by Gregory would be a hopeless contradiction of levels of snowline in this area.’ (Charlesworth 1924, p. 263). However, unusually, four years later, after Gregory (1925) had revisited the Evishanoran Esker, he re-iterated his opinions over that esker, but also pointed out that Charlesworth (1924) agreed with Gregory that eskers were deposited along the margins of glaciers and that the Irish glaciers spread from the mountains and not from a mass of ice over the Central Plain. Gregory (1926a) and Charlesworth (1926) disagreed over the origin of the esker and whether the ice sheet was to the east or the west. The 12 km long Evishanoran Esker, the largest in south-central Ulster, runs north – south except at the southern end where there is a prominent morainic ridge, orientated approximately east – west. As McCabe (2008) has summarized, the north –south part is a coarse boulder gravel transported northwards in a closed tunnel system under the ice that climbed uphill about 200 m, whereas the east –west ridge lies on that deposit and is younger, being related to deltaic sedimentation along the western limits of the younger Lough Neagh drumlin field. Since neither Charlesworth nor Gregory recognized the different ages of the two deposits, their different views are understandable today. This also emphasizes the difficulties of unravelling the complex series of Pleistocene glacial and interglacial deposits without really detailed field studies and some radiometric age determinations.

English eskers

Fig. 19.1. Professor Percy Fry Kendall (1856– 1936), reproduced from Fearnsides (1936). With acknowledgements to the Royal Society of London.

of having the required barriers in a lake deposit, whereas of course throughout ‘thousands of square miles’ of the Irish boulder clay, marine organisms are absent. Kendall (1921) was particularly incensed by Gregory’s claim that most British geologists now accepted a marine origin for the boulder clay of the British Isles. ‘If this is the case, then I can only say that it is the best-kept secret in geological literature. Where are’ [the publications and] ‘who are the’ [supporters of this view]? Gregory (1921b) replied; Kendall (1921a) responded, and Gregory (1921c) replied again, in all not making a convincing reply except ‘He [Kendall] complains of lack of deliberation. The first of my many visits to Irish eskers was in 1887. At my time of life I cannot hope for equal further deliberation’ [!]. He could only quote the aged Professor Bonney’s BA address in 1910 as a national authority that agreed with the marine origin of the boulder clay, and as regards the nature, and therefore the source, of the undescribed boulders, state that ‘it is so seldom that the last direction of movement can be inferred from the nature of the included rocks’ that he had not thought it worth including such data in general. Three years later in 1924, John Kaye Charlesworth (1889 – 1972) the Irish glacial expert, published his 140-page magnum opus on the glacial geology of NW Ireland and ominously made

The dust from the bust-up with Kendall was still thick in the air in 1921 when Gregory submitted his analogous study of the English (and Welsh, but not in the title) eskers which was published in the first part of the Geological Magazine in February 1922 (Gregory 1922). This made no reference to Kendall’s criticisms of the Irish work and either no concessions, or almost no concessions, to Kendall’s comments. Possibly giving the percentages of the boulder types in one locality near Bamburgh, in Northumberland and making no reference to a marine origin for any boulder clay, might have been a Kendall influence, but the style of the work as a whole suggests the fieldwork predated the criticisms, or ignored them. The fieldwork may have been completed in April to early summer 1921, but with observations from much earlier times, such as April 1914 when Gregory was allegedly on holiday, or July 1915 when Christopher and Gregory passed through Durham (postcard note by Christopher). Gregory’s survey ranged over Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Cumberland–North Lancashire (i.e. The Lake District), The Midlands, and Wales. A surprising number of these areas had been visited by Gregory, but not all, and some fleetingly; ‘as seen from the railway’. He made extensive use of published accounts, especially as regards the nature of the deposits as distinct from their topography. He then classified the glacial deposits or ‘eskers’ in inverted commas as either osars (rare fluvio-glacial ridges deposited as receding river deltas) or kames of a fluvioglacial, glacieluvial or residual nature. Again Kendall (1922) pointed out the superficial nature of Gregory’s fieldwork, and his ‘judgement [of the results], uttered with pontifical assurance in ludicrous contrast with the enormous lacunae in his data’. Kendall took two of the areas Gregory examined which Kendall knew in detail. One, the Laneshaw Delves, SSE of Ilkley in Yorkshire, was a place well-known in the literature as being where boulders of Carboniferous Limestone were dug out of the boulder clay and burnt to make lime, leaving the hummocky impressions and discarded Millstone Grit boulders

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that Gregory had seen, but had neither appreciated the origin of the holes, nor had read about them, despite the name of the place (‘delves’, plural of delf, a place where people ‘dig and delve’) and an extensive literature describing the limestone boulders. Moreover, Gregory had ‘put the ice [sheet] on the wrong side of the moraine – an error of which he was guilty in his memoir on the Irish Eskers, and perpetuated again in regard to the Roman Ridge at Lindrick (not Lendrick), near Ripon.’ (Kendall 1922). After pointing out a number of misquotations and other errors, such as a glacial ridge 8 km south of York in which the heights quoted were wrong, and the origin, although it was crescentshaped, as ‘a rise left by denudation’, but with no evidence for this denudation given, and the citing of a Mr J. E. Clark as favouring the deposition of certain deposits ‘by floating ice’ (thus supporting the marine deposition of much of the boulder clay) when the said Clark had published his change of mind 25 years earlier, Kendall concluded with the following paragraph: ‘After this demonstration of Professor Gregory’s inability to interpret even the most patent and obvious phenomena in the field, and his, I hope, unparalleled carelessness in quotation, I for one, grateful as I am to him for many ingenious and fruitful suggestions, must refuse to accept without corroboration of more deliberate workers either his facts or his inferences.

In general, this verdict has been endorsed by history. Gregory wisely made no reply. It should not be assumed that Gregory and Kendall were enemies, because Kendall was careful to give Gregory credit for ‘many ingenious and fruitful suggestions’ which implied at least a previous close talking relationship, if not so warm after the above words! Nevertheless, Gregory was later to serve under Kendall’s chairmanship on a BA committee to investigate (of all subjects!) ‘The Quaternary of the British Isles’, which does not suggest a complete fall-out between the two men, both of whom had close Royal School of Mines (RSM) connections, overlapping interests, and had known each other for many years. For instance, both had served on the prolonged (1910– 1923) BA committee preparing a list of characteristic fossils, chaired by Kendall. As was common with Gregory, he did not allow scientific differences to become personal, and he seems to have shrugged off the criticisms and continued unabashed as the following shows. Ever an individual, once decided, he never seems to have modified his opinions on certain matters, even when fresh evidence was produced and the general consensus isolated him. Gregory’s final contribution to English glacial history was a short note in Kendall’s backyard about the glacial geology of Swaledale in Yorkshire (Gregory 1927). This was a spin-off from a weekend visit with Audrey and Christopher to Swaledale to see the total eclipse of the sun on 29 June 1927 (A. Mendell, pers. comm., 2009).

Scottish glacial deposits Although Gregory had been writing on this subject since 1907, he had a renewed burst of activity in this field following his summaries of the Irish, English and Welsh deposits. On 12 March 1925 he lectured the GSG on ‘The moraine, boulder clay and glacial sequence of south-western Scotland’ (Gregory 1925a) and provoked some disagreement. Ernest Masson Anderson (1877 – 1960) (TGSG, 17, 467–468) rejected Gregory’s proposed submarine deposition of boulder clay, and the source of the marine shells in the till, stated to have been found by John Smith at heights above sea level ranging up to 1061 feet (325 m), was also controversial. It is curious and inexplicable that having clearly established in Spitzbergen that glaciers could move material uphill, including seashells (Garwood & Gregory 1898), Gregory still clung onto interpreting a few scraps of marine fossils as evidence of the former height and widespread extent of the sea. He concluded that moraines (used strictly as deposits from glaciers) were absent from large areas of the Southern Uplands and the Midland Valley and the few identified

were confined to the higher ground, usually .1500 feet (460 m), did not reach the coast, or occurred below an extreme of 175 feet (53 m) and, in a sweeping generalization, were all later than the boulder clay, which he still held was a marine deposit from floating ice. He even re-interpreted the grooves he had described in the Lugton glaciated surfaces (Gregory 1907) as due to floating ice because they indicated movement up the valley, whereas a glacier would have been moving down the valley. Despite this curious proclivity, the paper made early attempts to correlate these Scottish glacial deposits with those of England and with the continental divisions of the Wurm, Riss and post Mindel periods, with their clear recognition that several glacial and interglacial periods were involved. On 3 June 1925, Gregory submitted two papers to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), which were both revised on 6 November and published on 19 and 20 March 1926, dealing with Scottish drumlins and Scottish kames (Gregory 1926, 1926b). On Scottish drumlins, Gregory (1926) concluded that, although widely accepted as due to glacial deposition of boulder clay and that they retain their original shape, he deduced that some were parallel and others transverse, or even at right angles, to former ice-flow directions so that their shape has been ‘moulded mainly by sub-aerial erosion guided by wind’, ‘as is shown by the bending of trees upon their crests’(!). Such a perverse view was shared by few others then or now, and again seemed to ignore the possibility of several different phases of ice movement. Using kame for a ridge of sand and gravel deposited outside a glacier, along its edge, Gregory (1926b) stated (p. 396) ‘I have during the past 20 years visited nearly all the kames on the mainland of Scotland’ (an astonishing record of travelling by rail, cycle and foot before motor cars were common) and then listed dozens of localities from Caithness to the Solway Firth, but ‘only about 20 are true kames, and these occur mostly in Eastern Scotland’. The rest were drumlins (made of boulder clay), residual kames, moraines and ‘indefinite mounds of sand and gravel’. These last two accounts emphasized again the sometimes idiosyncratic conclusions of Gregory and his restless energy and constant need to be travelling rather than studying any of these deposits in detail. Of more lasting value was Gregory & Currie’s (1928) account of vertebrate fossils in the Hunterian Museum from the glacial and post-glacial beds of Scotland, reviewed anonymously in Nature, 123, 623, which the reviewer recognized involved many years work. Also, where ‘the views expressed are matters of controversy, the authors have been careful to direct attention to other opinions’. Gregory still held to the marine origin of the boulder clay in this publication. Overall, Gregory’s interpretations in the 1920s on the British and Irish glacial deposits were a disaster; seeing the deposits in a quick survey was not enough, what was needed was careful systematic study.

Geological Society of Glasgow After Gregory’s return from India and Kenya he was less closely involved in the running of the Glasgow Society than before he left. He was not an office-bearer, nor did he attend the meetings so regularly; nevertheless he did continue to attend and to give lectures to the society about once a year. The first lecture on the ‘Rift Valleys of Africa’ was given as soon as 9 October 1919, almost immediately after his arrival, and covered the whole of the Great Rift from the Jordan Valley, to the Red Sea to south of Tanganyika (TGSG, 17, 146). A year later on 14 October 1920, he gave a lecture to the society on ‘The future of oil supply’, pointing out that the use of oil was increasing much faster than the discovery of new supplies (TGSG, 17, 152). Both these topics were ‘spinoffs’ from accounts he was preparing, or had prepared, for publication elsewhere, the first his book (Gregory 1921d), and the second as a popular article (Gregory 1921a). Gregory’s next

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recorded contribution was on 14 April 1921 when he complimented E. B. Bailey on the latter’s address to the society on ‘The structure of the SW Highlands’. Gregory said he had accompanied Bailey in the field . . . his work would always stand out as a notable contribution to Scottish Geology . . . and ‘Nature is never simple’ (TGSG, 17, 157– 158). Considering the outrageously simple cross-section through the Highlands that Gregory himself was later to produce (Gregory 1931), and his notable lack of endorsement of Bailey’s views, it seems he either did not understand, or he did not accept, Bailey’s proposals. Although Gregory attended the meetings sporadically, and his son first lectured the society on 10 November 1921 on the ‘Parallel roads at Loch Tulla’ (C. J. Gregory 1921), it was not until 11 January 1923 that Gregory lectured to the society again, this time on his recent journey to Chinese Tibet with his son, under the title ‘To the Alps of Chinese Tibet’ (TGSG, 17, 334). His next lecture on ‘The moraines, boulder clay and glacial sequence of SW Scotland’ on 12 March 1925 (TGSG, 17, 467) has been dealt with above. On 11 November 1926, Gregory (1927a) lectured on ‘The sea lochs of the Outer Hebrides’ (drawing on some of his observations made while yachting), then on 9 February 1928 on ‘The geology of Loch Lomond’ (Gregory 1928, 1928a), emphasizing the roles of faulting and glacial action along the lines of his pre-war papers on Scottish lochs. On 13 December 1928 he spoke on ‘The sequence in Islay and Jura’, largely based on a visit, probably on the Corsair in summer 1928, with William John McCallien (1902 – 1981) (Gregory 1930) to examine the Dalradian succession of the two islands. Unfortunately Gregory did not accept the Islay Anticline, his succession supposedly went upwards from east Islay westwards through the main Jura Quartzite to the Mull of Oa Phyllites, which is the reverse of the truth as conclusively demonstrated by Allison (1933) working from Glasgow under E. B. Bailey. Gregory made other errors. His final lecture to the society was on 13 November 1930 when he delivered the 17th Thomas Hawksley Lecture to a joint meeting with the Glasgow and West of Scotland branch of the Institution of Mechanical Engineering and also the University Geological Society, under the title ‘The machinery of the Earth’ (Gregory 1930a). On 9 December 1926, P. G. H. Boswell (1927) was due to give a talk on ‘The rarer detrital minerals of British sedimentary rocks’. Boswell’s train from Liverpool was late and Ursula had to feed the party a full three-course dinner in 40 minutes before the lecture (U. J. Gregory, mss). An old student of Gregory’s, J. M. Wordie of Cambridge, lectured to the society for the second time on 14 January 1926, this time on Jan Mayen.

Visit to Burma in 1921 During September to late October or early November 1921, Gregory made an unexpected visit to southern Burma (Myanmar) ‘on about a week’s notice in September’ (16 November 1921 letter from Ursula to A. Percival), mainly to examine the oil-bearing shales which were being drilled for oil by Messrs. Moolla Sons Ltd (Gregory 1923). His Burma field notebook has more details than are given below but only has entries dated from 9 –21 October, so he must have missed much of the first term. Although no documentary evidence has been uncovered, it seems likely that he was acting as a consultant to the firm, who would then have paid his expenses and a fee which may have been intended to partly finance his proposed expedition to SE Tibet, which was to start from Burma. Although he had lectured on his concern about the increasing use of oil, and was familiar with the geology of gold, base metals, iron, and coal mining, he had not been personally involved in the problems of prospecting and extracting oil from oil-bearing shales, which were then being extracted on a large scale in the Midland Valley of Scotland and Gregory was familiar with that process, as shown by what he included in Gregory (1919).

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The letter dated 3 March 1922 to W. R. Smellie (UG Archives, ACCN3299) reveals that the quantity of oil shale was large, the quality good but (price) competition with the free (flowing) oil of the Burma Oil Company was severe and ‘the work done (so far) on the deposits inadequate to recommend the right way to handle them. I shall hear next month . . . on the progress on a plan I suggested’. The ‘deposits were remote’ (from the market, in contrast to those of the Midland Valley of Scotland where the shales were dug out and heated in retorts to yield oil). The Burmese connection may have been through the many Imperial College oil technologists and geologists who developed the Burma Oil industry, the output of which peaked in 1920 (Lewis 2000). Most likely then, from what was published, he was carrying out a quick survey for the oil company to establish the reserves and also being asked about the feasibility of improving the economics of extracting the oil from the oil shales. The published accounts (Gregory 1923; 1923a) show he visited the area east of Rangoon and the Gulf of Martaban where the Salween River, which rises in SE Tibet, passes into the Gulf. He traversed eastwards from Moulmein, towards the border with Thailand. He established that the Mepale Shales, the main subject of the paper, were the upper part of a Pliocene lake deposit (from the lithologies and fossils recovered) lying in a basin surrounded by older ‘Eozoic’ (¼Precambrian) gneiss and schistose quartzites. Permian, Triassic and possibly Carboniferous rocks lay outside the basin. ‘On my return journey a fortunate half-hour’s delay at Martaban Station enabled me to find some specimens of Palaeanodonta, which showed that the beds were either Permian or Carboniferous’ (Gregory 1923, p. 153). It is clear from Gregory (1923) that he was given significant commercially sensitive data which supports his putative role as a consultant to Moolla Sons Ltd. Thus the Tichara Oil shale part of the deposit yielded 9 –16% oil from seams 4– 16 feet (c. 1– 5 m) thick; the minimum economically workable deposits having 8% oil in c. 1 m thick beds. Nearly 10 years after his visit, Gregory (1930b) stated that a collection of fossils from probable Triassic limestones on the Burmese –Siamese border had been made in 1921 and sent to Gregory to identify. Gregory used a small team of experts. Dr Spath examined the ammonites, John Weir the brachiopods and lamellibranchs, Gregory himself examined the corals and identified three new species, while a few sponges and calcareous algae were examined by others, both in the university and abroad. The conclusion was that the Kamawkala Limestone near the Thaungyin River was Upper Triassic, probably Norian. On 23 April 1923, Gregory suggested to the Senate that he would be willing to give eight lectures on ‘Oil mining’ but the suggestion does not seem to have been implemented (UG Senate records). In Burma at this time, much oil was obtained by digging deep vertical holes, hence the title. Gregory may have been trying to emulate the successful pioneer lectures on Oilfield Geology given first at Imperial College (IC) in 1911, and from which the much-acclaimed Oil Technology Division of the IC Geology Department sprang (Lewis 2000). No doubt the Glasgow Honours Geology class would have had a digest of oil exploitation in Burma.

Expedition to Eastern Chinese Tibet, 1922 On 12 January 1922, Nature, (109, p. 51 & 281) announced that Gregory and his son, C.J. Gregory, expected to leave for Burma at the end of March, to investigate the mountain structure of NW Yunnan and west Szechuan, travelling by Rangoon, starting from Bhamo in NW Burma (Myanmar) at the beginning of May. As the expedition had been given a substantial grant by the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund, the undertaking was a Sladen Trust Expedition. The region, its valleys, rivers and geology, is dominated by north –south trends, in marked contrast to the east – west Himalaya to the west, and one of the main aims of the

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expedition was to establish whether the Himalayas continued eastwards into the Nan Shan Mountains or bend sharply south into the Burmese – Malay north –south trend. A full account of the journey appeared very promptly in 1923, jointly written (Gregory & Gregory 1923) almost half each but with most of the illustrations by Christopher. Christopher also undertook the study of the petrology of the collected igneous rocks. Gregory gave several lectures around Britain on the topic, including to the RGS and one with his son to the Royal Society of London on 22 May 1924. His son also gave lectures alone on the expedition (A. Mendell, pers. comm. 2009). The account of the RGS lecture on 11 December 1922 (Gregory & Gregory 1922) is well summarized in Nature, 110, p. 719. It starts with ‘Seek knowledge’ said Mohammet ‘even if it is found in China,’ which injunction the authors followed. The remarkable arrangement of the rivers in SE Tibet has been described as one of the most extraordinary features of the Earth’s land surface and explaining this was another principal aim of the expedition. A brief summary of the journey and the conclusions drawn from it follow. It paraphrases their words and uses the place names given by the Gregorys in the above references and in Gregory & Gregory (1923a, 1923b). The Bibby Line records show that Gregory and his son left Liverpool, bound for Rangoon on the Herefordshire on 4 April 1922, immediately after a special meeting of the Senate held to enable Christopher Gregory to graduate BSc Engineering and BSc Mining Engineering. They landed at Bhamo, Burma, on the Upper Irawaddy, 80 km from the Chinese border, on 7 May and left there with mules on 8 May, travelling 232 km by road to Tengyueh in SW China. Here the Indian bearers and mules were sent back and Chinese ones engaged. Permission was given to go to Likiang (Lijiang), the administrative headquarters near the border of Chinese Tibet. Because of brigands, the Chinese authorities insisted the expedition’s money was sent by draft. From Tengyueh they went to Yungchang and then to Yu¨nlung, a salt mining centre, but geologically and geographically the area was unknown and unmapped by Europeans, and in many villages they were the first Europeans the villagers had ever seen. From Yu¨nlung they went north by the Loma Ho River to Lanping and then NE to Likiang [Lijiang], only to find the bank draft had not arrived (Fig. 19.2). The Likiang magistrate initially refused to let them proceed further, apparently on instruction from the provincial capital. Gregory’s letter of 3 March 1922 to W.R. Smellie, referred to above, reveals that the problem was brigands who seized travellers and demanded high ransoms and the Chinese authorities were anxious to avoid the expense of releasing foreigners. Eventually, after days of lost time, a Chinese merchant agreed to advance the expedition half the cash value of the draft which had still not arrived. They convinced the magistrate that the orders to halt them must have been issued by those who were ignorant of the magnificent improvements he had achieved within his area of administration. The local merchants assured the Gregorys that there was no danger, and as no confirming letter of prohibition had arrived, the magistrate allowed them to proceed. However, he insisted that they write him a letter stating that the expedition was proceeding at its own risk, in spite of the magistrate’s warning, so that he was relieved of any personal responsibility. They left instantly this decision was made before a change of mind could take place, proceeding west and then north from Shihku to Ku¨tien (or Clutien), (Judian) in the valley of the Yangtze-Kiang (Jinsha), then in flood from the melting of the Tibetan snow, a great river even 3800 km from the sea. The structure of the north –south valleys and those of the two parallel neighbours, the Mekong (Lancang) and Salween (Nu), were studied, but the Salween valley was in famine due to failure of the previous harvest, so the expedition remained further east, passing Litiping and Tsedrong and examined the peaks and glaciers between the Mekong and Yangtze-Kiang valleys, crossing from 5000–6000 m in what are now the

Fig. 19.2. Maps showing the route taken by Gregory and his son in SE Tibet 1922. Simplified and redrawn from Gregory & Gregory (1923) by Alun Rogers, cartographer.

Hengduan Mountains. Throughout, botanical and zoological collections were made which were later donated to the NHM and the Indian Museum in Calcutta, for experts to examine. Bad weather and heavy floods prevented the examination of the Peimashan glaciers in Tibet and hampered the return march to Likiang. The return was made on very short rations as food had not been obtained. Wide tracts around the city of Tali-fu (Dali) near Erh Lake (Er Hai) were flooded, and they had to climb over the city walls to get in, as the north gate was closed to keep out the mischievous spirits which had brought the floods. From Tali they returned by the main road across Yunnan to Yungchang and Tengyueh and then to Bhamo on the Upper Irrawaddy in Burma on 8 September,

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reaching Marseilles on 9 October to make Glasgow for the beginning of term. The most detailed account of the geology observed was in a 127-page paper (Gregory & Gregory 1925) which documents the rock types, structures, dips and strikes of the rocks encountered along the trails and rivers, and includes identification of the Triassic, Carboniferous and Devonian Mollusca and Brachipoda by Frederick Richard Cowper Reed (1869 –1946), Ordovician graptolites by Gertrude L. Elles (1872 –1960) and Devonian and Triassic corals by J. W. Gregory. The zoological results of the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition appeared in summary in Gregory & Gregory (1923c). The Gregorys claimed that the three parallel rivers resulted from clefts (faults). Due to intense compression of the crust by the Himalayan mountain movements, when this relaxed, blocks subsided along faults, called basin fractures, which the rivers exploited to drain SE Tibet. The expedition had established to their satisfaction that the geography was due to two distinct periods of mountain building, one of ‘Coal Measure age’, or Hercynian, giving a north – south grain with the Indo-Malayan Mountains being of this phase, and then a modern phase of Alpine –Himalayan activity extending eastwards into the Nan Shan Mountains of China, but also with a subsidiary bend to the south, giving the Burmese and Malay mountain arcs. These extended along the Sumatra and Java (Indonesian) arc to the Banda Sea and then eastwards along New Guinea. In a reckless extrapolation, ‘the rises on the floor of the Pacific, which reach the surface in the Hawaiian Islands and the coral islands of Polynesia, are probably the continuation of these two mountain lines, being like them due to the pressure interacting between the northern cap of the world and the tropical or subtropical zone’ (Gregory & Gregory 1922). Although also thousands of kilometres away from Chinese Tibet, the role of the curved Banda arc in this synthesis was contentious. Either it was a curved Alpine –Himalayan-aged mountain knot or, as Gregory (1923b) claimed in a paper read to the RGS on 14 May 1923, a subsidence basin between the east –west

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Buru –Ceram –New Guinea ridge to the north and the east –west Sunda Java– Flores – Papua line to the south, both being of Alpine –Himalayan age, the islands of the curved Banda arc being an arc shaped horst between two curved ocean deeps, following Suess (1888, 1901). This was a Suess-like speculation, as of course the Tibetan expedition had provided no evidence on the matter whatsoever, although in retrospect, the concept of subsidence in a now recognized subduction zone, and the recognition that the subsidence was probably continuing today, was tantalizingly close to identifying the subduction process, but there was no glimmer of a reason for the subsidence advanced, or of it being an important general process (Fig. 19.3). By 22 May 1924, when the Gregorys gave an account of their findings to the Royal Society (Gregory & Gregory 1925), the eastern Himalayas were stated to show an earlier north – south strike due to Hercynian movements and clear evidence of transverse Cenozoic disturbances, such as should accompany an extension of the Himalayan axis into SW China. Marine Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian and Triassic rocks were found. The Triassic limestones and Permo-Triassic sandstones were widely dislocated by over-thrusts and overfolds of Himalayan age which were supposed to have brought up blocks of older pre-Palaeozoic rocks along east –west belts. Overall, Himalayan folding was followed by north –south fracturing in the Pliocene. The authors did not accept the great uplift of SE Asia as Pleistocene. Gregory’s long-held attachment to the importance of the subsidence which he thought had caused the formation of the Indian Ocean was repeated: ‘The succession of Earth movements and volcanic eruptions in comparison with those of East Africa, indicates that both areas were profoundly affected by the subsidence of the Indian Ocean’ (Gregory & Gregory 1925). When the 321-page book appeared (Gregory & Gregory 1923) it was critically reviewed anonymously in Nature (113, 6–7). The reviewer, who had been to northern China, thought the Gregory development of the river system was nonsense . . . ‘no evidence of the vast lakes postulated’ and ‘changes in the river courses are

Fig. 19.3. The Banda Arc with deep subsidence in the Banda Sea. From Gregory (1923b).

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in every case open to doubt, in some to almost unsurmountable difficuties’. Of course, Gregory’s views changed little, except for less emphasis on overflowing lakes (see below) and the results he believed the expedition had obtained were mentally filed away to be drawn on later in one of his GSL presidential addresses and, more immediately, perhaps to influence partly his views on continental drift. Recent work (Meade 2007) shows that both the east – west and north – south fracturing and folding of this part of SE Asia can be almost perfectly modelled by India as a northward moving indenter of Asia for the last 50 million years, leading to clockwise flowage, by major faulting, of the SE Asian crust around the NE corner of the Indian block, giving the north – south trend of the crust and rivers there (c.1008E, 258N) while raising the east –west Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau to the north of India (Fig. 19.4). Years later, around the early 1980s, the American space agency, NASA, wrote to the author (as Honorary Keeper of the Geological Collections in the Hunterian Museum) asking if any of the samples brought back from the Gregorys’ expedition were still available, as they were compiling a geological map from LANDSAT images but there was still no information in western sources on the geology for some of the places visited by the Gregorys. Samples are preserved in the Hunterian Museum and they were duly inspected by a visitor for this purpose. Gregory (1925b) summarized his views on ‘The evolution of the river system of South-Eastern Asia’, quoting with approval that the remarkable ‘parallelism and proximity of the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Salween, in their exits from Tibet, are amongst the most extraordinary features of the Earth’s land surface’, as these three close and parallel Tibetan rivers discharge thousands of kilometres apart into the Yellow Sea at Shanghai, the South China Sea (in present Vietnam) and into the Gulf of Martaban, (Burma), Indian Ocean respectively. Contrary to common

opinion, Gregory argued that the rivers were not antecedent to the rise of the Himalayas and had not carved their way through the rising mountains but were mainly influenced by faulting plus excavation along the axes of fractured arches (anticlines) with some minor assistance of overflow channels from foundered basins. As detailed by Marvin (1985), E´mile Argand (1879 –1940)’s (1924) book on La tectonique de l’Asie raised great interest in Europe in this hitherto little known region and Gregory (1925c) was an obvious choice as a lecturer at the Royal Institution on 30 January 1925, when he spoke on ‘The mountain structure and geographical relations of South-Eastern Asia’. In this he described mountain chains as the backbones of the continents and re-iterated that the Alpine –Himalayan chain mainly continued across south China, with a subsidiary branch loop to the south along Burma and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), in effect explaining both the east –west and north –south striking belts as Himalayan in age, although reading all the accounts produced after the Percy Sladen expedition shows Gregory had some uncertainty about the age of the north –south fold trends. The causes of all this folding, according to Gregory, were shrinkage of the Earth’s interior (showing Gregory’s continued retention of this view) causing the fold waves to move northward towards Europe, but southward over Asia ‘by the pressure of the northern dome of the world against the tropical and subtropical belts’ of Asia. He summarized views that he would later develop in more detail (Gregory 1929 & 1930c), stating that former connections across the Atlantic were now well accepted, in both the north and south, instancing the distribution of the blind snakes (Typhlopidae) in South America, Central America, South and tropical Africa, South Asia and Australia, which he stated could only have spread by land, involving former land connections, not only across the Atlantic Oceans, but also across the Pacific from Asia to the Americas.

Fig. 19.4. Showing the present observed and modelled movement directions and velocities of the crust in the Himalayas, including SE Tibet, and the influence it has on the course of the rivers studied by the Gregorys. Observed velocities (black arrows) are overlain by model velocities, which were coloured by magnitude in the original. Thin grey lines are 2000 m elevation contours and thick black lines are block model boundaries. Both sets of velocities show north–south convergence across western half of Tibetan Plateau and transport of material towards southeastern Asia. From Meade (2007).

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Christopher Gregory’s progress According to A. Mendell, (pers. comm. 2005, 2008, 2009), the Tibetan expedition inadvertently led to the life-long employment of Christopher with Mavor & Coulson of Glasgow, a firm producing mining and other heavy machinery. Christopher had undertaken, as substitute for his father, a lecture engagement on the Tibetan expedition and had done it so well that one of the audience, a Sam Mavor, offered him a post, unsolicited, there and then after the lecture, and he joined the firm in September 1923. After three months training he initially worked underground on coal cutters, then specialized in the installation of conveyor belts and shakers and visited underground mines all over the UK where Mavor & Coulson machines were used. In 1927 he caught pneumonia in a Mansfield Colliery and then tuberculosis in January 1928 and was hospitalized in Davos-Platz, Switerland, until the spring of 1929, when he returned to office work only in Glasgow. Sam Mavor then offered him to take charge of Mavor & Coulson’s advertising which he did continuously from the end of November 1929, as this was mostly office, rather than underground, work. Christopher’s time in the Swiss sanatorium led to Audrey and Gregory visiting Switzerland in September –October 1928 when they took Christopher to the renowned fresh air of Pontresina, Switzerland. Gregory returned to Switzerland in December 1928 and took his son to Mu¨rren and then Berne. As Gregory’s notebooks record the collection of volcanic rocks from the Auvergne in France in 1928–9, Gregory may have also visited there around the time of these visits.

Further awards On 7 November 1922, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS) awarded Gregory the society’s Gold Medal in recognition of the scientific importance of the results obtained by him in Spitzbergen, Australia, East Africa and SW China. This was closely followed on 16 December 1922, at the RGS, of the presentation, by the French Ambassador, on behalf of the Socie´te´ de Ge´ographie of Paris, of another Gold Medal, the Gallois Medal, for Gregory’s geographical work in East Africa. Afterwards, Gregory and his son

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lectured on the expedition to Chinese Tibet. In March 1924, the Royal Society of Edinburgh awarded him the Keith Prize for 1921 –3 in recognition of his numerous contributions to geology extending over a period of 36 years. According to the 1927 Who’s Who, Gregory was an Honorary Member of the New Zealand Institute, the Geological Society of Belgium and of the Academy of Science, Halle, in addition to the Honorary Memberships already noted. Based on the university archives, on 11 May 1928, Liverpool University, in celebrating the 25th anniversary of the granting of the University’s Charter, awarded Gregory the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (LL D) (Fig. 19.5). It is unclear who instigated this award as the obvious initiator, P. G. H. Boswell, the Herdman Professor of Geology, is almost certain, in view of what he wrote in his obituary notice for Gregory (Boswell 1936) not to have framed the words that the Public Orator used, nor was he on the Special Committee that decided who should receive honorary degrees (pers. comm., Adrian Allan, Archivist) but as an old friend of Gregory’s, he probably proposed him. The citation began: ‘John Walter Gregory has fared far East and West, North and South, over the world and travelled in the realms of thought: his fame is as wide and as firmly established as his researches have been extensive and judicious. His scientific instinct has had the nature of prophecy, and his anticipations boldly made in many fields of inquiry have been fulfilled in as many regions of knowledge ascertained by his labours. In East Africa and Australia, in Chinese Thibet and along the Himalayan system, he has conducted explorations, the results of which are of great social and political importance.’

The citation continues in such a way that it is clear that the writer was not very familiar with Gregory’s work, as indeed the part quoted above also shows. The occasion was enlivened by the students singing a specially written song, which has been preserved, to the tune of ‘Solomon Levi’ My name is Johnny Gregory and I teach geology, Reducing rocks to powder which I sell for a small fee. In little paper packets as most all of you may know; You used to take the stuff in jam, a-many years ago. Oh, Mister Gregory, you make profits galore With which, Mister Gregory, you go out and explore The wide, wide open spaces and the rugged rocky hills, And with your Gregory Powders you cure all the natives’ ills.

Fig. 19.5. Photo of the honorary degree awardees with Gregory almost hidden, second from the right. This shows Gregory’s quite small stature and expresses his typical diffident and sometimes retiring nature. St George’s Hall, Liverpool, 11 May 1928 (Courtesy of Liverpool University archives).

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The reference was to a then well-known brand of patent medicine which shared Gregory’s name. The same words today would have an entirely different meaning!

Return to the Essex rivers and the Lower Thames; also North Sea – Thames – Rhine history In 1922, Gregory (1922a) published a small 68-page book aimed at explaining the present courses of the Essex rivers and the Lower Thames. There is no indication of exactly when he wrote this account, but most of the conclusions, and therefore probably much of the evidence, had been read to the GSL on 8 April 1914, but published only in extended abstract (Gregory 1914). It seems likely that the account had been considered for some years as it went back to problems that had first attracted him to becoming a geologist, and he had since taken every opportunity to continue fieldwork in Essex on this problem. This was probably helped by Audrey spending an increasing amount of time in Essex rather than Glasgow, as Ursula and Christopher had completed their education, and because Gregory himself was so often away from Glasgow, except during his teaching period. However, despite some support from Boswell (Fig 19.6), the general GSL reception in 1914 was unfavourable, with George Barrow (1853 – 1932), supported by Cyril Edward Nowgill Bromehead (1885 –1952), maintaining that the gravels Gregory supposed were river-deposited were ‘now generally accepted as of glacial origin’ and could not be river-deposited because they had an undulating base, whereas river gravel bases decline towards river mouths. Also, Barrow stated that the width of the deposits was so wide that ‘the whole of the British Islands could not supply the water for such a stream’, an assertion Gregory disputed because the width in continuous gravel sheets was much less than the aggregate width and the ‘widest were small when compared with the shingle-rivers of New Zealand’ (discussion in Gregory 1914). It is possible that the paper was rejected by the GSL and after some re-writing in 1921 or 1922 published in a book. Like several other of his books & articles, Gregory started with a biblical quotation, which in this instance was from Ecclesiastes –‘All rivers run into the sea’. Such quotations were not phenomenal memories of childhood Bible readings, but a task Ursula was asked to do searching the Bible for appropriate quotations (A. Mendell, pers. comm. 2009). Gregory then outlined the problem of explaining the reasons for the curious courses of many of the Essex rivers, their right-angled bends, their evident former abandoned courses, etc. The evolution of the rivers was partly tracked by a study of the likely sources of the gravels, especially their non-local constituents such as quartzites from the NW and Lower Greensand cherts from the south and SE. The importance of Eocene Earth movements which formed the London Basin was stressed, with the Thames originally flowing down the syncline (another disputed point in the GSL discussion) to discharge near Clacton in Essex, with coeval uplift of the English Midlands. This started radial drainage with the rivers that flowed SE cutting what are now wind gaps through the Chiltern Hills. Subsidence of the Wealden area in the early Pliocene deflected the lower Thames southward to its present position and allowed the Chelmer to extend its valley south-eastwards. The details of the supposed sequence of Oligocene and Miocene movements and their influence on the river systems were outlined. Generally the objections raised at the GSL in 1914 have been confirmed, and Gregory’s supposed former course of the River Blackwater not fully accepted, nor his supposition that marine Pleistocene foraminifera in the ‘Chalky Boulder Clay (¼Springfield Till) show the latter was a marine deposit (Bristow 1985). Five years later, Gregory (1927b) advanced further into what had been a peripheral matter in his (Gregory 1922a) consideration

Fig. 19.6. Prof. P. G. H. Boswell, (on left), Gregory’s friend, with Ivan Sydney Double, (1879– 1968) Lecturer in Petrology, both of Liverpool University and Prof. William Thomas Gordon (1884– 1950) of King’s College, London on a field excursion about 1927. By permission of the University of Liverpool archives, reference D4/1/2.

of the Essex rivers, namely the former course of the Thames. This interest was apparently revived by Sir Herbert Maxwell (1845 – 1937) drawing his attention to the fact that two freshwater fish, the Burbot and the White Bream, which occur in the Rhine, are only indigenous in those English rivers that discharge into the Humber and the Wash, and are not found in the Thames. This, plus other evidence, such as the dredging of mammoth, reindeer and walrus bones from the southern North Sea and the occurrence of warm water Mediterranean mollusca as far north as Suffolk in the early Pliocene Coralline Crag in the area of the southern North Sea (Gregory, 1927b, 1927c), led Gregory to conclude that in the Pliocene, that is, in pre-glacial times, the outlet of the Thames was to the south through the Strait of Dover. It was then generally thought that the outlet had been to the north giving union with the course of the Rhine, which was considered to run across what is now the North Sea, to discharge west of the Skagerrak. The Wash and Humber were supposed to have joined the Rhine in post-Pliocene time. Laurence Dudley Stamp (1898 –1966) wrote in support of Gregory’s southern route of the Thames although he thought ice had blocked the flow into the North Sea (Gregory 1927c). The supposed former northward course of the Rhine around what is now the Dogger Bank in the

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North Sea was in Gregory’s view confirmed, when a few years later Admiral Henry Percy Douglas (1876 –1964) drew Gregory’s attention to the recent discovery by a Royal Naval Survey ship of a deep north-trending trench north of the Dogger Bank, giving a depth of c. 240 m in the ‘Devil’s Hole’, compared with the surrounding maximum of 88 m. Gregory thought this trench confirmed the former course of the Rhine (Gregory 1931a).

BA, IGC and International Geographical Congress activities 1920– 1929 Gregory did not contribute to the 1920 or 1922 BA meetings (BA 1921, 1923), and his only input to the 1921 meeting was a written contribution, read out, to a discussion on the ‘Age of the Earth’(BA 1922). By 1923 however, when the BA met in Liverpool, he lectured on ‘To the Alps of Chinese Tibet’, as recorded in title only (BA 1924, p. 458). The committee preparing the ‘List of Characteristic Fossils’ must have concluded its activities, as it disappeared after the Liverpool meeting. In 1924, the BA met in Toronto, Canada with Gregory as President of Section E, his presidential address, delivered on 7 August, is described below under ‘Racial matters’. It was followed on 12 August by an unrecorded joint discussion with Section H (Anthropology) on the subject of the address (BA 1925). In connection with the Toronto meeting, Gregory went on field excursions, as shown by a donation of Mallotus villosus Mull. from glacial clays in Ontario to the Hunterian Museum in 1925 and also possibly by Gregory & Barrett’s (1927) reference to ‘one of us’ visiting typical Keewatin areas in Canada in 1924. Although he visited Tennessee primarily in connection with his investigation of racial discrimination in the Southern United States, as dealt with below, he also collected from there, and recorded in his field notebook, but with no dates, visiting Shelbyville, Nolansville, Nashville area, Black River Gip (sic), Rutherford County, Tullahoma, Mt. Pleasant, McIntyre (Wilkinson Co.), Frankton, and Allisoma. The joint paper (Gregory & Barrett 1927) on the examination of the Keewatin rocks was part of an ambitious attempt to correlate the Precambrian rocks of Canada and Scotland before there were any radiometric age determinations which bore on the question. Gregory had supposed from his reading of the literature that the Keewatin rocks were the oldest stratigraphical horizons in Canada and was surprised to find in the Porcupine district that the Keewatin pillow lavas and their associated sediments resembled the Loch Awe Series of the Dalradian, rather than the much older Loch Maree Series of metasediments in the Lewisian of NW Scotland. Astonishingly, they then concluded that this threw serious doubt on whether the Keewatin rocks were the oldest in Canada (Gregory & Barrett 1927)! In effect, the argument was that the oldest rocks in Canada had to resemble the Loch Maree metasediments because they were the oldest metasediments in Britain. This study also prompted a review of Precambrian terminology (Gregory & Barrett 1927a) and would later be used by Gregory in his ill-fated attempt to correlate the Precambrian rocks of Scotland with those of the rest of the world in his book Dalradian Geology (Gregory 1931). In 1925, the BA met at Southampton and on 28 August, Gregory joined in a joint discussion of the Geography and Botany Sections on ‘The evolution and colonisation of tidal lands’. On 1 September, he lectured on the ‘Problems of the Queensland Barrier Reef’, and also participated in a joint discussion involving Sections C and D, Geology and Zoology, on the ‘Distribution of animals in relation to continental movements’, which is included in the consideration of continental drift below (BA 1926, pp. 357– 358; 329; 316–317). In the BA meetings of 1926 and 1927, Gregory did not make presentations, but he and Ursula did attend the International

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Geological Congress in Madrid, Spain in 1926, Gregory’s first since 1910. According to IGC records, they both went on excursions to Linares [38400 W; 388 100 N] to Huelva [68 570 378180 N] from 13 –22 May, the Asturias from 1– 8 June and to the Mines of Bilbao from 9– 12 June, and Gregory went by himself on a day-trip to the Almaden Mines on 26 or 27 May (field notebook). His field notebook records visits to mines at El Guin, Rio Tinto, La Zarza, S. Anala Real, and Almaden in southern Spain and to Sierra Narenco, north of Oviedo [58500 W; 438250 N], Radical, Bufarrera Mine near Covadonga, San Roman and the Bilbao mines. The emphasis on visiting mines was to have seen such classic mines as those of Rio Tinto in connection with his forthcoming book on economic geology. Gregory and Ursula returned to Britain on 13 June (15 June 1926 letter from Ursula to A. Percival). Gregory’s paper to the 1926 IGC returned to his 1906 subject ‘Variations of climate in the past’ (Gregory 1927d) but he had little to add that was new. This revived interest stemmed from considering Precambrian glaciations as part of his attempts to correlate the Precambrian rocks of the different continents. As pointed out by D. Oldroyd (pers. comm. 2002), Gregory probably continued correspondence over a long period with Walter Howchin (1845 – 1937) in South Australia, who was keenly interested in Precambrian glaciations, and a short note by Gregory (1927e) in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, of which Howchin was Editor, was extracted from a letter to Howchin advising him that the South Australian Sturt Tillite, which Gregory thought was the most fully established of the pre-Carboniferous glaciations, should not be correlated with Canada’s so-called Cobalt glaciation. The following IGC was in South Africa in 1929. Gregory was a non-attending delegate of the Imperial Institute, London, and he did not publish a paper (IGC records). At the International Geographical Congress of June 1928, held at Cambridge, Gregory (1928b) presented an account of ‘Raised beaches and variations in sea-level’ but his paper on 21 July on ‘Former variations of climate’ attracted much more press attention, with its usual ‘the evidence of physical geology and palaeontology shows that the climate of the earth as a whole has been remarkably stable’ (The Times, 23 July 1928). This insistence on the past constancy of climate is now firmly known to be wrong, with the climate in the past varying from very much colder to much hotter than now. From 5 –12 September 1928, the BA met in Glasgow and Gregory played an important role. First, Gregory was appointed onto a committee chaired by P. F. Kendall ‘To Investigate the Quaternary of the British Isles’. On 6 September he lectured on the General geology of the Glasgow district in the opening session on that topic, with Tyrrell and J. Weir of the Glasgow department following him respectively on the igneous rocks and the palaeontology. On 8 September Gregory and E. Currie led an excursion to Pinwherry and Girvan, and on 11 September Gregory led an afternoon excursion to Aberfolye and Loch Chon. In that morning Gregory led, and had gone to some trouble to obtain, a number of distinguished contributors, to a session on The tectonics of Asia which was a complement to the Section C presidential address, by E. B. Bailey on The Palaeozoic Mountain Systems of Europe and America, in which Bailey (1929) correlated the European Caledonide and Variscan orogenies across the Atlantic Ocean, and expressed his support for Wegener’s continental drift theory (BA 1929). Out of the session on Asia came the following summer a 227-page book The Structure of Asia, which was edited by Gregory (1929a); he also wrote the 34-page introduction. The other contributors were Franz Eduard Suess (1867 –1941), son of the renowned Eduard Suess, on the European Altaids and their correlation to the Asiatic Structure; stratigraphy and tectonics of Iranian Ranges by Professor Hugo de Bo¨ckh (1874 –1931), George Martin Lees (1898 –1955) and F. D. S. Richardson, all of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company; the tectonic features of East

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Ferghani – Alai Range by Dmitrii Ivanovich Mushketov (1882 – 1938) of Leningrad; recent work by the Geological Survey of India on the NW Himalaya by William Dixon West (1901 –94); the structural evolution of Eastern Asia by George Brown Barbour (1891 –1977) of New York and Peking; orogenic evolution in the Gobi region of Central Asia by Charles Peter Berkey (1867 –1955) of New York; and the importance of horizontal movements in the East Indian Islands by Hendrik Albertus Brouwer (1886 –1973) of Delft, The Netherlands. The AngloPersian Oil Company’s geologists contributed 119 pages and made the first widely circulated geological syntheses arising from their exploration of Iran, parts of Iraq and Oman, for oil. To have obtained contributions from such a distinguished and geographically widespread range of writers was quite a coup and demonstrated Gregory’s world-wide connections. Gregory’s introduction made considerable reference to Suess’s (1901) ‘The Face of the Earth’ synthesis which Gregory held was still largely valid. Gregory sweepingly divided Asia into three primary geological divisions. First, the ancient nucleus of the continent in the north in Siberia and northern Mongolia, being part of the supposed Angaraland continent long espoused by Gregory (1908). Second, the southern peninsulas of Arabia and India, being fragments of the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, and thirdly the generally east – west orogenic ranges between the first two divisions, in which the Alpine-aged Himalayas lay to the south and the older Altai mountains, thought to be of Hercynian or Variscan age, lay to the north. The latter Gregory thought in part continued south-eastwards across Burma, Thailand and Vietnam into Malaysia and Borneo, and in part eastwards across China, both to be eventually lost in the marginal arcs of the western Pacific Ocean. Here ‘they were broken off by subsidence which enlarged the Pacific Ocean in the late Oligocene, contemporary with the extension of the North Atlantic to the W. of Europe’ (p. 34). The Himalayas were shown by Gregory as continuing both eastwards across southern China in the east –west Nanlin

Range and bending sharply southwards through Burma in an north –south trend to Sumatra, but in the text he drew on his Yunnan work to maintain that only the Hercynian or Altaid orogenic trend was north – south across Eastern Tibet and Burma, ‘the Alpine movements . . . cut across the Hercynian or Altaid lines, and continue eastwards into southern China instead of going southward along the Burmese Arc’ (p.32). The overthrusting character of much of the Himalayan front ‘due to pressure from the N. and to movements which lasted into and even later than the Pliocene, is apparently unassailable’ (p. 19). These thrusts are still a confirmed Himalayan feature (Fig. 19.7). The immense scope of the synthesis included the supposed broad structure of Turkestan, Afghanistan, the Persian (Iranian) arc, Mongolia and the Gobi, China, Siberia and the Verkhoyansk arc, the Eastern Marginal arcs of the Philippines, the Banda arc (Gregory 1923b) and the East Indies (Indonesia), the Bonin-Ladrone-Pelew arc, the Kurile arc, and the Altaid chain of Japan. There was considerable reference to, and some criticism of, the then recently published La Tectonique de l’Asie by E´. Argand (1924), which Gregory had scrutinized in some detail and which F. E. Suess’s account summarized. Underlying the whole interpretation of the structure of Asia, was the maintenance of the thesis that the European Alps resulted from the northward movement of most of Africa against Europe (a view still held today), while the synchronous Himalayas were caused by southward movement of northern and central Asia against the old rocks of the India (the complete opposite of today’s view) and Arabia, so that the Great African Rift from Palestine southwards was opened up along the junction of the opposing movements and thereby explained (Gregory 1921d). Any evidence of Cenozoic northward movement in Asia north of the Himalayas, as for instance, D. I. Mushketov’s supposition of northward movement of the Pamir towards Kashgar, the Altai and the Fergana Basin, was regarded by Gregory as a ‘local occurrence of the European direction [of movement] in Central Asia’.

Fig. 19.7. Gregory’s broad summary of the structure of Asia, showing the course of the Altaids, the Himalayan –Alpine System and the boundary of the primitive nucleus of Asia. From Gregory (1929a).

1919– 29: RETURN TO GLASGOW AND SUBSEQUENT ACTIVITIES

Although the details of the supposed structures are now only of historical interest as the account is incredibly simplistic, the book was an admirable attempt, at a time when little was known about the structure of Asia, to make a synthesis of the rapidly emerging information that was readable by the general geologist. To do so, breath-taking generalizations by today’s standards were made. To have combined the details available for some areas with the scanty information for whole countries would have overwhelmed most geologists, and one is reminded of Gregory’s (1921d) words: ‘the rashness of using imperfect evidence or the sterility of uncorrelated, unexplained facts’. In retrospect the publication depended upon the almost total ignorance of the geology of most of the area described. In being successful, Gregory’s growing reputation (boosted by his contemporary Presidency of the Geological Society and his two outstanding presidential addresses), as a man who knew more about the geology of most of the world than anyone else, was further enhanced.

Racial matters Although this author is not qualified to analyse Gregory’s writings on race and anthropology in detail, some account of Gregory’s views needs to be included. Ever since Gregory first travelled to Africa and wrote his 1896 account of the different African ethnic groups, he had been fascinated by the different races of mankind. After his time in Melbourne, he became almost an obsessive supporter of the ‘Keep Australia White’ campaign as we have seen from his writings, such as those on the use of white labour in tropical agriculture (Gregory 1912). After his 1916 book on Australia, Gregory published nothing more on the subject until 1923 (Gregory 1923c), but then followed with a stream of publications arguing for the maintenance of white-only immigration into Australia. What prompted this renewed outburst is not clear, but his time in crowded India, especially Bengal, and his Burma and Yunnan visits, may have renewed his appreciation of the population pressures in parts of Asia, and he considered ‘the Asiatics’ viewed the sparsely populated Australia as a highly desirable place to migrate to. The problems of reconciling the differing cultural and educational approaches of the Muslims and Hindus in India would have also brought home to him the relative homogeneity of Australians and Australian education and its advantages. In Gregory (1923c) he argued that there were large tropical and subtropical tracts in Asia, such as in Yunnan and north Burma, with good soil and adequate rainfall, that could be cultivated that were ‘wasted’, and that the population pressure in Asia as a whole had been exaggerated. ‘Asiatics;’ he claimed (Gregory 1923c), ‘show little interest in developing the marginal lands in Australia, but only want to live in the established cities’. On 21 May 1924 Gregory opened a conference on ‘Race and Race Mixtures’ held at Wembley, London, by the Eugenics Education Society, speaking on ‘White Australia’ (Glasgow Herald, 22 May), which in effect was the topic of his 1924 BA Section E (Geography) 22-page presidential address on ‘Inter-racial Problems and White Colonization in the Tropics’ (Gregory 1925d). ‘The Tropics’ really meant Australia, as that was the emphasis in his address, summarized in Gregory (1924a). The theme was shortly afterwards (Gregory 1925e) expanded enormously in a 264-page book that was mainly a repetition and updating of arguments already published over many years. The whole thrust of these writings is well summarized in Gregory’s (1925d, p. 147) own conclusions at the end of his presidential address, which are now given in full. ‘The conclusion that the white man is not physiologically disqualified from manual labour in the tropics and may colonize any part of Australia simplifies inter-racial problems, as it provides an additional outlet and spacious home for the European race. The preceding survey of the position where the three main races [Caucasian, Mongolian and Negro, the latter used for what today might be called ‘black African’] meet in intimate association indicates that the world will have a happier and brighter future if it can avoid the

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co-residence in mass of members of the different primary divisions of mankind. Individual association and contact should secure for each race the benefit of the intellectual, artistic, and moral talents of the others; while industrial co-operation should aid each nation to make the best use of the land in its care. The world has reached its present position by the help of each of its three great races, and it still needs the special qualities of each of them. The contemplative Asiatic founded all the chief religions, the ethical basis of civilization. The artistic Negro probably gave the world the gift of iron, the material basis of civilization. The administrative genius of the European race has organized the brain power of the world to its most original and constructive efforts. The affectionate, emotional Negro, the docile, diligent Asiatic, and the inventive, enterprising European do not, however, work at their best when associated in mass. That association is attended with serious difficulties; for race amalgamation, which is the natural sequel, is abhorrent to many nations, and the intermarriage of widely different breeds, according to many authorities, produces inferior offspring. The policy of co-residence with racial integrity has failed to secure harmonious progress in North America and South Africa. The development of the best qualities of the three races requires their separate existence as a whole, with opportunities for individual association and co-operation. In view of the inter-racial difficulties that have developed wherever the races are intermingled, Australia will throw away a unique opportunity if it fails to make a patient effort to secure the whole continent as the home of the white race.’

The crux of the matter was Gregory’s belief that racial interbreeding was ‘abhorrent’ and produced ‘inferior offspring’, a quite general European and certainly British, view at the time, and it is perhaps surprising that the Eugenic Society records show that Gregory never became a member. Either before or just after Gregory’s attendance at the BA 1924 Toronto meeting, he visited some of the southern states of the United States, primarily in order to learn firsthand what problems were raised by the coexistence of Negros (his choice of word ‘as being least offensive’) and whites, although he also did some geological collecting (Hunterian Museum archives). After this visit, as soon as October 1924, he completed the book The Menace of Colour (Gregory 1925e) which appeared in January 1925. It is certain that he visited the Tuskegee Institute, 48 km east of Montgomery, Alabama, and the Hampton Institute, Virginia, both dedicated to giving technical training to Negros, Howard University, Washington D. C., Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and probably the Meharry Medical College, dedicated to Negro medical training, in the same place. He also acquired or consulted many books and articles giving facts about the Negro – white problems in the United States. In the book Gregory showed great sympathy for improving the lot of the African Americans, particularly in education, fair rights as a citizen and his abhorrence of lynching and also segregation as practised in the southern states of the USA. He absorbed a much deeper understanding of the problems he had come to study, and there is no question that he was strongly in favour of really equal and fair advancement of African Americans, which was why he visited the institutions doing most to promote this. He also listed, and strongly deplored, the unequal spending by the United States on Negro and white education. The threatening title of the book refers to the problems raised in attempting to give equal treatment in a mixed Negro–white community, which he sought to avoid spreading to Australia. The book included chapters on South America, the Asiatic immigration to, particularly, the west coast of the United States, race problems in Africa, ‘The Menace of Asia’, miscegenation and the results of racial interbreeding, and the familiar problem of white immigration to Australia. Overall however, he is not successful at proposing a clear solution, his proposals for segregation, but equal treatment, being an aspiration with no practical proposals as to how it would be implemented. Only three years later Gregory (1928c) followed with another related book in which he argued that immigration should only be of a similar race to that already occupying the host country, although inexplicably, he ignored the prior aboriginal possession of Australia. Consideration of emigration to Australia led Gregory onto being interested in what the population capacity of Australia was, and he estimated 100 million, whereas W. Geisler, who had specifically

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studied the problem in some detail, suggested 150 –200 million, which Gregory (1928d ) thought was ‘optimistic’ but not ‘fantastic’. On the other hand, a Melbourne University publication (Phillips & Wood 1928) estimated 30 million because of the general scarcity of fresh water in most of Australia, a figure Gregory (1929d) thought was too low when he reviewed the book. The 2008 population of Australia was 20 million and fresh water is still a limitation. It is certain that the general British attitude, including that of the establishment, at the time was similar to Gregory’s, and judging him by present day standards is unwise. Thus Wilson (2005. p. 199) stated: ‘America had become ‘repulsive and appalling’ to Henry James, and one reason for this was that it had become a racial mixture. The modern sensibility is shocked that so kindly and broad-visioned a man as James should be what we call a racist, but we should fail to understand the past if we did not see that almost everyone in the past was.’ Again, ‘The whole climate of opinion has altered since the Second World War. What is now called ‘political correctness’ was unknown, as was the race relations industry. Throughout the British Empire, an effectual apartheid operated which was social as much as racial (Indian and Malay princes were treated like white men). Ordinary ‘natives’, whether Indian, Malay or Chinese, or African, were not educated at the same schools, or entertained at the same restaurants and clubs as Europeans. In the United States, blacks and whites were still segregated in all the southern states, and for social purposes in the northern ones too’ (Wilson 2005, p. 359). Gregory was a Victorian, a stalwart of the British Empire, a man of his time and its convictions in these matters, and, as Bishop (2008) has pointed out, Gregory was awarded two Honorary LL D degrees at the time of the peak of his racial publications, implying that his views were then those of establishment society. However, Gregory (1925e) clearly recognized that a system in which, by 1914, one third of the human race (the whites) ruled 8/9ths of the world leaving only 1/9th under the control of 2/3rds of the population, could not be sustained for long.

Other activities In the 1920s Gregory aided various political campaigns to advance science, such as writing to support the movement for a planned development in London of the natural science museums and the Science Museum itself (Nature, 105, 68 –69), adding to a series of pleas opposing the prohibition of the teaching of Darwinian evolution in United States schools (Nature, 116, 104) and urging the establishment of a Geological Survey of Kenya (Gregory 1925f). He also successfully undertook to persuade a number of specialists to contribute to a general account in the Scottish Geographical Magazine of the history, development and geography of the city of Glasgow, himself writing the chapter on the post-glacial geographical history (Gregory 1921e), including much on the 18 discovered Neolithic canoes, one of which was in the Hunterian Museum. In view of his later bizarre arguments (Gregory 1926) for the shape of drumlins being wind-derived, it is clear that in 1921 he had not arrived at this interpretation. He regarded rivers as the cause of the post-glacial shape, for he wrote (p. 3), ‘the Glasgow ice had disappeared so long before the first arrival of man that the rivers had already carved the boulder clay into rounded hills or drumlins separated by wooded glens’. This undertaking probably in part prompted his appointment as a Vice President of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 1921, together with his growing international status (Gregory 1921f ).

Geography textbook revision Before 1921, Gregory was evidently asked to revise the soft-bound school geographical booklets that he had written and continued to

be used in Victoria. In collaboration with T. W. Bothroyd and J. A. Leach, seven booklets, increasing from 47 to 160 pages were published under the titles The Federal Geography: Grades III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII, (Gregory et. al. 1921? to 1926?), there being no printed dates on the copies but hand-annotated additions. The contents show the writing to be several years after the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The titles suggest an attempt to make the booklets usable elsewhere in Australia. The two booklets, The Austral Geography: for class II and III, may have been revised by Gregory alone, or even simply reprinted, as there is no date on these. The extant copies in Glasgow University Library indicate that the Grade VII was used to prepare a revised version. A notable feature of the booklets was Gregory’s insistence on the early involvement of the classes in keeping systematic records of barometer, thermometer and rain gauge readings, and the use of graph paper to plot the results, the determination of the north –south meridian by measuring the lengths of shadows cast by sticks, and comparison with the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field, as measured by a compass. The texts described the main geographical, climatic and trading features of the various Australian states, the continents, the British Isles and the British Empire. Another reprinting, but with minimal revision, was the second edition of ‘Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative’ (Gregory 1925g) which went on to sell for many years.

General lectures In the 1920s Gregory continued to lecture on a wide range of general topics to varied audiences. Most of those outside Glasgow have not been identified, but the following three subjects are probably representative of the breadth of topics that he continued to lecture on. On 20 January 1922 Gregory lectured the Greenock Philosophical Society on ‘The beginnings of geography’ in which he emphasized the educational value of geography and deplored the neglect of the subject in Scottish schools (Glasgow Herald, 21 January 1922), in effect promoting the teaching of geography. Under the title ‘Some problems of Western China’ a talk was given to the Glasgow Rotary Club on 27 March 1923 in which in spite of chaotic finance and administration, inefficiency and corruption, he expressed the view that the Chinese civilization was the most stable the world had ever known, and would outlast our own Western civilization (Glasgow Herald, 28 March). A modified gist of the talk was probably later summarized and published as ‘The scientific renaissance in China’ (Gregory 1924). The advances made in China since the 1911 revolution were explained with such detailed knowledge that it is clear he had been briefed at length, in addition to what he would have learnt from his expedition to Chinese Tibet. This briefing was probably by his old student, Ven Kiang Ting (1887 –1936), whom he mentioned had recently resigned as Director of the Chinese Geological Survey and Museum to be General Manager of the great Chinese Coal Company. He was also in contact with Francis KingdonWard (1885 –1958) a plant collector, explorer and author who had briefed Gregory from Chinese Tibet about the state of affairs in the country prior to the Gregorys’ visit (undated letter). Attempts to replace the 8000– 10 000 written Chinese characters by an alphabet of c. 40 letters, were introduced in 1918, so that children could learn to read and write more easily and their education could be broadened. However, they are pronounced so differently in different regions, that a common alphabet still gave rise to difficulties. Gregory displayed such great knowledge of the educational institutions and of the Geological Society of China (Gregory 1923d) that it is likely he corresponded with his old student for many years. The title subtly reflected appreciation of the great Chinese advances in the distant past (Gregory 1924).

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Another topic occupied him on 18 January 1928 when he addressed the West of Scotland branch of the British Astronomical Association on ‘The geological structure of the Moon’. He had clearly been studying photographs of the Moon’s surface and thought the craters or ring formations were due to internal processes, as some of them seemed to be in a linear series related to fissures, so some sort of volcanic origin was proposed, but with great differences from terrestrial volcanoes, in that the ‘earthquake craters’ were formed by pulsating quicksand-like action rather than lava. Although a meteoric origin had been proposed, he did not favour such a view. The valleys were rift valleys and not due to folding, and the mountains were not in linear ranges as on Earth (Glasgow Herald, 23 January 1928). Although little of these interpretations have turned out to be correct, Gregory clearly continued to provide interesting lectures that led to many invitations to speak.

Yachting on the Corsair Sometime in 1920 Gregory purchased a 9 m auxiliary cutter, Corsair, from William Macneile Dixon, Litt D of Belfast, which had been converted into a yacht with a petrol engine in Carrickfergus, N. Ireland (Lloyd’s Registers of Yachts, 1920– 1925). Gregory used it to sail along the west coast of Scotland in summer, partly for relaxation (Fig. 19.8). As Audrey did not like sailing, she did not accompany him, but his daughter Ursula did, acting as cook and thoroughly enjoying herself, as did his son Christopher (known as Kit) (C. J. Gregory, mss). The Corsair was retained by Gregory, registered at the same address in Glasgow until 1931; as it is not on the 1932 Register, it was presumably disposed of in 1931. One letter, written by Ursula from Oban on Monday 27 June [1921] detailed herself, Gregory, and Kit as crew under the captain, Stevens. Alexander Stevens was one of Gregory’s oldest Glasgow students, an expert sailor, who had helped lay depots

Fig. 19.8. Gregory on the Corsair in rough water. Courtesy of A. Mendell.

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inland of the Ross Sea for Shackleton’s ill-fated 1914–17 expedition, and had been appointed in 1918 to the Lectureship in Geography in Glasgow University. They attempted to reach Iona but the furious sea and storms split the jib which was carried away, and the boat was only saved with difficulty. Another attempt to get to Iona was proposed 10 days later. The letter also refers to Ursula acting as cook while sailing the previous year [1920]. Another letter written by Ursula on 8 July 1925, while off Kerrera (in the Sound of Mull) awaiting a piston ring for the engine, listed herself, Gregory and two students (McCallien and Flett) on the boat with ‘Kit joining on Saturday for a week’. The engine broke down in the Crinan Canal but they managed to drift and be towed through, meeting a sailor at one of the locks who had helped them two years before (in 1923) when the rudder had dropped off, by towing them into Oban (U. Gregory, mss). Clearly, Gregory had some adventurous times in his summer sailings. The 1925 sailing included visiting Rum, Eigg and Loch Sunart, Ardnamurchan (Fig. 19.9). Some of their explorations by boat enabled them to visit otherwise inaccessible islands and lochs. Although there was undoubtedly pleasure in the sailing, often there was also a serious investigative aspect which resulted in publication. Thus both ‘The sea lochs of the Outer Hebrides’ (Gregory 1927a) and ‘The fjords of the Hebrides’ (Gregory 1927f) were based on this recreation in the summer 1926, again with McCallien and Flett, with photographs taken from the boat to illustrate various points; in 1928 the destination seems to have been Islay and Jura (Gregory 1930).

Book reviews Gregory continued to review books until his death and this account does not attempt to cover all the dozens of reviews he must have written. It is unfortunate that many of them have not been found, or cannot be positively identified as his, because they often

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Fig. 19.9. Black & white drawing of Professor J. W. Gregory in his sailor’s cap, probably in 1925, by W.J. McCallien, Baxter Demonstrator from October 1923. (By permission of the University of Glasgow Archive Services.)

reveal, in some detail, Gregory’s views on a wide range of matters. Thus some of the reviews are effectively papers expressing Gregory’s opinions at length as, for instance over continental drift (Gregory 1923e), and with his 11-page account of The Future of East Africa (Gregory 1925h) which was purely political and economic in content. In this account, Gregory (1925h) reviewed together both Norman Leys 1924 book ‘Kenya’ and the 1925 ‘Report of the East Africa Commission’, chaired by the Hon. William George Arthur Ormsby-Gore (1885 –1964), Under Secretary of The Colonies (both references in Gregory 1925h). Gregory listed Dr Leys’ charges against the Government of appropriation of all the land; compulsory labour imposed on the natives to work on private white plantations; overtaxing of the natives to force them into plantation labour; grossly inadequate expenditure of the native-derived taxes on schools and hospitals for them, or for their social and political advancement; and finally the route of the Uganda Railway. This crossed Kenya, not Uganda, but gave access to the latter although the route was not the best for Kenya, but lined the pockets of certain speculators, as there was virtually no local traffic in the empty country of the first 330 miles from the coast, thus making the charges prohibitively high. Gregory accepted these complaints (as did the Commission in general), but thought the contribution of the settlers had been underestimated, and the fact that the 1919 compulsory labour act, which Gregory abhorred (‘slavery’) had been repealed in 1921, and was unequivocally condemned by the Commission, while the British Government had proclaimed ‘in July 1923 that in the administration of Kenya Colony the interests of African natives must be paramount’, had not been adequately taken into account.

Gregory, as a British Empire enthusiast, had a comprehensive vision of a British East Africa Dominion, made of a united Nyasaland (Malawi), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe and Zambia), Tanganyika (Tanzania), Zanzibar, Uganda and the Sudan, with Kenya at the core, occupying a territory ‘more than two million square miles in area . . . much larger than India’ [including Pakistan and Bangladesh], and serviced by an expert professional civil service, trained along the lines of the Indian Civil Service. He advocated cultivation and development of the lowlands and the coastal region, especially the Tana Valley, by bringing in Indians, and an Australian-type ‘betterment tax’ near to railways, which declined with distance away from the railway. It seems likely that a friend, or friends, were supplying him with up to date local information as he quoted several times from copies of the 1925 East African Standard newspaper. He used this review as a means of pressing his own views and in fact tells very little indeed about the Commission’s Report. Indeed, many of Gregory’s book reviews became very poor or even non-existent attempts to give an account of what the books contained, in favour of seizing on a topic in which Gregory had a particular interest, and devoting practically the whole review to expressing his own opinions on the matter concerned. This gave the reader little idea of the books’ contents, but probably aroused more interest than an impartial survey of the contents of the book, just as newspaper accounts tend to focus disproportionately on any controversy. In 1926, Gregory (1926c) reviewed the Geological Survey memoir, The Geology of the Carlisle, Longtown and Silloth District by Dixon et al. (1926), most of the review was devoted to Gregory’s opinion that the Abbeytown gypsiferous marls correlated with shales near Carlisle and not with the Stanwix Beds as correlated in the memoir. As usual, Gregory (1927g) subsequently defended his conclusion when his review was criticized by the authors of the memoir. He reviewed the longawaited final statement by Peach & Horne (1930) on their views on the correlations, structures and rocks of the Scottish Highlands (Gregory 1930d). He seized on the difference of opinion between the two authors as to whether the Moines and the Torridonian rocks, both Neoproterozoic Precambrian psammite sequences, were correlated and the same (Peach), or whether the Moines, much of which is highly metamorphosed, were older than the unmetamorphosed Torridonian (Horne). The problem was long standing before 1930, and rumbled on throughout the 20th century, only being perhaps finally resolved by Krabbendam et al. (2008) in favour of Peach’s correlation of the two successions. Gregory seized on this single point, largely because he had found pebbles in the Torridonian which he claimed were Moine fragments and which he had described 15 years earlier (Gregory 1915), thus leading him to support Horne’s view. Obviously, Peach and Horne knew about these alleged Moine pebbles and clearly Peach did not accept the pebbles as Moine clasts. A fuller account of the background to this review is given by Howarth & Leake (2002), but it is generally accepted now that the pebbles could not have been Moine in origin, and even in 1915 when Gregory probably collected them, Teall, Horne and Tyrrell, all of whom looked at the thin sections, would only agree that they ‘could be Moine’. The review gave almost no account of the rest of the contents of the book which dealt widely with Scottish geology. In April 1923, reviews by Gregory (1923f ) of two books concerned with climatic change or stability appeared in Nature: The Evolution of Climate by Charles E. P. Brooks (1922) and Climate Changes: their Nature and Causes by E. Huntington & S. S. Visher (1922)(references in Gregory 1923f). Much to Gregory’s delight, the latter wrote ‘A hundred million or a thousand million years ago the temperature of the Earth’s surface was very much the same as now’ and what variations there have been such as ice ages, were due to variations in solar activity, whereas, also to Gregory’s approval, the first author emphasized

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that climatic changes were due to the varying distribution of land and sea and great uplifts of land in high latitudes that enlarged both the polar glaciers and tropical deserts. However, when Gregory reviewed a book that did not impinge on his particular interests, he could give a praiseworthy review as with his account of the 854 pages in two volumes, in German, of ‘The Diamond Fields of South-West Africa’ by E. Kaiser & W. Beetz et al. (1926; reference in Gregory 1927h). This massive publication was important in first establishing clearly that the diamond-bearing beach sands of SW Africa were derived from the interior of Africa, and not as was then generally accepted, from rocks under the Atlantic Ocean. Gregory retained an ability to read geological and geographical publications in German, French and Italian. Gregory’s (1920c) review for Nature of four of the Scottish County Geographies by the Cambridge University Press, and one of Banff and District by the Banffshire Journal, is an example of a straightforward review in a classic field of geography.

Renewed taxonomic work on echinoids and corals In the 1920s, Gregory returned to a certain amount of systematic work on echinoids and corals, largely as result of specimens being sent to him from various parts of the world for identification, often by old students. He continued with this in a minor way after retirement and in a sense this was the last of his serious systematic scientific work, as distinct from his lecturing and writing of text and general books, most of which are now forgotten. Thus in 1919 or 1920, W. R. Smellie sent echinoids from Gilan, 160 km NE of Baghdad, now Iraq, which proved to be Senonian and pre-Maastrichtian, with a new species Codiopsis smelli being identified, and John Vernon Harrison (1892 – 1972) sent Upper Eocene echinoids from the same district (Gregory & Currie 1920). J. V. Harrison later sent Miocene and Middle and Lower Cretaceous corals from Eastern Venezuela, which included new genera of Dendroseris (Gregory 1927i, 1929b), while Frederick Philip Mennell (1880 –1914) sent corals from the Upper Cretaceous of the Cheringoma district, Portuguese East Africa which included a new Ceratotrochus (Gregory 1930e). He also published on Jurassic fossils from Kenya (Gregory 1927j) and on corals from Somaliland in Wyllie & Smellie (1925).

Denudation and tectonism In Gregory’s 60s, he made several broad syntheses of world-wide geology as he saw it, and one of these was an article written for the review journal Scientia concerned with ‘The relative influence of denudation and Earth-movements in moulding the surface of the Earth’ (Gregory 1926d), a topic still of current interest. Contrary to those such as Alexander Henry Green (1832 – 96), who held that the landscape of the continents was almost entirely due to denudation, Gregory saw a major role for structural movements with the Earth’s surface being a balance between the two processes. He considered that meteorite and volcanic craters owed little to denudation, whereas the tectonic processes of faulting and folding, uplift and depression, were major topographic influences, softened by denudation. An excellent example was the Great African Rift Valley, of structural origin, but modified topographically by erosion. More recently the role of ‘tectonic denudation’ has been recognized as an important factor in rapidly exposing deep orogenic ‘cores’ and preserving high pressure minerals in ultra-highpressure rocks (e.g. Clark & Dempster 2009) and the whole subject of tectonic geomorphology has developed, with its own textbooks (e.g. Burbank & Anderson 2000; Bull 2008), thus vindicating Gregory’s views.

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Economic mineral studies, IMM involvement & ‘The Elements of Economic Geology’ In the 1920s, Gregory was intermittently involved with economic mineral studies. He lectured to the Chemical Society on 8 December 1921 on ‘Ore deposits and their genesis in relation to geographical distribution’. ‘The use [of minerals] depends on chemistry’; their ‘discovery on geology’ (Gregory 1922b). The talk ranged over the whole field of ore deposits, from magmatic ores to those deposited from supposed magmatic waters, and drew on his wide experience, mostly achieved a decade or more earlier; he proposed as magmatic the titaniferous magnetite iron ores of Lapland, and cited non-magmatic pyritic masses, Sudbury nickel, Rand gold, tin, base metals, mercury and platinum, in a lecture that was later (Gregory 1925i) in part repeated with the same message, to the Faraday Society on 24 October 1924, under the rather surprising title ‘Magmatic ores’. Surprising because the lecture concentrated on showing that ‘metalliferous ores . . . formed . . . directly . . . from igneous magmas are . . . unimportant’ . . . as most were deposited from solutions, albeit of magmatic origin (Gregory 1925i). This view was reiterated in the discussion of Boydell (1927). On 27 October 1927, Gregory (1928e) presented an account to the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (IMM) of the nickel – cobalt ore of Talnotry, 8 km ENE from Newton Stewart, SW Scotland, which he stated he had ‘recently twice visited’. The niccolite ore contained 11.5 wt% of nickel, 1.5% cobalt plus other metals including Au and occurred in the contact aureole of the Cairnsmore of Fleet Granite at the junction between an altered diorite and greywacke. It had previously been described as a magmatic segregation in the margin of a small diorite sill. Gregory, however, expressed his usual doubt about the magmatic origin, arguing that since chemical analyses of the igneous rock revealed neither Ni nor Co, it could not have been derived from that magma, and although the metals might ultimately have been derived from some deep-seated magma, their transport to the site of deposition was in solution, not magma. A vigorous discussion followed, as IMM practice was to circulate the printed paper in advance so that most of the meeting could be devoted to discussion. This was only the third paper Gregory had published in the Transactions of the IMM, although he had been a member since 1905. His first two papers had concerned gold in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa (Gregory 1906, 1907a) and his fourth and last concerned the Kupferschiefer of Mansfeld, Germany (Gregory 1930f ). His involvement with the IMM was very much more than four papers would suggest, because he often contributed to the discussions, although it is not always clear from the published discussions whether he was actually present. Some of his contributions were recorded as having been submitted for reading out at the meeting. An exhaustive list of these contributions is not given but some indication has already been given of his economic contributions up to 1917. The culmination of three decades of activity, lecturing and thinking about economic geology came with the publication in January 1928 of ‘The Elements of Economic Geology’ (Gregory 1928f) in 312 pages. The text was completed in November 1927 and as a teaching text is, in the present author’s view, the best that Gregory ever produced; it is still useful today. Unusually, he thanked someone for assistance – Tyrrell – for ‘much help in the preparation of this work’ so that Tyrrell, who was a master of textbook writing and teaching, probably improved the presentation significantly. The chapters in order deal with the scope of economic geology and the search for ores; the formation of deposits of useful minerals; the ores of gold, platinum, tin and tungsten, copper, lead, zinc and silver, nickel, mercury, antimony, arsenic and bismuth, iron, manganese and chromium, and aluminium; the ‘earthy minerals’ micas, asbestos and gems, clay, building stones

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and road metals; the geology of cements; the soil, agriculture and mineral fertilizers – nitrates and phosphates; salt deposits; the engineering geology of water supply, coastal defences and reclamation, earthquakes and the principles of anti-earthquake construction; mineral fuels, coals, mineral oil and oil shale. For each substance he explained its properties and use, its occurrence and mode of formation and described some of the classic mines. Early in the book Gregory whets the prospector’s appetite by quoting the hardly believable figures that 85% of oil wells sunk in accordance with geological advice proved successful, whereas only 5% of those sunk at random were productive. He discussed the problem of whether ore-forming solutions ascended or descended, and favoured primary ascending solutions bringing in the metals which are often distributed and concentrated by secondary downward percolating solutions, which deposited the ores. He thought the Mississippi Valley and the Mendip Hills Pb –Zn ores had just such an origin. A long account of the Mount Morgan mine in S. Queensland is given. The book was probably based on the second year and honours lectures on the subject that Gregory had given over many years, which his son described as the highlight of the university geology course, and which his Demonstrator in Mineralogy, Miss Neilson, said ‘You wanted to get every word down’ (C. J. Gregory 1977). The account is particularly good on alluvial gold prospecting and mining and water supply, in which Gregory’s experiences surface, but he had seen so much of what he described that the favourable reviews stressed that ‘The strongest point of the book is beyond doubt the impression that it gives that Professor Gregory has actually seen a large proportion of the things that he describes’ (Rastall 1928). The anonymous reviewer for Nature (122, 991) also concurred that a ‘remarkable amount of cogent information has been attractively compressed into its 23 Chapters . . . particularly valuable for its references to little known sources of evidence and for the intimacy and vitality of the style in which it is written’ but the review was also more critical. ‘An unavoidable consequence of the brevity with which each topic is treated is that many conclusions are perforce stated dogmatically. In the Preface he states other views would not have been rejected but for the limitation of space – he should have made the book longer! His views are not always those which will encourage teachers to recommend it. Professor Gregory regards most ores as coming from a zone lying between the barysphere and the lithosphere “beneath the ordinary igneous rocks of the crust” and not from the igneous rocks themselves. The primary mineral deposits are due to ascending currents rising from the vast store of metals in the interior of the earth.’ Connected with Gregory’s views on ascending plutonic water was his belief that most primary ores in the crust were deposited by such solutions, which were ultimately derived from a metal-rich layer lying under the crust, again an idiosyncratic view little approved of by most of his contemporaries, or since.

Human migration In February 1928, only one month after the publication of The Elements of Economic Geology (Gregory 1928f), ‘Human Migration and the Future: the Causes, Effects and Control of Migration’ appeared in 218 pages (Gregory 1928c), as the midnight ink continued to flow. The background to this lay partly in Gregory’s perennial interest in migration to Australia, partly in the worsening economic situation in the UK, with soaring unemployment, and partly in discussions that were taking place, nationally and locally, about the absence of conditions fit for those who had survived the slaughter of the First World War. The economic enigma of full employment only during war, but not in peace, exercised the thoughts and discussions of many. Gregory’s colleague, Prof. J. G. Kerr of Zoology,

took political action, and eventually in the 1930s became a Member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities, but Gregory, ever the concerned citizen, seems to have redoubled his social and economic writings, without being able to suggest very clear solutions. The Nature (122, 341) reviewer (A. M. C.-S.) stated: ‘His [Gregory’s] work is distinguished by scientific detachment [with] a world outlook. It would be possible to debate his views on many of the issues raised. [Those] on the overpopulation and underemployment in Great Britain might be severely criticised. His estimate of 214 million surplus of population seems quite arbitrary. The value of the book does not lie in specific solutions.’

The severely criticised view was that emigration from Britain would not solve the population problem, because an increased birth rate would replace the emigrants, so that the main advantage would be to increase the demand for British manufactured goods in the countries to which the emigrants went. The supposed increased birth rate was puzzling and not adequately explained. The theme, noted earlier, of how many immigrants Australia could absorb, and the desirability of Britons going there or to Canada, rather than the USA, because they would buy manufactured goods from the UK, and reduce unemployment in the UK, prompted Gregory (1929d) to defend a possible Australian population of 100 million, far in excess of most estimates. This would enable much increased emigration from Britain. The article, which appeared in the October 1929 ‘The Contemporary Review’, must have been written just as he was about to retire, and does not realistically explain how even the then water requirements (far less than today) would be met. This was rapidly followed in November 1929 with an article in The Nineteenth Century amid widespread serious unemployment and falling birth rates in the western world, and dealt with human migration, its necessity in the modern world of changing industries and agriculture, and the problems that accompany such migration (Gregory 1929e). He discussed the recently introduced ‘quota’ system restricting immigration into the USA to certain numbers of each national origin and pointed out how unworkable even the US President thought it was. Drawing partly on information published in articles in the March 1929 Glasgow Herald, he also dispelled the spectre of the supposed problem of Irish immigration into Scotland swamping the Scots, by showing that even in 1911 the census returns showed only 3.67% of the population of Scotland was born in Ireland, a decline since 1901, and the 1921 census recorded a further marked decline. Irish immigration had virtually finished by 1929. Moreover, he pointed out that the majority of those entering from Ireland in recent decades, had come from the six UK northern counties in Ireland, although he did not mention the main cause of the concern, which was of course the concentration of Irish immigrants in localized areas of Glasgow and district. The article was a spin-off from, and an updating of, his 1928 book on human migration and was unusual in not revolving solely around immigration into Australia. In general these social economic writings, which went back to the use of white agricultural labour in the Australian tropics and before (e.g. Gregory 1906a), sought to marry the advancement of Australia with assured benefits to Britain and to maintain the traditional economic and human links between the two nations. Gregory may have had to leave Australia reluctantly, but he never forgot the favourable impression, the wide open spaces and the friendships he had enjoyed, and he was ever the passionate advocate of the development of Australia.

Water divining At some point in the 1920s, Gregory became interested in water divining (dowsing) and at the Public Works Congress held at the Public Works, Roads and Transport Exhibition in the Royal

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Agricultural Hall, Islington, from 14 –19 November 1927, Gregory spoke at a meeting of the British Waterworks Association on the 17th about ‘Water divining’ (The Times of the following day). Unfortunately, the report stated he was enthusiastic supporter of water divining and this was repeated on 25 November, only to be corrected by Gregory (The Times, 2 December 1927), who declared that all the controlled experiments had shown negative results. Gregory investigated the history and the available facts about the subject, and produced a small 23-page booklet, published by the British Waterworks Association, which was reprinted in the Smithsonian Report for 1928 (Gregory 1929f). The account retells various published tests made on water diviners in which in every case they were discredited such as the April 1913 Guildford test in which seven diviners working independently in a field between them identified supposed underground springs in nearly every different part of the field but did not detect a buried sewer; also the Anglo-Persian Oil Company tests at their research station at Sudbury involving buried barrels variably empty and containing oil, or water which they could not identify. Gregory did not carry out any experiments of his own, but was unequivocal in his rejection of the method. This study was really a spin-off from a more general publication for the British Waterworks Association of a circular entitled ‘The origin and distribution of underground water’ (Gregory 1927k) in which he again re-iterated that part of the source of the central Australian artesian water was of plutonic origin, a theme repeated at the summer meeting in Glasgow of the Institution of Water Engineers under ‘Sources of Underground Water’.’

W. W. Watts & A. C. Seward were among the circle of Gregory’s associates. Unfortunately there does not appear to be a recording of these talks preserved in the BBC archives.

President of the Geological Society, 1928 – 30, excluding Presidential addresses Although the GSL Council minutes of 25 January 1928 record the decision to propose Gregory as the next President, the matter had almost certainly been agreed before then, as on 14 December 1927 Gregory was one of those appointed to administer the newly received Joseph Burr Tyrrell (1876 –1958) gift of Can. $10 000. Gregory would have been proposed as President by his old friend Bather, who was the preceding (1926 –8) President. Gregory took over the Presidency of the GSL on 17 February 1928, becoming Chairman of the Council, which met fortnightly between early November and late June, and also Chairman of the Publication, Library, House, and Awards Committees, a heavy burden (Fig. 19.10). He stood down on 21 February 1930, but continued as a Vice-President and on the above committees, except the House Committee, until February 1932, although effectively his spell on Council ended in December 1931, as he left for Peru in early January 1932. Of the 49 meetings of Council between 17 February 1928 and 16 December 1931, Gregory was present at 43, so he had a good attendance record. Usually following the Council, the President chaired the late afternoon meeting of the Fellows for the reading of papers and their subsequent discussion

Journalism and BBC broadcasts Gregory continued to write for a variety of outlets, being especially concerned with popular accounts of geological phenomena and racial matters, but as these sometimes appeared in the nonscientific literature, tracing them all has not been easy. Racial matters, such as his Empire Review article of 1923 (Gregory 1923c), have been mentioned already. In the Sunday Mail of 24 June 1923, Gregory wrote on the ‘World’s oldest volcano in a wrathful mood. Etna’s bad record of fiery cascades and ruination’ accompanied by a photograph of himself and a facsimile of his signature, and in Country Life of 30 June 1923, 341– 342, was a similar piece under the title ‘Etna and the present eruption’. Later in November 1928, when Etna erupted again, he wrote (Gregory 1929g) a more scientific, but still popular, 4-page account of Etna’s historic eruptions, accompanied by a scaled geological cross-section across the volcano, which appeared in the January 1929 issue of Discovery, ‘A monthly popular journal of knowledge’, which had A. C. Seward as one of its trustees. Gregory made the account more relevant to the largely British readers, by pointing out that Etna resembled the great Mull volcano of the past, with a similar circumference of c. 150 km. Another article in Discovery, but on a quite different topic, was an account of the life of the recently missing, presumed dead, Roald Amundsen (1872 –1928), whose efficiency in reaching the South Pole first, Gregory admired (Gregory 1928g). Also, he did not forget the help Geikie had given him, and when Geikie died, aged 89, Gregory wrote a glowing obituary notice in the Glasgow Herald (of 12 November 1924) under the title ‘A great scientist’. Only a few days before Gregory formally retired, on 24 September 1929, Gregory broadcast the first of a series of talks on the BBC by eminent scientists on ‘How the world began: the Earth and its origin’, followed by further talks by Gregory on 1 October on ‘What the Earth is made of’ and on 8 October on ‘The age of the Earth’ (The Times of those dates & July 23; also The Listener, 2, 397– 398; 438– 439, 456, 478–479). These talks, under the Central Council for Broadcast Education, were later reprinted in full in Gregory et al. (1930). The other speakers, A. S. Woodward,

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Fig. 19.10. Gregory around the time he became President of the Geological Society, from a photograph presented to the Society. By permission of the Geological Society.

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and then joined the Dining Club at a restaurant. Unlike many more garrulous Presidents, Gregory rarely made use of his privileged position to start the discussion, although with his wide experience, he could have commented with some insight on many of the papers read under his Chairmanship. Gregory’s overt influence while President of the Geological Society from February 1928 to February 1930 included setting up a committee ‘to draw up a list of areas, outcrops and isolated exposures that are so important they should be preserved’ (Proceedings of the GSL 18 December 1929); suggesting Dr V. K. Ting and others as GSL Foreign Correspondents; and ensuring that B. Hilton Barrett received the first J. B. Tyrrell award of £100 in 1929, to investigate the relations between the Keewatin and Timiskaming series in Canada. Even more pronounced was his influence on the choice of medal awards. The GSL Bigsby Medal for 1929 was awarded to Professor P. G. H. Boswell, an old friend of Gregory’s, who closed his reply to Gregory’s citation with the words: ‘the receipt of the Bigsby Medal from your hands reminds me of the immense benefit that I have derived from our numerous discussions – discussions arising out of your unusually wide interest in Geological Science, and ranging over all its branches. Your friendly crossexamination has time after time compelled me to verify my facts and justify my inferences; in this connexion I feel that I have ever been under a greater debt of gratitude to you than to any other of my geological friends’ (Proceedings of the GSL 1929, p. lii).

The 1929 Lyell Medal went to Dr A. Morley Davies, whom Gregory had known for almost 40 years. The wide range of Gregory’s contacts is shown by the award, on 21 February 1930, of the Wollaston Medal to Gregory’s longcontinued friend ever since NHM days, Prof. A. C. Seward (Fig. 19.11) for his research in stratigraphy and palaeobotany, the Murchison Medal to Dr Arthur Lewis Hall (1872 –1955), Director of the Geological Survey of South Africa, for his work on the stratigraphy and economic geology of South Africa, including the Bushveld Complex, and the Lyell Medal to Frederick Chapman for his Australian foraminiferal and other fossil group researches, including the Globigerina Marls of Barbados and studies of the Tertiary beds of Australia. Chapman was for many years from 1899 in charge of the Geological Collections in the Melbourne Museum but had been an Assistant to Prof. Judd. Most unusually, a second Lyell Medal was awarded in 1930 to Herbert Brantwood Maufe (1879 –1952), Director of the Geological Survey of Southern Rhodesia for work on the geology and Mineral Resources of Southern Rhodesia which that year would reach £100 million in value, far exceeding that when Gregory first visited. The inability of the last three awardees to be present led to the unprecedented simultaneous appearance of no fewer than three High Commissioners, for South Africa, Australia and Southern Rhodesia, to accept the medals on behalf of the recipients. Gregory did not forget the amateur Mr John Smith of Dalry, Ayrshire, who received an award from the Murchison Fund. For 50 years and in more than 50 papers, Smith had tirelessly worked to describe the geology and palaeontology of the west of Scotland (Gregory 1930g). Seward’s reply to Gregory’s citation on awarding him the Wollaston Medal, is interesting, as it surely alludes, as a close friend can, in thinly veiled words, to Gregory’s humanistic beliefs. ‘Speaking as a botanist, I am proud to think, although as a young man I partly deserted Geology, I have gained the right to count myself a member of one of the most human of all brotherhoods, the brotherhood of Geologists. It must have been Geologists of whom Meredith was thinking when he said – ‘Men of Science are always the humanest’ (Proceedings of the GSL 1930, p. xliv). The normal duties of the President, or Vice-President, include attendance at the annual dinners of related societies, such as the Institution of Petroleum Technologists on 3 October 1928, the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy on 10 April 1929, and a special dinner to celebrate the granting of a Royal Charter to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on 16 October 1930.

Fig. 19.11. Professor Albert Charles Seward, FRS whom Gregory had known since his NHM days. From Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1941.

Gregory also attended the opening of an Exhibition of the Mineral Resources of the Empire at the Imperial Institute on 17 February 1931 (The Times of the following days). On 28 May 1929 an Eduard Suess Memorial Tablet, funded by Fellows of the Geological Society, was unveiled by His Excellency the Austrian Minister Baron George Franckenstein (1878 –1953) at 4 Duncan Terrace, Islington, Suess’s birthplace (b. 20 August 1831). This plaque still existed in 2009. Gregory opened the ceremony with a long speech on Suess emphasizing his practical achievements in obtaining a pure water supply for Vienna against massive opposition, his political service, and his great geological syntheses on ‘The origin of the Alps’ and ‘The face of the Earth’, which were of course the real basis for the Geological Society involvement. Gregory said Suess recognized world-wide marine transgressions, whereas previously expansion of the sea in one place was supposedly accompanied by withdrawal in others. He held that mountain chains were due to pressure in one direction and not to compression as in a vice, so that the Alps and the Himalayas were due to pressure from the south, remarkably a view still held today. ‘Doubtless in some cases he went too far, as in his view that ‘major movements of the earth’s crust are all subsidence as widespread even uplifts are impossible’ (Gregory 1929h). Following Gregory in speaking were Franckenstein, and then representatives of the RGS and the RS (Bather), the Mayor of Islington, W. J. Sollas and Sir A. S. Woodward, Foreign Secretary of the GSL. Although Bather, as President before Gregory, had initiated the tablet, there is no question that Gregory would have been consulted, as of all the written influences on Gregory, none exceeded Suess, whose writings on what came to be called the African Rift Valley and letters to Gregory, had initiated Gregory’s first visit there.

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On stepping down as President, Gregory ensured that his old Spitzbergen companion, Prof. E. J. Garwood, succeeded him as President of the GSL, and probably also, as Vice-President, that G. W. Tyrrell be awarded the Murchison Medal in February 1931. His last proposal on 2 December 1931 and passed in his absence on 13 January 1932, was to get the Council to agree that any unrestricted donations or bequests should go to support the library or publications.

References Allison, A. 1933. The Dalradian Succession in Islay and Jura. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 89, 125– 144. Argand, E. 1924. La Tectonique de l’Asie. Comptes Rendues, Congre`s Ge´ologique Internationale, XIII, Brussels, 1, 171–372. BA. 1921. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Eighty-eighth Meeting, Cardiff 1920. John Murray, London. BA. 1922. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Eighty-ninth Meeting, Edinburgh 1921. John Murray, London. BA. 1923. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninetieth Meeting, Hull 1922. John Murray, London. BA. 1924. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-first Meeting, Liverpool 1923. John Murray, London. BA. 1925. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-second Meeting, Toronto 1924. John Murray, London. BA. 1926. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-third Meeting, Southampton 1925. John Murray, London. BA. 1927. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-fourth Meeting, Oxford 1926. John Murray, London. BA. 1928. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-fifth Meeting, Leeds 1927. John Murray, London. BA. 1929. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-sixth Meeting, Glasgow 1928. John Murray, London. Bailey, E. B. 1929. The Palaeozoic Mountain Systems of Europe and America. In: BA 1929. Report of the Ninety-sixth Meeting, Glasgow 1928. John Murray, London, 56– 76. Bishop, P. 2008. The geographical work of J. W. Gregory. Proceedings of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 150th Anniversary Special Edition: Local geological heroes and characters; a selection, 22– 25. Boswell, P. G. H. 1927. The rarer detrital minerals of British sedimentary rocks. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 18, 129– 148. Boswell, P. G. H. 1936. John Walter Gregory—1864– 1932. Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, 1, 53 –59. Boydell, H. C. 1927. Operative causes in Ore deposition. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 37, 50– 177; discussion 141– 143. Bristow, C. R. 1985. Geology of the Country around Chelmsford. Memoir for 1:50 000 Sheet 241. British Geological Survey, HMSO. Brooks, C. E. P. 1922. The Evolution of Climate. Benn Bros. Ltd., London. Bull, W. B. 2008. Tectonic Geomorphology of Mountains: A New Approach to Paleoseismology. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. Burbank, D. W. & Anderson, R. S. 2000. Tectonic Geomorphology. Blackwell Science, Oxford. Charlesworth, J. K. 1924. The glacial geology of the North-West of Ireland. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 36B, 174–314. Charlesworth, J. K. 1926. The Evishanoran esker. Geological Magazine, 63, 223– 225. Clark, S. J. P. & Dempster, T. J. 2009. The record of tectonic denudation and erosion in an emerging orogen: an apatite fission-track study of the Sierra Nevada, southern Spain. Journal of the Geological Society, 166, 87– 100. Coleman, A. P. 1908. Glacial periods and their bearing on geological theories. Geological Society of America Bulletin, 19, 347– 366. Coleman, A. P. 1926. Ice Ages: Recent and Modern. MacMillan Co., London. Dixon, E. E. L., Maden, J., Trotter, F. M., Hollingworth, S. E. & Tonks, L. H. 1926. The Geology of the Carlisle, Longtown, and Silloth District. Memoirs of the Geological Survey, HMSO.

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Eyles, N. 2004. Frozen in Time: concepts of ‘Global Glaciation’ from 1837 (die Eiszeit) to 1998 (the Snowball Earth). Geoscience Canada, 31, 157–166. Fearnsides, W. G. 1936. Percy Fry Kendall 1856–1936. Obituary Notices of the Royal Society of London, 2, 57 –65. Garwood, E. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1898. Contributions to the glacial geology of Spitsbergen. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 54, 197– 226. Gregory, C. J. 1921. Parallel roads at Loch Tulla. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 17, 91 – 104. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: a sketch. Privately printed. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, J. W. 1906. The ancient auriferous -conglomerates of Southern Rhodesia. Transactions of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 25, 563– 578; discussion 579–587. Gregory, J. W. 1906a. The economic geography and development of Australia. The Geographical Journal, 28, 130– 145; 229–245. Gregory, J. W. 1907. A glaciated rock surface at Lugton, North Ayrshire. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 13, 10 –18. Gregory, J. W. 1907a. The origin of the gold in the Rand banket. Transactions of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 17, 2 –41; discussion 41 –85. Gregory, J. W. 1908. Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative. Blackie, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1912. The employment of white labour in the sugar plantations of Queensland. Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 43, 182– 194. Gregory, J. W. 1914. The evolution of the Essex river-system, and its relation to that of the Midlands. Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Geological Society, 957, 83– 87. Gregory, J. W. 1915. Moine pebbles in Torridonian conglomerates. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 447– 450. Gregory, J. W. 1919. The prospects of oil wells in Britain. The Contemporary Review, No. 648, December 1919, 672–680. Gregory, J. W. 1920. Conservation of our coal resources. Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 50, 3– 24. Gregory, J. W. 1920a. The conservation of our coal resources. The Contemporary Review, No. 654, June 1920, 817–825. Gregory, J. W. 1920b. The Irish eskers. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 210, 115– 151. Gregory, J. W. 1920c. Review of Scottish county geographies. Nature, 106, 561–562. Gregory, J. W. 1921. The conservation of coal resources. Scientia, 29, March 1921, 185– 192. Gregory, J. W. 1921a. The future of oil supply. The Contemporary Review, No. 666, June 1921, 778–786. Gregory, J. W. 1921b. The glaciation of Ireland. Geological Magazine, 58, 137– 140. Gregory, J. W. 1921c. The glaciation of Ireland. Geological Magazine, 58, 239. Gregory, J. W. 1921d. The Rift Valleys and Geology of East Africa: an account of the origin & history of the Rift Valleys of East Africa & their relation to the contemporary Earth-movements which transformed the Geography of the World. With some account of the Prehistoric stone implements, soils, water supply and mineral resources of the Kenya Colony. Seeley, Service & Co, London. Gregory, J. W. 1921e. Glasgow and its geographical history. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 37, 2– 12. Gregory, J. W. 1921f. National contributions to geology. Scientia, 30, 1– 12. Gregory, J. W. 1922. The English ‘eskers’—their structure and distribution. Geological Magazine, 59, 25 – 44. Gregory, J. W. 1922a. Evolution of the Essex Rivers and of the Lower Thames. Benham & Co Ltd, Colchester. Gregory, J. W. 1922b. Ore deposits and their genesis in relation to geographical distribution. Journal of the Chemical Society, 121, 750– 772. Gregory, J. W. 1923. The geological relations of the oil shales of Southern Burma. Geological Magazine, 60, 152–159. Gregory, J. W. 1923a. The Mepale oil shales, Southern Burma. Mining Journal, 140, 145.

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Gregory, J. W. 1923b. The Banda Arc: its structure and geographical relations. The Geographical Journal, 62, 20 – 30. Gregory, J. W. 1923c. Asia’s claim to migration into Australia. The Empire Review, 37, 356– 361. Gregory, J. W. 1923d. The Geological Society of China. Nature, 112, 883. Gregory, J. W. 1923e. Climatic changes and continental drift. The Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, 238, 85 –103. Gregory, J. W. 1923f. Climatic changes. Nature, 111, 561. Gregory, J. W. 1924. The scientific renaissance in China. Nature, 113, 17 –19. Gregory, J. W. 1924a. Tropical colonisation and the future of Australia. Nature, 114, 314–317. Gregory, J. W. 1925. The Evishanoran esker, Co. Tyrone. Geological Magazine, 62, 451–458. Gregory, J. W. 1925a. The moraines, boulder clay and glacial sequence of South-western Scotland. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 17, 354–376. Gregory, J. W. 1925b. The evolution of the river system of South-Eastern Asia. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 41, 129– 141. Gregory, J. W. 1925c. The mountain structure and geographical relations of South-Eastern Asia. Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 24, 511– 519. See also Nature, 115, 203–204; 464– 465. Gregory, J. W. 1925d. Inter-racial problems and white colonization in the tropics. British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-second Meeting, Toronto 1924. London, 124– 145. Gregory, J. W. 1925e. The Menace of Colour: A Study of the Difficulties Due to the Association of White & Coloured Races, with an Account of Measures Proposed for their Solution, and Special Reference to White Colonisation in the Tropics. Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd., London. Gregory, J. W. 1925f. Science and administration in East Africa. Nature, 115, 753– 755. Gregory, J. W. 1925g. Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative. 2nd edn. Blackie, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1925h. The Future of East Africa. Review of Kenya by N. Leys (1924) and Report of the East Africa Commission. In: The Edinburgh Review, 242, No.493 (July 1925), 20– 31. Gregory, J. W. 1925i. Magmatic ores. Transactions of the Faraday Society, 20, 449– 458. Gregory, J. W. 1926. Scottish drumlins. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 54, 433– 440. Gregory, J. W. 1926a. The Evishanoran esker, Co. Tyrone. Geological Magazine, 63, 336. Gregory, J. W. 1926b. The Scottish kames and their evidence on the glaciation of Scotland. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 54, 395– 432. Gregory, J. W. 1926c. The Carlisle Basin (Review of Dixon et al. 1926). Geological Magazine, 63, 377–379. Gregory, J. W. 1926d. The relative influence of denudation and earthmovements in moulding the surface of the Earth. Scientia, 40 (October 1926) 218–230. Gregory, J. W. 1927. Swaledale glacial geology. The Naturalist, No. 849, October 1927, 293–295. Gregory, J. W. 1927a. The sea lochs of the Outer Hebrides. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 18, 27– 39. Gregory, J. W. 1927b. The relations of the Thames and Rhine and age of the Strait of Dover. Geographical Journal, 70, 52– 59. Gregory, J. W. 1927c. The Thames– Rhine problem. The Geographical Journal, 70, 509– 511 Gregory, J. W. 1927d. Variations of climate in the past. International Geological Congress, 14th Meeting in Spain, 1926, 181–192. Gregory, J. W. 1927e. Note on the geological age of the Sturtian tillite in South Australia. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, 51, 414. Gregory, J. W. 1927f. The fiords of the Hebrides. The Geographical Magazine, 69, 194–216. Gregory, J. W. 1927g. The Carlisle Basin. Geological Magazine, 64, 384. Gregory, J. W. 1927h. The diamond fields of South-West Africa. Review of Die Diamantenwu¨ste Sudwest-Africas in The Geographical Journal, 69, 146– 148.

Gregory, J. W. 1927i. Some Lower Cretaceous corals from Eastern Venezuela. Geological Magazine, 64, 440– 444. Gregory, J. W. 1927j. Further Jurassic fossils from Kenya Colony. Geological Magazine, 64, 325. Gregory, J. W. 1927k. Origin and distribution of underground water. British Waterworks Association Circular, 69, 644– 671. See also Sources of Underground Water, Nature, 120, 383. Gregory, J. W. 1928. The geology of Loch Lomond. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 18, 301– 323. Gregory, J. W. 1928a. The geology of Loch Lomond. Geological Magazine, 65, 331– 332. Gregory, J. W. 1928b. Raised beaches and variations of sea-level. Reports of the International Geographical Congress at Cambridge 1928, 157– 158. Gregory, J. W. 1928c. Human Migration and the Future: a study of the causes, effects and control of Migration. Seeley Service & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1928d. The population capacity of Australia. Review of Die Wirtschafts und Lebensrau¨me des Festlandes Australien by W. Geisler (1928) in Kolonial Studien, Hans Meyer Festscrift, 199– 222, Reimer & Vohsen, Berlin. Geographical Journal, 72, 468– 469. Gregory, J. W. 1928e. The nickel-cobalt ore of Talnotry. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 37, 178– 186; discussion 186– 195. Gregory, J. W. 1928f. The Elements of Economic Geology. Methuen & Co, London. Gregory, J. W. 1928g. Roald Amundsen: an appreciation. Discovery, 9, 243– 245. Gregory, J. W. 1929. The geological history of the Atlantic Ocean. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 85, lxviii– cxxii. Gregory, J. W. (Editor & Contributor) 1929a. The Structure of Asia. Methuen, London. Gregory, J. W. 1929b. Dendroseris n. g. and other corals from Trinidad. Geological Magazine, 66, 65 –68. Gregory, J. W. 1929c. Review of The peopling of Australia edited by Phillips, P. D. & Wood, G. L. The Geographical Journal, 74, 290– 291. Gregory, J. W. 1929d. The capacity of Australia for immigration. The Contemporary Review, No. 766, October 1929, 476–482. Gregory, J. W. 1929e. Migration. The Nineteenth Century, 106, 672– 682. Gregory, J. W. 1929f. Water Divining. Smithsonian Report for 1928. US Government Printing Office, Washington, 325– 348. Reprinted from British Waterworks Association. Final Report of the Public Works, Roads and Transport Conference and Exhibition, 1927, 368– 389. Gregory, J. W. 1929g. The new eruption of Etna. Discovery, 10, 3– 6. Gregory, J. W. 1929h. Eduard Suess memorial tablet. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 85, cxxxvi– cxli. Gregory, J. W. 1930. The sequence in Islay and Jura. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 18, 420– 441. Gregory, J. W. 1930a. The machinery of the Earth. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 119, 957– 980. Gregory, J. W. 1930b. Upper Triassic fossils from the Burmo-Siamese Frontier. The Thaungyin Trias and description of the corals. Records of the Geological Survey of India, 63, 155–167. Gregory, J. W. 1930c. The geological history of the Pacific Ocean. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 86, lxxii – cxxvi. Gregory, J. W. 1930d. The older rocks and physiography of Scotland. Nature, London, 126, 234– 235 Gregory, J. W. 1930e. A new Ceratotrochus. Geological Magazine, 67, 475– 477. Gregory, J. W. 1930f. The copper-shale (Kupferschiefer) of Mansfeld. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 40, 3 –10. Gregory, J. W. 1930g. Proceedings of the Geological Society of London. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 86, xliii–xliv. Gregory, J. W. 1931. Dalradian Geology: The Dalradian Rocks of Scotland and their Equivalents in other Countries. Methuen & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1931a. A deep trench on the floor of the North Sea. The Geographical Journal, 77, 548–557.

1919– 29: RETURN TO GLASGOW AND SUBSEQUENT ACTIVITIES

Gregory, J. W. & Barrett, B. H. 1927. The stratigraphical position of the Keewatin. Journal of Geology, 35, 141–149. Gregory, J. W. & Barrett, B. H. 1927a. The major terms of the PrePalaeozoic. Journal of Geology, 35, 734–742. Gregory, J. W., Bothroyd, T. W. & Leach, J. A. 1921?–1926? The Federal Geography: Grade III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII. Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd, Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. & Currie, E. D. 1920. Echinoidea from Western Persia. Geological Magazine, 58, 500–503. Gregory, J. W. & Currie, E. D. 1928. The Vertebrate Fossils from the Glacial and associated Post-Glacial beds of Scotland in the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow and their Evidence on the Classification of the Scottish Glacial Deposits. Monograph of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, 2. Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1922. The Alps of Chinese Tibet and their geographical relations. Nature, 110, 826– 827. Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1923. To the Alps of Chinese Tibet: an account of a journey of exploration up to and among the snow-clad Mountains of the Tibetan Frontier. London, Seeley, Service & Co Ltd., London. Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1923a. The Alps of Chinese Tibet and their geographical relations. The Geographical Journal, 61, 153– 179. Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1923b. A note on the map illustrating the journey of the Percy Sladen Expedition, 1922, in North-Western Yunnan. The Geographical Journal, 62, 202–205. (Map is on p. 240). Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1923c. Zoological results of the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to Yunnan under the Leadership of Professor J. W. Gregory, FRS (1922). Journal of the Asiatic Society, Bengal, (New Series), 19, 383– 384. Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1925. Geology and physical geography of Chinese Tibet, and its relations to the mountain system of SouthEastern Asia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 213, 171– 298. Gregory, J. W. with others. 1915. The Geology of the Glasgow District. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 26, 151– 194. Gregory, J. W., Woodward, A. S., Watts, W. W. & Seward, A. C. 1930. From Meteorite to Man: the Evolution of the Earth. Forum Series 11. Watts & Co., London. Gregory, U. J. mss. Unpublished but edited letters in the author’s possession from Mrs A. Mendell. Excepts from letters from Ursula Gregory to her cousin, Alicia Percival, written while boating off the west coast of Scotland, ?1921 & 1925, in possession of Mrs A. Mendell.

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Howarth, R. J. & Leake, B. E. 2002. The Life of Frank Coles Phillips (1902–1982) and the Structural Geology of the Moine Petrofabric Controversy. Geological Society, London, Memoir, 23. Huntington, E. & Visher, S. S. 1922. Climate changes: their nature and causes. Oxford University Press, London. Kendall, P. F. 1921. The glaciation of Ireland. Geological Magazine, 58, 50– 56. Kendall, P. F. 1921a. The glaciation of Ireland. Geological Magazine, 58, 189– 191. Kendall, P. F. 1922. The English eskers. Geological Magazine, 59, 98– 103. Krabbendam, M., Prave, T. & Cheer, D. 2008. A fluvial origin for the Neoproterozoic Morar Group, NW Scotland; implications for Torridon–Morar Group correlation and the Grenville Orogen foreland basin. Journal of the Geological Society, 165, 379–394. Lewis, C. 2000. The Dating Game: One Man’s Search for the Age of the Earth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. McCabe, A. M. 2008. Glacial Geology and Geomorphology; The Landscapes of Ireland. Dunedin Academic Press Ltd, Edinburgh. Marvin, U. B. 1985. The British reception of Alfred Wegener’s Continented Drift Hypothesis. Earth Sciences History, 4, 138– 159. Meade, B. J. 2007. Present-day kinematics at the India– Asia collision zone. Geology, 35, 81 – 84. Peach, B. N. & Horne, J. 1930. In: MacGregor, M., Bailey, E. B & Campbell, R. (eds) Chapters on the Geology of Scotland. Oxford University Press, London. Phillips, P. D. & Wood, G. L. (eds.) 1928. The Peopling of Australia. Pacific Relations Series No. 1, Macmillan & Co, Melbourne, & Melbourne University Press. Rastall, R. H. 1928. Review of Elements of Economic Geology. Geological Magazine, 65, 190. Suess, E. 1888. Das Antlitz der Erde, Volume 2 (English Edition, 1906). Suess, E 1901. Das Antlitz der Erde, Volume 3 (Part 1 1901, Part 2 1909); English Editions, Volume 3, 1908, Volume 3/2 1909; Tempsky, Vienna. Wilson, A. N. 2005. After the Victorians. Hutchison, London. Wyllie, B. N. K. & Smellie, W. R. 1925. The collection of Fossils and Rocks from Somaliland made by B. N. K. Wyllie and W. R. Smellie. With an account by them of the Geology of part of Somaliland, an Introduction–the Geology of Somaliland and its relations to the Great Rift Valley by J. W. Gregory (p. 1– 7) and descriptions of the Collections by E. D. Currie, W. N. Edwards, J. W. Gregory (Fossil Corals, p. 22 –45), A. T. Neilson, R. B. Newton, L. F. Spath & J. Weir. Monographs of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University, 1.

Chapter 20 Opposition to continental drift and the origin of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans

As pointed out by Marvin (1985), Gregory was influential in persuading many British geologists to reject Wegener’s theory of continental drift. In short, with the eminent Cambridge physicist Harold Jeffreys (1891 – 1989) maintaining that drift was geophysically impossible, and Gregory, whose encyclopaedic geological knowledge and experience of seeing rocks in most of the continents could hardly be bettered, also rejecting the theory, few British geologists accepted continental drift. Gregory did not so much speak and write against the theory as emphasizing an alternative, more plausible (to some) view in two massive (each 54 pages) presidential addresses to the GSL, on the history of the Atlantic Ocean (Gregory 1929) and the Pacific Ocean (Gregory 1930). These purported to explain most of the Wegener evidence, and much more, by means of the simple subsidence of the oceans basins. There is no doubt that Gregory was much influenced in this interpretation by Suess (e.g. see Gregory 1915), who had even supposed that ‘the major movements of the Earth’s crust are all subsidence, as widespread uplifts are impossible,’ a view Gregory (1929a) thought ‘went too far’. Although Wegener took the name of Gondwanaland from Suess, who had earlier proposed that the oceans were underlain by sunken continents (Suess 1901), Wegener realized that such a view was incompatible with isostasy and he proposed the breakup of Gondwanaland by sideways movement. Gregory (1923) first revealed his views on continental drift in a little known 18-page review entitled ‘Climatic changes and continental drift’ of the third German edition of ‘Die enstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane’ (Wegener 1922), which Gregory read in the original. He commented on the attractiveness of explaining the jigsaw-like fitting of the continental shapes and of being able to explain the variations in the past climates of different regions by moving the continents across climatic zones so that simultaneously different geographic regions could be undergoing either tropical or polar conditions, while keeping the climate of the Earth as a whole in the past more or less constant, an axiom Gregory held unwavering throughout his life. A crucial part of Wegener’s theory was that due to isostasy, the light sialic continents floated like icebergs on the heavy sima of the oceanic crust and underneath the continents, the sialic layer being at one time a continuous slab, but subsequently shortened by being squeezed into folds and mountain ranges. However, Gregory ended by rejecting the theory, for several reasons, the main stated one being the ‘concertina-like’ horizontal movements backwards and forwards of the continents required when their history was traced far enough back to see ocean closure (like Tethys) and opening (like the Atlantic). No force adequate to do this was known at that time. The first widely circulated indication of Gregory’s reaction to the theory of continental drift came on 21 February 1925 in a Nature review by Gregory (1925) of the translated Alfred Wegener’s third German edition of ‘The Origin of Continents and Oceans’. Again, initially the review seemed favourable to the theory, which ‘offers an easy escape from difficulties and is not to be dismissed as impossible or scouted as fantastic’ and he even pointed out that Gregory (1915a) himself had proposed some horizontal movement to explain the folded nature of the Pacific margin of America. Gregory agreed further that the positions of the rocks showing the Carboniferous glaciation of India and of some parts of the Southern Hemisphere were much better

explained by having one continent than the present scattered ones, and he also accepted the correlations across the North Atlantic of the Appalachian and Armorican orogenies (later corrected by Bailey (1929) to correlate the Caledonides with the Appalachians), but thought it much easier to sink the Atlantic crust by ‘two miles’ than to move it the thousands required by continental drift. He compared the matching grain of the rocks across the ocean to that of a floating piece of wood where the grain on each side of a submerged centre still matches. He pointed out close correlations across the Pacific, expanded on below. He rather lamely concluded that ‘the geophysical evidence and data are so inexact that the results are inconclusive’. By 1 September at the 1925 BA, Gregory participated in a Joint Discussion of the Geography and Zoology Sections on the Distribution of animals in relation to continental movements, in which he again pointed out attractive aspects of Wegner’s theory, but he also repeated the very important point that Wegener’s theory of the expanding Atlantic implied a contracting Pacific Ocean, with previously even more distant margins than today, whereas the evidence of plants and animals was that there had been similar connections across the Pacific in the past as there had been across the Atlantic. ‘The testimony of the alligator in the Yangtse Kiang is as instructive as that of the manatee in the tropical Atlantic’ (BA 1926, pp. 316– 317). The biological matches across the Pacific Ocean, which were later elaborated on in Gregory (1930), were of course correctly, but unwittingly, pointing to the various Mesozoic and Cenozoic openings of the Pacific Ocean that are now recognized by plate tectonic theory. Wegener’s proposals lacked any subduction processes, so that without expanding the Earth’s radius, opening the Atlantic in the floating continental mass meant also reducing the width of the Pacific, so that its past width was even greater than today as shown by Wegener’s own maps (Fig. 20.1). This made inexplicable the fossil correlations across it that Gregory identified. This was a shrewd deduction, indicative of the error in Wegener’s theory, and a point Gregory has rarely been given credit for. These published views led to Gregory being invited to contribute to a discussion in New York on continental drift, organized by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists on 15 November 1926, to which Wegener himself contributed. This was important in terms of shaping American geological opinion (Marvin 1985). Although Gregory did not attend, as is testified by his recorded presence at the Glasgow University Senate on 18 November 1926, he submitted a surprisingly short (four page) paper (Gregory 1928) to what became a general anti-drift publication, despite the pro-drift views of the organizer and Chairman of the meeting (W.A. J. M. van Waterschoot van der Gracht, 1873 –1943). Almost certainly a longer paper would have been written if he had steamed for 5–6 days across ‘the pond’. Most of Gregory’s points are summarized below. He emphasized (again) that the biological correlations across the Pacific Ocean were as strong as those across the Atlantic but, of course, the Pacific Ocean was far wider in Wegener’s theory in the past than now, if the Atlantic opened by Eurasia and Africa moving from the Americas. Gregory did not oppose horizontal movements of the crust, but thought vertical ones were far more important, and were caused by ‘adjustment of the crust to shrinkage of the interior, [which] was not necessarily due to cooling’ as the Earth might have accreted from solid meteorites.

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 187– 191. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.20

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Fig. 20.1. Wegener’s theory of continental drift as shown in his final account of 1929. Hatching denotes oceans, dotted areas are shallow seas; present-day outlines and rivers are given simply to aid identification. Right-hand side is the same but in different projection. With acknowledgements to Wegener (1929). Note the progressive narrowing at the equator of the Pacific Ocean from the Carboniferous to the Quaternary as the Atlantic Ocean opened.

Despite Gregory’s (1928) protestation that ‘I have no a priori objection to the drift hypothesis’, which was probably true, publication of this paper in that book put him in the anti-drift camp, which was shortly to be confirmed, although Oreskes (1999) has correctly pointed out that the British response to the theory, including that of Gregory, was one of ‘cautious entertainment compared with the American flat rejection’. Gregory’s two presidential addresses to the Geological Society on the geological histories of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (Gregory 1929, 1930 respectively) were crucial in casting doubt on Wegener’s theory, because they were much more widely read. In the first, he pointed out the differing views on the permanence of the existing oceans and continents, with some supporting the concept and others, like Lyell, accepting frequent interchange of deep sea and land. Others supported continental drift with no permanent oceans, but the ocean floors never being uplifted above sea level. This concurred with the scarcity of really deep-sea deposits in the sedimentary record of the continents. Persuasively, he put it that the ultimate test is ‘the actual geological record of the former distribution of land and sea, and of different groups of animals and plants’ (Gregory 1929). Much of what was in the two addresses had been previously published by Gregory, but synthesising it as he did was a tour de force. Then followed a magisterial survey of the North and South Atlantic Ocean borderlands and the evidence showing that they

were once connected, Europe with North America, Africa with South America. In fairness, he also considered carefully the evidence against this connection, but eventually rejected it. Throughout, he drew on extraordinarily wide reading in several languages to cite structural evidence, geological histories and, most convincingly, fossil evidence, animals and plants ranging across the mammals, reptiles, molluscs, corals, echinoids, trilobites, freshwater fish, spiders, scorpions, etc. He showed a comprehensive grasp of the biological kingdom that gave great authority to his account, buttressed by information he had published over the years, and convincingly demonstrated his personal knowledge and experience in all but South America. He concluded that in Cambrian and Ordovician time, Europe and North America were one landmass, separated in the Silurian by an ocean even larger than the present North Atlantic, only to be reduced in the Devonian with Canada being joined to Britain and the South Atlantic being land but with a peripheral ocean to the south and west. In the Upper Palaeozoic and Mesozoic, Gondwanaland formed a vast southern continent with Tethys separating it from a northern landmass. By northward and southward expansion of the Tethys Ocean, the present North and South Atlantic formed mainly in the Cenozoic, the main subsidence beginning in the Upper Cretaceous and finishing in the Miocene. The evidence for a land-bridge, or at least shallow water across the Atlantic until the Miocene, was, he thought, shown by the similarity of

OPPOSITION TO CONTINENTAL DRIFT AND THE ORIGIN OF THE ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC OCEANS

the Mediterranean and Antillean shallow-water mollusca, noticed by many authors, and both that of the Mediterranean and West Indian corals, which have only a very brief free-swimming larval stage, and the echinoids which had no free-swimming larval stage at all, and are absent further north in both Europe and America, as he had pointed out much earlier (Gregory 1891), and had recently been supported by Prof. Giuseppe Stefanini (of Florence; active 1908 –1938) (1924). This was also a time of great tectonic upheaval, with the formation of the Alpine and western American Mountain chains and the subsidence of the Indian Ocean, which could not be continued northwards like the Atlantic, because of the solid Himalayan Range. The Atlantic formed, he affirmed, by downward faulting. He claimed that fault displacements comparable to the depths of the ocean basins were well established, citing the conveniently located Worcester Fault in Cape Colony, South Africa with a downthrow of 12 000 feet (c. 3.7 km). Over the isostatic objections that the ocean floors were made of heavy sima, not the lighter sial of the continents, he questioned whether the ‘whole surface of the Earth was in perfect isostatic compensation’, citing F. A. Vening Meinesz’s (1887 –1966) preliminary submarine pendulum results that had just been published in 1928, then cavalierly throwing out ‘If isostasy be so stated that it is inconsistent with the subsidence of the ocean-floors, so much the worse for that kind of isostasy’. This no doubt went down well with geologists, but to prove to them that this was not mere geological prejudice flying in the face of the facts of physics, Gregory footnoted that ‘Dr Harold Jeffreys kindly allows me to say that he fully agrees with the foregoing’ (Gregory 1929). So even an eminent geophysicist could support such views which must have cast doubt in many minds about the validity of Wegener’s insistence that isostasy did not allow the sinking of continents. No doubt Suess’ decidedly negative attitude to isostasy (Sengo¨r 1982) also influenced Gregory, and of course, although Gregory was wrong in his general synthesis, he was quite correct about the lack of perfect global isostatic equilibrium, which has been confirmed, in for instance, the Himalayas and in subduction zones, such as the Indonesian trench, that could not exist if all the Earth’s surface was in perfect isostatic equilibrium. Privately, however, Gregory knew that isostasy was a problem. Thus Oreskes (1999, p. 198) records that the Yale Professor Charles Schuchert (1858 –1942) wrote to Gregory in the summer of 1929, that is, between Gregory’s two presidential addresses: ‘What scares me are the conclusions of our isostastists like Chamberlain, Lawson [and] Bowie . . . that there is no known means by which a continent can be sunk into oceanic depths . . . Barrell wrote a paper about how Gondwana could be weighed [down] by material rising out of the asthenosphere and so sunk out of sight. But all of the workers in isostasy say that mere rising of heavier materials into the lithosphere will not do it, but if I could show flow from lateral regions the thing could be done. Of course no one can show such lateral flowage’. However, ‘lateral flowage’ due to convection currents resulting from radioactive heating had already been proposed by Holmes (1931) to be the driving mechanism of continental drift in a seminal lecture (ironically) delivered to the Geological Society of Glasgow on 12 January 1928, at which Gregory was present. The paper was not published for three years, partly because Holmes had not finished writing it, and partly because there were no funds to publish it, so Schuchert was unaware of it, but Gregory most certainly knew about it. Moreover Holmes (1928) had already published the main aspects of his proposals, except for not then recognizing the important additional role of eclogite in sinking basaltic material (Figs 20.2, & 20.3). The Glasgow lecture was given only a month before Gregory became President of the Geological Society. Although Tyrrell approved of Holmes’ views, Gregory’s comments in the discussion after the reading of Holmes’ paper suggest Gregory did not appreciate the full significance of Holmes’s theory, although he

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Fig. 20.2. Professor Arthur Holmes. From Dunham (1966) with acknowledgements to the Royal Society.

conceded that convection currents in the sima solved some of the objections to continental drift. But Gregory still niggled, querying the Squantum Tillite (in Boston, Massachusetts) as situated on Wegener’s equator and whether the Matterhorn, as a supposed fragment of Africa, was actually resting on Jurassic schists (TGSG, 18, 614–615). As the Gregorys are likely to have accommodated Holmes (who then lived in Durham) on the night after the lecture, he would no doubt have had more supporting arguments from Holmes in private, but there was absolutely no recognition of Holmes’ proposals in the presidential addresses that later followed. Presumably, Gregory did not think convection currents would be strong enough to break the lithosphere apart and it is true that Holmes had not actually proved the strength of such currents, if they existed. Curiously, Gregory (1915b) had already proposed lateral flow of magma from under the sinking Indian Ocean to provide the Deccan Plateau lavas, as shown in Figure 18.2, but he did not bring this into the isostasy discussion. Apart from isostasy, the main criticism that could be flung at Gregory’s suppositions ‘using only the evidence then available’ was that it totally failed to explain the matching shapes of the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Gregory realized this, and although one keen solely to press the subsidence theory might have cited as an analogue the amazing parallelism of the matching sides of the African Rift Valley over thousands of kilometres, Gregory firmly rejected such a possibility by specifically stating that the formation of the Atlantic was an entirely different process to that which formed the Rift Valley. This was somewhat curious in view of his earlier insistence (Gregory 1921, 1923a) that the formation of the Rift Valley and the Indian Ocean were

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Fig. 20.3. Holmes’ explanation for the formation of new oceans given to the Glasgow Geological Society in January 1928, (although not printed until 1931) which Gregory knew of in 1928, but rejected. From Marvin (1985).

contemporaneous and linked processes. So he left unexplained the matching shapes of the opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, presumably regarding them as a coincidence or not significant, in the same way that those who rejected the Tetrahedral Theory regarded the antipodal arrangement and the shapes of the oceans and continents, as of no particular significance. Gregory also left unresolved the enigma of his continued acceptance (Boswell 1936) of the Tetrahedral Theory, with its required permanence of the present positions of the continents and oceans, compared with his reconstructions of the past histories of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He seemed to have moved on to the extent that he no longer thought all the oceans were generally permanent. Thus it is not likely that part of the reason for his espousal of land-bridges across oceans to explain animal and faunal correlations, rather than uplift and destruction of the whole ocean, was an attempt to retain the integrity of it being an ocean, because he explicitly emphasized in his summary of his Pacific Ocean address that the Pacific Ocean was not permanent (see below). However, his absence of discussion of the Tetrahedral Theory in his GSL addresses implies a lower priority for those views compared to his actual argument. In Gregory’s (1930) address on the history of the Pacific Ocean, he returned to criticize a belief in global perfect equilibrium in isostasy, together with considering earthquake wave speeds across the Pacific and the elasticity of the outer layers of the crust. He contrasted the unity of that ocean, with its ‘girdle of fire’ from active and recent volcanoes, ring of extant earthquakes, border of parallel young mountain chains and concordant Pacific coasts, with the more disparate elements of the Atlantic Ocean which cut across the strike of many of its borderlands. Although the ‘biological differences between Papua and Peru may appear at first sight so fundamental as to debar any former direct land-connexion; but the distance between them is greater than that between western Europe and southeastern Asia, which are in distinct zoological regions, although parts of one continuous land.’ He rejected a permanent Pacific Ocean and went on to give a similar palaeontological survey from Cambrian times onward as he had for the Atlantic Ocean, with various land-bridges and oceanic bodies at different times, culminating in a general extension of the Mesozoic Pacific Ocean to its present size in the Miocene, with detailed consideration of the extant plants and animals around and within the Pacific Ocean, and what light they threw on the development of the present ocean. There was no embarrassing geometric match of the opposing Pacific coasts. Particularly persuasive of Gregory’s subsidence theory, was the evidence he had pointed out in Gregory (1908), that the Pacific islands lay in eight, or possibly ten, festoons and three linear chains, which he supposed were a series of ridges formed by folding and later broken across by fracturing. The main part of the Pacific was occupied by coral islands which grew on these

prominences. Such coral islands, he pointed out, had from the Funafuti borings been shown to have formed in accordance with Darwin’s theory for the formation of coral atolls by subsidence, with shallow-water coral growth keeping up with the sinking of the prominences. This seemed to indicate widespread subsidence across most of the Pacific Ocean. The deepest trenches like that of Tonga, he supposed were submarine rift valleys which had undergone greater subsidence than the surrounding seabed. His own summary was that the Pacific Ocean was not a persistent ocean but ‘a succession of variable narrow seas separated by land’ commonly trending east –west (Abstracts of Proceedings GSL, 1210, pp. 59– 61). Although Gregory (1930) briefly considered the greater density of the oceanic crust, which was supposed to explain its low-lying nature compared with the continental crust, he drew attention to the fact that such a supposition was not appropriate for land, where depressions such as that of the Cutch, India, were not underlain by lower density rocks than the basalts of the high Deccan Plateau. Nor was there, at that time, conclusive proof of the different elasticities and speed of earthquake waves under the oceans. Far more convincing to Gregory was ‘the direct geological evidence [which] is overwhelming, that large blocks of the Earth’s crust rise and fall for vertical amounts greater than the greatest depths in the oceans. If the continental blocks cannot sink, much geological evidence becomes meaningless. The Kainozoic sedimentary rocks of California are estimated as 30 000 feet [c. 9 km] thick. Such an accumulation is only possible by the slow subsidence of the crust’. . . ‘the great geosynclines . . . include sediments about 50 000 feet [c. 15 km] thick, which have accumulated in a sinking area. In view of such facts, there is no impossibility in the heaving of the Pacific floor to an extent sufficient to cause the interchange of ocean and continent, and the interbedding of deep-sea oozes with shallow-water deposits as in Barbados’ (Gregory 1930). Wegener’s theory did not explain the supposedly certain Barbados oscillations between deep- and shallow-water deposits in such a significant position in the Atlantic Ocean; Gregory never forgot this early lesson (Gregory 1892, 1895), and his theory could explain it. In the writer’s opinion, the apparently reliable history of Barbados and its oceanic situation was crucial in influencing Gregory’s views that continental crust could both sink to become ocean floor and rise again. The other decisive factor for Gregory in not accepting continental drift was Suess’s conviction that oceans developed by sinking of the crust and Gregory’s respect for the impressive syntheses of Suess. In view of Gregory’s public image, his almost unrivalled geological experience around the world, and both his broad grasp of palaeontology and his expertise in echinoids, corals and bryozoa, which gave him credence as a genuine palaeontologist, it is not surprising that many British geologists also had reservations about

OPPOSITION TO CONTINENTAL DRIFT AND THE ORIGIN OF THE ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC OCEANS

continental drift involving thousands of kilometres of movement if a few kilometres of vertical movement would suffice. There were notable exceptions, such as Arthur Holmes. Nowhere in Gregory’s two addresses does he disparage the theory of continental drift; indeed Marvin (1985) states he ‘cannot be counted among the outright foes of Wegener’s hypothesis’; he simply made an apparently overwhelming case for an alternative interpretation, which if correct, ipso facto ruled out continental drift. In a sense this approach was, to the British mind, more persuasive than if he had been hammering out an overt anti-drift message. Gregory recognized that there were some very attractive elements in the continental drift theory which caused him to hesitate over attacking it (Gregory 1923, 1925). However, it is not apparent from the written papers of the following three decades, that many really accepted Gregory’s Atlantic and Pacific proposals; as distinct from regarding them as evidence of the uncertainties surrounding Wegener’s continental drift hypothesis. At the least, Gregory’s views added to the general British suspicion of continental drift. Viewed from the plate tectonic age, his proposals seem incredible, although credit is due for his recognition of crossPacific correlations that today are more understandable than they ever could have been under Wegener’s proposals. Prior to the common acceptance of plate tectonics, there were many tectonic theories, many far more bizarre than Gregory’s, each with its particular strengths and fatal weaknesses (Donovan 2008).

References BA. 1926. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-third Meeting, Southampton 1925. John Murray, London. Bailey, E. B. 1929. The Palaeozoic mountain systems of Europe and America. In: BA 1929. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-sixth Meeting, Glasgow 1928. John Murray, London, 56 –76. Boswell, P. G. H. 1936. John Walter Gregory—1864– 1932. Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, 1, 53 –59. Donovan, S. K. 2008. The ‘Forbidden Theory of Mountain Uplift’ of Charles Taylor Trechmann (1884–1964): A tectonic theory of the 1950s in context. Geological Journal, 43, 605– 619. Dunham, K. C. 1966. Arthur Holmes (1890 –1965). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, London, 12, 291– 310. Gregory, J. W. 1891. The relations of the American and European Echinoid faunas. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 3, 101– 108. Gregory, J. W. 1892. Archaeopneustes abruptus, a new genus and species of Echinoid from the Oceanic Series in Barbados. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, 163–169. Gregory, J. W. 1895. Contributions to the Palaeontology and Physical Geology of the West Indies. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 51, 255– 310.

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Gregory, J. W. 1908. Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative. Blackie, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1915. Suess’s classification of Eurasian Mountains. The Geographical Journal, 45, 499–513. Gregory, J. W. 1915a. The relative distribution of fiords and volcanoes. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 31, 257– 261. Gregory, J. W. 1915b. Geology of Today: A Popular Introduction in Simple language. Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd, London. Gregory, J. W. 1921. The Rift Valleys and Geology of East Africa: An account of the origin & history of the Rift Valleys of East Africa & Their relation to the contemporary Earth- movements which transformed the Geography of the World. With some account of the Prehistoric stone implements, soils, water supply and mineral resources of the Kenya Colony. Seeley, Service & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1923. Climatic changes and continental drift. The Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, 238, 85– 103. Gregory, J. W. 1923a. The structure of the Great Rift Valley. Nature, 112, 514–516. Gregory, J. W. 1925. Continental drift. Review of the origin of continents and oceans by Alfred Wegener. Translated from the 3rd German edition by J. G. A. Skerl. Nature, 115, 255– 257. Gregory, J. W. 1928. Wegener’s hypothesis, pp. 93 – 96 in W. A. J. M. van W. van der Graht et al. Theory of Continental Drift. American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Tulsa. Gregory, J. W. 1929. The geological history of the Atlantic Ocean. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 85, lxviii –cxxii. Gregory, J. W. 1929a. Eduard Suess memorial tablet. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 85, cxxxvi –cxli. Gregory, J. W. 1930. The geological history of the Pacific Ocean. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 86, lxxii – cxxvi. Holmes, A. 1928. Radioactivity and continental drift. Geological Magazine, 65, 236– 238. Holmes, A. 1931. Radioactivity and Earth movements. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 18, 559– 606. Marvin, U. B. 1985. The British reception of Alfred Wegener’s Continental Drift Hypothesis. Earth Sciences History, 4, 138– 159. Oreskes, N. 1999. The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Sengo¨r, A. M. C. 1982. Eduard Suess’ relations to the pre-1950s school of thought in global tectonics. Geologische Rundschau, 71, 381– 420. Stefanini, G. 1924. Relations between American and European Tertiary Echinoid faunas. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 35, 827– 846. Suess, E. 1901. Das Antlitz der Erde, Volume 3 (Part 1 1901, Part 2 1909); 508pp English Editions, Volume 3, 1908, Volume 3/2 1909; 789pp. Tempsky, Vienna. Vening Meinesz, F. A. 1928. Gravity survey by submarine via Panama and Java. The Geographical Journal, 71, 144–156. Wegener, A. 1922. Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane. Druck und Verlag von Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn Akt.-Ges, Brunswick. Wegener, A. 1929. The Origin of Continents and Oceans. 4th edn, translated by John Biram. Methuen, London. (Reprinted in 1967.)

Chapter 21 ‘Retirement’ with continued output

At the meeting of the University Court on 13 June 1929, Gregory intimated his intention to retire from the Chair of Geology on 30 September 1929 (Glasgow Herald, 14 June), thus giving very short notice to appoint a successor without an interregnum. This suggests that he had made the decision only shortly before 13 June. The official retirement age for Professors in Glasgow was then 70; at 65, he was standing down five years early. He had visibly aged (Figs 21.1 & 21.2 compared with Frontispiece when c. 50). He did not intend to stop working, but planned to concentrate on writing, particularly books, undisturbed by the academic routines of teaching, field classes, attendance at Senate and other committees, and running the Department of Geology and the geological section of the Hunterian Museum. He still had part of his two year spell as President of the GSL and a second presidential address to deliver; both London-based duties. Since he produced no fewer than four books (two joint) and about 30 papers in 1930 and 1931 following his retirement, there is no doubt that he continued relentlessly in his work ethic. His publication output actually increased as other duties fell away. The topics were mostly, but not entirely, the familiar ones already described. It seems likely that the trigger that precipitated Gregory’s early retirement was the fact that Audrey, at some time in the later 1920s had decided to move back to Little Baddow in Essex (Fig. 21.3). There are several possible reasons; because her lungs could take no more of the polluted Glasgow atmosphere, or because she found Little Baddow in the country much more congenial, or to look after her aged parents (over 80 years old). This was not a rift, as they maintained close contact with weekly letters (A. Mendell, pers. comm. 2008). Ursula, who did not marry, remained with her father in Glasgow to run the household for him and Christopher (C. J. Gregory mss). He was some months into his retirement before Ursula and Gregory moved to Little Baddow, which was within easy reach of the London libraries and societies. Gregory was still writing from Glasgow at least into 1930, and was attending meetings of the Geological Society of Glasgow, for example, 13 February, 13 March, and 10 April 1930, on which occasions he is recorded as having spoken (TGSG, 18, 632– 635). J. G. C. Anderson, who in his first year at Glasgow University was taught by Gregory in his last year in post (1929), told the author he discussed geological matters with Gregory after his first year. Although there would have been the usual retirement tributes from within the university, the anonymously-written one given in Nature (124, p. 591) on 12 October 1929 is appreciative, generous and probably representative of many others (e.g. Glasgow Herald, 14 June 1929) and is quoted in part, even though one or two details may not be precisely correct. Possibly, it was written by G. W. Tyrrell. By coincidence, the publication of a letter in Nature only two days before Gregory’s retirement enabled the writer to pour cold water on some of those, who quite correctly in retrospect, disbelieved some of Gregory’s long held theories. At the end of September Professor Gregory left the University of Glasgow on retirement from the Chair of Geology—the end of 25 years of service. During that period the membership of his classes has risen from 15 to 400, and in his last session he lectured to the largest geological class in the British Isles, if not in the world. His skill as an organiser and his powers as a lecturer have been well displayed in dealing with these enormous numbers. Under his inspiration and guidance the Glasgow geological school has produced a large amount of original work . . . he has inspired numerous young men to take up geology as a career, many of whom are now in prominent positions in the geological world. He retires with the good wishes of a host of students . . . His extraordinary versatility and powers of work are well known. Not only as a geologist, but also as a geographer, explorer and social economist, has he won scientific

fame. Twenty books plus 300 papers range from palaeontology to ore deposits, from geology of East African Rift Valleys to the origin of fiords . . . social problems. His journeys in East Africa . . . Chinese Tibet are well known and his racy travel books are models of their kind. There is scarcely a department of geology he has not enriched by observation and brilliant theory and while he has been accused of a tendency to champion ‘lost causes’, his views have frequently been vindicated in the advance of science, the latest example being found in Prof. A. Holmes’ letter to Nature on September 28 1929, pp. 477– 478 on ‘Ore-lead and Rock-lead and the origin of certain ore deposits

The Holmes letter referred to dealt with the atomic weight of different leads being related to the U and Th proportions from which the daughter Pb isotopes were derived. Not that Gregory had written on this topic, but as Holmes (1929) wrote: ‘Thus we are led to agree with Professor Gregory – at least for certain deposits – that “the source of the ores appears to lie in a zone deeper than that of the ordinary igneous rocks (Gregory 1928, p. 19)”. Professor Gregory’s hypothesis of the origin of certain ore-deposits – first published in 1906 [refers to abstract; full account Gregory 1907] – is by no means inconsistent with geological observations, though it has been generally regarded as heresy . . . it receives unequivocal support from a source so apparently unrelated as that of atomic weight determinations’. When Gregory retired, the University Calendar listed the departmental staff as Tyrrell, Weir, Neilson, Barrett (Carnegie Teaching Fellow, appointed 1924), W. J. McCallien (appointed 1927, previously Baxter Demonstrator) and W. R. Flett (Demonstrator), a total of seven staff including the new professor, who to the disappointment of the faithful and distinguished Tyrrell, was E. B. Bailey This was a significant increase from the one or two staff of 1904. By coincidence, Sir Donald MacAlister, Principal 1907 –1929, who had worked well with Gregory, retired as Principal at the same time as Gregory, becoming the new Chancellor of the University. The university recognized Gregory’s outstanding contributions and on 18 June 1930 he received a Glasgow University Honorary LL D from the new Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Robert Sangster Rait, (1874 –1936) who addressed him in Latin, a few of the translated words of which are: ‘How great a loss have we suffered in your resignation who have so long been a stoup [an old Scots mining term for support or prop, but also used for a loyal and enthusiastic supporter] and ornament of our Faculty of Science. Now that you have passed into honoured retirement we most gladly create you Doctor of Laws’ (Glasgow Herald, 19 June 1930). This was his second LL D. Gregory retired a few days before the October 1929 Wall Street stock market crash, and the resulting Great Depression which caused massive unemployment in the western world. Selling his boat and his house, if he owned it, could have been the reason for his delayed departure from Glasgow. The national university pension scheme, FSSU (Federated Scheme of Superannuation for Universities), had only been introduced after the First World War, so Gregory would have been partly dependent upon his own pension provision, and royalties from books already published. After formal retirement, Gregory must have expected to continue supplementing his income by writing paid articles and textbooks. Since probate records show he left over £15 000, a considerable sum in 1932, he must have been successful financially, and his publication income must have made up a significant part of this. For instance, he had become General Editor of Methuen’s Geological Series (before 1929), the first book being G. W. Tyrrell’s ‘The Principles of Petrology’, followed by ‘The Elements of Economic Geology’ by Gregory, then ‘The Nappe

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 193– 200. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.21

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Fig. 21.1. Gregory on one of his last Glasgow day geological excursions. By permission of the University of Glasgow Archive Services.

theory in the Alps’ by Franz Heritsch (translated by P. G. H. Boswell) then ‘The Structure of Asia’, edited by Gregory (with a substantial introduction by him). ‘In preparation’ in this series when he retired were ‘General Stratigraphy’ by Gregory and B. H. Barrett of the Glasgow Department and ‘Geomorphology’ by F. Debenham plus an unannounced book on the Dalradian rocks of Scotland.

Journal articles and lecturing

Fig. 21.2. Gregory about the time of his retirement, aged 65. By permission of the University of Glasgow Archive Services.

A more surprising source of income was the completion in 1929 or 1930 of a study of the Lower Eocene corals from Thal (708 330 E, 338 220 N), south of Tirah, Samana Range, then in the NW Provinces of India (now in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan), collected by the foraminiferal expert Lt. Col. Lewis Merson Davies (1882 –1955), and published in Palaeontologica Indica (Gregory 1930), which paid by the page published. This was a reversion to NHM-type output and was part of a final burst of palaeontological output. P. M. Duncan had made an earlier study of the corals, and an attraction of the project was that the Lower Eocene of Europe was poor in corals compared with the magnificent specimens from the Ranikot and Laki Beds of NW India. Forty species (half of which were new species) were described and splendidly illustrated, with Miss M. Latham’s help. This was followed by identification of corals collected by Miss M. McKinnon-Wood from Kenya (Gregory et al. 1930). Gregory’s last palaeontological papers appeared in January and November 1931. The first concerned Eomontipora harrisoni, sp.n., a new coral genera from the Cretaceous of Honduras presented by J. V. Harrison, and returned Gregory to discussing the affinities of the Montiporidae (Gregory 1931). The Eumontipora showed that the New Guinea coral reluctantly called Montipora antique by Gregory & Trench (1916) and the Honduras specimen were

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Fig. 21.3. Bassetts, Little Baddow, east of Chelmsford, Essex, to which Audrey and Gregory retired, showing the rural setting in the 1920s and part of the garden about 1904. By courtesy of Mrs Chalmers and Miss J. Gregory.

primitive species of Montiporids. As Montiporids were restricted to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and were unknown in the Atlantic or the West Indies, Gregory concluded the Pacific Ocean must have extended eastward over Central America. The second paper described two new genera of Cretaceous Hydractiniidae collected from the Kent Chalk by George Edward Dibley (1857 –1943); they looked like sheets covered with conspicuous cones – ‘a difficult group of the Hydrozoa’ (Gregory 1931a). On 22 January 1930, a few days before his final presidential address, Gregory et al. (1930a) read an account to the GSL of the geology of the South Central Sahara, on the NW and western sides of the Aı¨r Massif, based on a collection of samples made by Francis James Rennell Rodd (1895 – 1977). At In Nuguren, Turonian fossils were cited as evidence of the former connection of the sea between Angola and the Mediterranean across the Central Sahara. The igneous rocks were also described, and considered to be a northern extension of the Cenozoic volcanic rocks of Kenya and Kordofan. In May and early June 1930 (postcard in Hunterian Museum sent to E. Currie) Gregory visited the Eiseben mining field, Rothenburg am Tauber, Bavaria and the Mansfeld mining field, Saxony, Germany, where he was conducted around the Permian Copper shale (Kupferschiefer) and collected specimens (Gregory’s field notebooks). From this study he described the classic ore deposits (worked for over seven centuries yielding over a million tons of copper but with over 40 other elements), to the IMM in a paper discussed on 18 December 1930 (Gregory 1930a). This was the last of his four Transactions IMM papers, but not his last contribution to discussion. Because of the fossil non-marine fish and plants, Gregory concluded that the Kupferschiefer was a lagoonal deposit with the copper, derived in solution from the Harz Mountains, and precipitated by bacteria. His readings about early mining, perhaps as preparation for his visit to the Saxony mining field with its long history, prompted a general account of ‘The Dawn of Mining’ in ‘The Nineteenth Century’, February 1930 issue (Gregory 1930b). This summarized the then known dates of the earliest mining of copper, tin, iron and gold, and held that although some of the abundant gold used in Egypt and Babylon certainly came from near local sources such as Libya, Nubia (Sudan), Midian (now S. Israel, S. Jordan & W. Saudi Arabia) and Asia Minor, significant quantities also came from Zimbabwe and southern Africa. Later a short summary appeared in the Canadian Mining Journal (Gregory 1930c).

Involvement in more local archaeology, in Scotland, was a new venture with an account of ‘Some caves and a Rock Shelter at Loch Ryan and Portpatrick, Galloway’ which described the occupation of those caves by post-glacial man (Gregory et al. 1930b). More familiar was interpreting the submarine topography of troughs that Admiral H. P. Douglas, Hydrographer to the Royal Navy, drew to Gregory’s attention. The first of these, the old course of the Rhine, has already been described and was regarded as eroded by the River Rhine (Gregory 1931b). The others, in or near the Mediterranean, prompted Gregory to study the geology and tectonic history of the adjoining lands. He proposed that the Salamis Submarine Trough, east of Cyprus in Famagusta Bay (Gregory 1931c), and troughs in the Strait of Gibraltar and south of Ceuta in NE Morocco, SE of the Strait of Gibraltar (Gregory 1932), were all of down-faulted tectonic origin, a conclusion accepted only for the Strait of Gibraltar by Francis Parker Shepard (1897 –1985) (1933), who regarded the other two as old river valleys excavated more recently by submarine erosion. The March 1932 paper by Gregory on the submarine troughs of Morocco and Gibraltar seems to have been his last paper. Gregory continued to lecture widely after his formal retirement. On 15 April 1930 he addressed the Edinburgh City Business Club arguing for establishing the Cairngorms as a National Park for Scotland for walking and camping, winter sports and to improve the physique of the nation (Glasgow Herald, 16 April 1930). On 13 April 1931 at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London, under the auspices of the South Place Ethical Society, Gregory gave the 22nd Conway Memorial lecture entitled ‘Race as a Political Factor’ with Sir Arthur Keith (1866 –1955), a declared friend of Gregory’s, in the Chair. The lecture summarized Gregory’s repeated arguments that where black and white races coexist, as in South Africa and the United States, there are interracial problems and that interbreeding (‘miscegenation’) of the two groups gave rise to ‘inferior stock’ not a superior hybrid. The lecture was published in a 72-page booklet in April 1931 (Gregory 1931d). On 18 June 1931 he addressed a conference of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems at the Royal Society of Arts where he again maintained that the main advantage of emigration from Britain was not the removal of surplus population, but the much-needed human increase in under-populated countries which would ensure a market for British exports (The Times, 19 June 1931).

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In late May 1931, Gregory (1931e) wrote the introduction to a memoir by Dr Leo Picard (1900 –1996) of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, entitled Geological Researches in the Judean Desert. The memoir, based on Picard’s mapping of the Jericho area, was reprinted by the Palestine Exploration Fund from Picard (1931). Gregory’s introduction summarized the previous geological opinions about the origin of the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, and although ostensibly written to give authority to the memoir, the work itself was almost certainly approved of by Gregory because it concluded that the depression was due to down-faulting giving a rift valley, as Suess, Gregory and others had supposed for many years. On the contrary, Bailey Willis, (1857 – 1949) (1928), for whom Gregory had high admiration, had recently proposed that the highlands on both sides of the depression had been thrust upwards, leaving the valley behind, but Picard conclusively showed this to be erroneous, which pleased Gregory. The 1929 British Association (BA) meeting was held in South Africa and Gregory did not make a presentation but the following year in Bristol he spoke on ‘The recent cable fractures in the Western Atlantic’ (BA 1931, p. 314; also Gregory 1929), discussing the earthquake east of Nova Scotia on 18 November 1929 in which 26 people drowned in the resulting tsunami. He supposed a rift valley had formed by the faulting, which he thought favoured a fault origin for submarine canyons as earlier proposed by him (Gregory 1913). He participated in a session on the possible correlation of pluvial periods in the tropics with glacial periods near to the poles, strongly arguing against any such correlation (The Times, 6 September 1930). He was also appointed to a committee, chaired by Prof. John Stanley Gardiner FRS (1872 –1946), ‘To investigate the biology, geology and geography of Lakes Baringo and Rudolf, Northern Kenya, and Lake Edward, Uganda’ which at the 1931 BA meeting became responsible for organizing an expedition to fulfil those purposes. Although the 1931 BA meeting in London, from 23 –30 September, was the last Gregory attended, it brought to him the outstanding honours of being the President of Section C (Geology) in the year of the centenary meeting, and of being President of Section C for a second time. His presidential address (Gregory 1932a), given on 24 September, was on ‘Problems of geology contemporary with the British Association’. This address, which had involved him in much reading of the literature, is important as it was effectively the last statement by Gregory, less than a year before his death, on why he still did not accept continental drift, although there is no overt mention of it. First, Gregory summarized the state of ‘Stratigraphy in 1831’ and the subsequent identification of the Phanerozoic Geological Systems. Secondly, he reviewed what he considered to be ‘The Fundamental Problems’ facing geologists in 1831. Inevitably his choice reflected some of his own interests – establishing what controlled sea level, including the related mobility of the crust (both expanded on below), the 1831 belief of many in the fixity and special creation of species, influenced by the theological dominance of much thought, including regarding the widespread Pleistocene boulder clay as being evidence of a world-wide biblical flood. Other 1831 problems dealt with were the origin of ore deposits and the geology of the inner Earth and its control over mountain building, especially Jean-Baptiste E´lie de Beaumont (1798 – 1864)’s theory of mountain ranges as due to the interior of the Earth cooling and contracting, causing the rigid outer shell to undergo deformation. From this Gregory went on to repeat his long-held, but almost solitary, espousal of the Lowthian Green Tetrahedral Theory, supposedly explaining the antipodal arrangement of the continents. This led on to consideration of ‘Mountain structure’ in which H. D. and W. B. Rogers views of the formation of the Appalachian chain as wave-like advances of the crust was described and later adopted by E. Suess for the origin of the Alps. This gave Gregory an opening into a summary of Suess’s views on downward vertical movements and Suess’s world-wide

geological and geographical syntheses. There was no recognition of the inconsistency of the Tetrahedral Theory with the impermanence of the oceans. In Gregory’s third section he considered the topic of ‘Geology in education’, with some words still true today. ‘The progress of geology in most branches of its work contrasts with the decline in its educational status’. Although he thought ‘the geologists’ ordinary task is the interpretation of a tangle of uncertain factors’ and such gave excellent training for dealing with ‘problems as varied and complex as those of daily life’, he attributed the decline in the educational status of geology as due to persistent retention of ‘illogical nomenclature’, causing ‘the lowered value of the subject as a medium of education’, a theme emphasized in the Glasgow Herald of 25 September 1931. Finally in the fourth section he identified his choice of the outstanding geological leaders of the previous century as having been C. Lyell, E. Suess, J. Milne and C. Lapworth. Returning to Gregory’s evaluation of sea level variations and the mobility of the crust in his BA address, (which incidentally led to another review (Gregory 1931f ) on ‘Raised beaches and variations of sea-level’ that was almost a repeat of Gregory 1909), he was in effect continuing the thrust of his GSL presidential addresses by bringing forward further arguments in support of his views, particularly where he knew he was vulnerable, namely, the question of isostasy. He pointed out that it had been established that the crust in Scandinavia was rising rapidly and not due to erosional removal of material although both that, and the deposition of sediment, could cause elevation and depression of the crust respectively. He accepted that gravity surveys such as those of the Himalayas had established the principle of isostasy with mountains rising above the general level because of the lightness of their foundations, but he did not accept that isostasy was the only controlling factor, and complained that strict adherence to mathematical deductions had, in the past, as with the controversies over the age of the Earth, produced results that geological evidence disagreed with and were later shown to be correct. Vertical movements, involving faults with a throws of 10 000 feet (.3000 m), were known with no surface cause. Rift valleys showed profound vertical drops, even to below sea level, as in the Jordan Rift Valley. Moreover, he did not accept that the entire ocean floor was a continuous sheet of heavy material, sima, with specific gravity being the only control over its height or depth, a point returned to four days after giving his presidential address. Gregory still maintained his strong BA geographical connections by contributing to a Section E (Geography) symposium on 28 September 1931, discussing the ‘Boundary between geology and geography’ (BA 1932, p. 410), and on the same day he made a written contribution (as Section C duties prevented him attending), to the Section E discussion on ‘Problems of the Earth’s crust’ which was later published in full in The Geographical Journal (Gregory 1931g). The main new point Gregory made again concerned how far the Earth’s crust could be from isostatic equilibrium by stating that ‘Dr Meinesz’s work (measuring gravity in the Indonesian trench) has shown that the depth of the seafloor is not determined simply by the specific gravity of the mass below, so isostatic equilibrium is not a world-wide condition’. This interest in the ups and downs of the crust led to him being invited to comment on Haarmann’s Oscillation Theory of the crust, which Gregory (1931h) did, in an article he wrote and published in German, rejecting Haarmann’s views on polar wandering, the origin of the Moon by being flung out of Asia and, surprisingly in view of Gregory’s Geological Society of London presidential addresses, the impermanence of the oceans and continents! Clearly, Gregory was still able to write in German, even if some of his views appeared to oscillate puzzlingly, perhaps symptomatic of internal disagreements. After formal retirement, despite his book commitments, Gregory’s output of papers actually increased slightly as he maintained scientific papers in addition to returning to writing paid

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articles, for example, The Spectator on ‘Mixed marriages and the colour bar’ (Gregory 1931i) and The Political Quarterly on ‘Indian education and unemployment’ (Gregory 1931j). The latter is interesting for revealing the lengths he had gone to in 1917– 19 to ascertain whether it was true that increased university education in Bengal had led to more criminal activity, as he had been assured in Britain before he went to India. This brought out his suspicion of the ‘accepted truth’. He inspected the Bengal police records which showed that the malcontents who carried out ‘criminal sedition and dacoity’ came not from the universities but the Middle Vernacular Schools, which were neither Government funded nor controlled. The Police assured him that the educated classes were the most effective supporters of law and order, so the popular view in Britain was factually wrong. However, by 1931, as Gregory admitted, university staff and students were taking an active part in political agitation (against British rule) though not normal criminal activity. He urged that unemployment among Indian graduates be reduced by paying school teachers improved salaries as the real need was for better school teaching rather than over-large universities (Gregory 1931j). Gregory’s scientific papers continued to range widely from geology and geography locally to that of far-flung countries. He considered the origin of stone polygons on the shores of Loch Lomond as being due to horizontal pushing by frost –thaw of flat slate pebbles around a core of mud or against a boulder, and were a matter of local interest, although having application generally (Fig. 21.4; Gregory 1930d). More widespread interests included his editing and publication of ‘The Late Professor Schwarz’s contribution to the Geology of the Coast of Mauritania, in which a description of that little known coast was given (Gregory 1931k); Gregory et al. (1930a) on the Central Sahara; and his continued reviewing, such as the 703 pages of the

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Geology of Albania (Gregory 1930e). Other accounts repeated old themes, such as his steadfast maintenance that the climate of Palestine was the same now as it was in the times recorded in the Bible (Gregory 1930f). This was the repetition of how important the historic storing of water in tanks had been which he had previously used to justify the constancy of the rainfall from Roman times until now in Cyrenaica.

Books published Technically, the first books to appear after Gregory’s retirement were ‘The Structure of Asia’ (Gregory 1929a), already discussed, and ‘Earthquakes and Volcanoes’, (Gregory 1929b) both first published in October 1929 although clearly written before his retirement. Excluding these, Gregory published four books, (two single-authored) and a booklet, in the years of 1930 and 1931, one of which, ‘From Meteorite to Man; the evolution of the Earth’ (Gregory et al. 1930c), published in September 1930, has already been noted.

‘Earthquakes and Volcanoes’ This 80-page 16.5  10.5 cm softback booklet (Gregory 1929b) was No. 97 in the exceedingly popular ‘Benn’s Sixpenny Library’ Series (of 252 titles by the time the present writer’s copy was printed) and probably sold very well, being reprinted unchanged with ‘First Published in 1929’ as supplies ran out. The first 46 pages described the devastating historic eruptions of Mt Pele´e, Kratatoa, Vesuvius, Etna, Kilauea and other volcanoes with exciting accounts of death and survival, and gave some explanations for the varying violence of the eruptions; the remaining pages dealt with a number of historic earthquakes and the

Fig. 21.4. Slate fragments packed against boulders, Loch Lomond, Scotland. Rule is c. 23 cm long. (Gregory 1930d.)

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destruction and effects they caused, together with the means of recording earthquakes, what caused them, and what they tell us about the inside of the Earth, all written in an easy-to-read and favourably reviewed style. They probably drew on material used in Gregory’s first-year lectures. The 1930 Nature (125, p. 11) reviewer was highly complimentary ‘there is no better short account of these subjects available in English . . . but the chapter on ‘The inner structure of the Earth’ is less up to date than it might be; it is certainly not in accordance with modern evidence to describe the shell between the rocky crust and the iron –nickel core as consisting “mainly of the rigid nickel –iron mass of the Earth”. This was a reference to the metalrich layer that Gregory believed underlay the crust. Certainly, at least one notable Cambridge geologist, Walter Brian Harland (1917 –2003), recalled using this series, including No. 100, The Age of the Earth by A. Holmes, when a youth of 15–16, and also instanced other people he knew who also used them (pers. comm. 2000). Verbally he ascribed his interest in geology as being confirmed by the two books by Gregory and Holmes.

‘General Stratigraphy’ In February 1931, ‘General Stratigraphy’, a 285-page book by Gregory & B. H. Barrett (1931) appeared. The bulk of the book summarized the stratigraphy of the world in 239 pages, in itself no mean feat, and this part was correctly stated to be ‘mainly a work of omission and compression’. Somewhat puzzling, in view of his GSL presidential addresses, was the statement on the permanence of the oceans and continents: ‘no former continents were essentially different from those of the present time, both in position and extent’ (pp. 16–17), which presumably was justified as a simplification for elementary student use. The book also ascribed all the widespread regional areas of gneiss and schist as Precambrian, and the Precambrian of the world as being a basal granite gneiss complex, followed by a series of metamorphosed sediments, capped unconformably by sediments which have not suffered the development of foliation or significant metamorphism. World-wide correlations were equally controversial, and although Gregory’s familiarity with many of the successions was apparent, many of the supposed facts, such as the ‘Grenville Limestone’ of NE America being .90 000 feet thick (.27 km), were disputable. Nevertheless, the simplifications throw light on one of the reasons for Gregory’s success in building the first year classes to 400 students; he presented a clear, easy-to-grasp story, unruffled by exceptions or strict adherence to the exact truth which is what a good teacher often finds necessary at an initial stage in understanding a subject.

‘The Story of the Road’ In October 1931 Gregory’s (1931l ) book ‘The Story of the Road from the beginning down to AD 1931’ was published. He had probably planned it for some years, as gathering facts and ideas in connection with the later parts of the book was probably part of the reason for his attendance in term time at the November 1927 Public Works Congress held at the Public Works, Roads and Transport Exhibition in Islington, as there were extensive discussions on all types of modern roads with hundreds of delegates from abroad (The Times, 15– 18 November). The book first described, under ‘Ancient and mediaeval roads’, the early tracks and roads, such as the ‘amber’ route in Europe, the ‘silk’ road in China, and the astonishing 7000 km Inca road in Peru, the paved Egyptian and Carthaginian roads and the Roman continental road system. The second part describing ‘The evolution of the Modern Road’ deals with the development of toll

roads, the work of the great British road engineers, Wade, Thomas Telford (1757 –1834) and John Loudon MacAdam (1756 –1836), and the civil engineering of modern roads, and presumably drew partly on lecture material given to civil engineering students with its descriptions of the requirements for a good modern road. The book brought out again the wide reading and productivity of Gregory, and his ability to simplify and convey the essence of a message. The reviews were favourable.

‘Dalradian Geology’ In December 1931, Gregory produced his final synthesis of the structure and succession within the Dalradian rocks and their correlation with other Precambrian successions in a 188-page book ‘Dalradian Geology: The Dalradian Rocks of Scotland and their Equivalents in other Countries’ (Gregory 1931m). It was a complete disaster. First, it was unfortunately timed for Bailey (1930) had not only found out how to use cross-bedding and graded bedding to establish way-up, but had already published both the methods and the first reliable stratigraphical successions in the Loch Awe Nappe, the Iltay Nappe and the Ballappel Foundation (Balluchulish to Appin and adjoining region) of the Dalradian rocks. This enabled the first confident identification of the major anticlines and synclines in the Dalradian. All this Gregory totally ignored, presumably because he did not accept the results, which, since he did not discuss them, suggests he did not really understand their enormous significance. As Bailey succeeded Gregory in Glasgow and these discoveries were first made known to Bailey in late 1927, and confirmed in the summer of 1929, Gregory must have known about them at least two years before he completed the writing of the Dalradian book. Gregory had one piece of way-up evidence, based on a field sketch of cross-bedding in the Schiehallion Quartzite, made fortuitously in 1911 before he realized it could be used to show the bedding at that outcrop was right way up. The fact that he included it showed he was aware of its usefulness by the time the book was finished. ‘The study of the Dalradian rocks has been my main recreation during the 25 years of my residence in Glasgow, mostly in weekend excursions in winter’. Although he had seen an impressive range of the Dalradian, including hundreds of thin sections (Hunterian Museum collections), the solutions to the internal sequence and structure of the Dalradian required careful mapping with knowledge not then generally available. Dr W. J. McCallien’s field and other assistance was acknowledged. Gregory had previously delved into the subject of the Dalradian succession (e.g. Gregory 1910, 1916) and into the relationship of the Lewisian, Moine, Dalradian and Torridonian rocks in a German publication in English (Gregory 1916) for which the proofs were in the hands of the contributors when war broke out in 1914. The proofs were allowed to be returned and the book was published in 1916, although it was almost unknown, because circulation was limited. In 1929 what was effectively a second edition was produced under the editorships of the Geological Survey geologists, John William Evans (1857– 1930) and Cyril James Stubblefield (1901 – 1999) (1929), as Handbook of the Geology of Great Britain with Gregory contributing the section on The Pre-Cambrian or Pre-Palaeozoic of Scotland. Gregory maintained that ‘The name Dalradian is now adopted for a Scottish pre-Torridonian System’ (p. 33) and illustrated the structure from the Moines to the Highland Boundary Fault with an incredibly simple cross-section with no scale. He recorded his supposed Lennoxian basal division of the presently understood Upper Dalradian, with the Dalradian being thrust on top of the Lennoxian because of the thrust he had seen in the Loch Katrine aqueduct tunnel in 1906. By 1931 Gregory considered that the Lennoxian contained Dalradian detritus and was unconformably deposited on the Dalradian, with the natural contact being nowhere exposed, but was inverted

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at Callandar and right way up generally from Loch Lomond westwards. Almost no-one has accepted the existence of the Lennoxian, even during Gregory’s time, and certainly not thereafter, the rocks being simply part of the Dalradian succession. The concept that the Dalradian rocks pre-dated those of the Torridonian was based on the simplistic view that the Dalradian rocks were tightly folded, cleaved and highly metamorphosed in some places whereas Torridonian Sandstones were unmetamorphosed, generally flat-lying and had originally even been thought to be Old Red Sandstone (Devonian). Gregory’s interpretation assumed that there were no significant strike –slip faults across the Highlands, and that any single folding or metamorphism, (and there are many in the Moines and the Dalradian rocks), must affect the whole of the Highlands. Gregory also assumed that the Dalradian succession, which dips to the north in the southern Highlands, was a simple succession becoming younger to the north, starting in the south with a thrust contact against the younger Lennoxian to the south. Even at that time it was well understood that the succession in the Dalradian was undetermined before Bailey’s (1930) paper. Gregory assumed there were no significant repetitions of the succession, which is the complete reverse of the truth, and he correlated the Lennoxian with the Macduff Slates and Grits of Banffshire. He claimed that the Torridonian was younger than the Moine rocks because he had found a Moinian pebble in the Torridonian (Gregory 1915), which agreed with Horne’s conclusion, but not that of Peach (Peach & Horne 1930). Horne partly based his view on his belief that the Sparagmites (¼Torridonian) in Scandinavia were younger than the rocks he correlated with the Moines. Modern age dating tends to favour correlating the Moines and the Torridonian so Peach was nearer the truth. Other conclusions of Gregory, such as his rejection of E. B. Bailey’s slides and nappes, the Islay Anticline, and the glacial origin of the Schiehallion Boulder Bed, have also not been vindicated by modern work. In Bailey’s (1934) monumental synthesis: ‘West Highland tectonics: Loch Leven to Glen Roy’, he devoted a specific part of the paper to ‘The late Prof. J. W. Gregory’s views’, pointing out that Gregory (1931m) had ignored the mapped connection of the succession between Glen Nevis and Glen Spean, and that a published photograph in Gregory (1931m, p. 154) supposedly showing way-up was of ramifying quartz segregations. The book on the Dalradian rocks included an audacious attempt to correlate the Precambrian rocks of the world, largely based on the Scottish and Canadian successions, despite admitting that ‘The classification of the Canadian pre-Cambrian rocks is at present confused’. The whole of the ‘Pre-Palaeozoic’ in the world Gregory supposed to consist of an astonishingly simple succession of basal gneisses, coarse schists and plutonic rocks overlain unconformably by metasediments, including schists, (e.g. Dalradian) which were overlain by thick sandstones (e.g. Torridonian and Sparagmites), slates and some limestones. He tried to correlate the Dalradian with the Anglesey and Start Point rocks and then, with what is seen now as reckless audacity, with some of the Precambrian successions in USA, Canada, Greenland, Spitzbergen, Scandinavia and even China and India (Dalradian ¼ Dharwar), the Transvaal, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Australia. Even when published, the book was most unfavourably reviewed by G. L. Elles (1932), who wrote: ‘sweeping generalisations . . . Gregory’s views upon metamorphism generally are quite incomprehensible . . . considerable space devoted to an attempt to establish his Lennoxian Series—his evidence is very unconvincing . . . largely based on an entire misconception of the metamorphic condition of his Loch Lomond Series. It is a great pity that he tries to force his succession upon the Pre-Cambrian rocks of other countries.’

The scene has not changed with time. Thus Dr P. W. G. Tanner wrote (pers. comm. 29 November 2006): ‘Gregory had the unhappy knack of almost always being wrong about things Dalradian. For example, his concept of the ‘Lennoxian’ as a basement to the Southern Highland Dalradian is

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unsubstantiated nonsense, and so is his interpretation of the Glen Orchy area as a standard, right-way up Moine sequence with no folds (the Beinn Udlaidh Syncline [superbly demonstrated in Tanner & Thomas (2010)] is the best example of a major, recumbent isoclinal fold in the British Isles), and so on. He based his hypotheses and interpretations on what he saw on day visits made to localities on maps made by other geologists. He does not appear to have done any original mapping himself, and therefore never really understood the rocks.’

Gregory had not been trained in the mapping of metamorphic rocks and did very little mapping in his life and certainly no sustained effort. The mapping he and his students did in Victoria was in the nature of reconnaissance compared with the meticulous and slow 1:10 560 mapping required to unravel the structure and stratigraphy of the Dalradian succession. Moreover, the basic knowledge of structural geology among most geologists was not then as developed as that of mineralogy, palaeontology and stratigraphy and has advanced enormously since 1930. Even when published, Gregory must have known about Archibald Allison’s (1906 –1992) (1933) and Bailey’s work on the application of way-up indicators which disproved his own succession, but he may have felt, after all the effort that he had put into looking at the Dalradian rocks in so many field areas and under the microscope, he had to ‘round-up’ his studies with a final summary. For a man who tried to use every moment profitably, the time and travelling he spent on the Dalradian rocks was probably his biggest waste of effort in his whole career. Gregory’s lack of structural expertise was well brought out by his deductions (Gregory 1915a) from the photographs of South Georgia commented on already. Another instance of Gregory’s poor grasp of structure was in his review of ‘The Geology of Ben Nevis and Glen Coe and the surrounding country’ (Gregory 1917). This showed him very uncertain about the major recumbent folds identified by Bailey in the Ballachulish to Glen Coe area although, being in very clear stratigraphic units like the Glencoe Quartzite, these folds were reliably established. Basically the problem was that the structural geology of metamorphic rocks had advanced significantly since Gregory took his BSc, but he had not kept up with it. To a lesser extent the same applied in petrology, as is clear from, for instance, Gregory (1926), but he had Tyrrell on whom he could call for help or to describe, but he had no structural geologist to whom he could turn. The day of the polymath was ending as rapid giant scientific advances made it impossible for any one person to be expert in many fields. The book on the Dalradian rocks is therefore rarely referred to today. Gregory presumably never saw the review by Elles as it only appeared months after his departure for Peru. Sadly this seems to have been his last substantial publication, excepting one on Kenyan corals which was included in the fifth and final Monograph of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow (McKinnon Wood et al. 1938).

References Allison, A. 1933. The Dalradian Succession in Islay and Jura. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 89, 125–144. BA. 1930. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-seventh Meeting, South Africa 1929. John Murray, London. BA. 1931. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-eighth Meeting, Bristol 1930. John Murray, London. BA. 1932. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Centenary Meeting, London 1931. John Murray, London. Bailey, E. B. 1930. Sedimentation and tectonics. Geological Magazine, 67, 77– 92. Bailey, E. B. 1934. West Highland tectonics: Loch Leven to Glen Roy. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 90, 462–525. Elles, G. L. 1932. Review of Dalradian geology by J. W. Gregory. Geological Magazine, 69, 190– 191.

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Evans, J. W. & Stubblefield, C. J. (eds) 1929. Handbook of the Geology of Great Britain. Thomas Murby, London. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, J. W. 1907. Ore deposits and their distribution in depth. Lecture published in the Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 18, 305– 321. Gregory, J. W. 1909. The level of the sea. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 25, 311–324. Gregory, J. W. 1910. Work for Glasgow geologists—The problems of the South-Western Highlands. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 14, 1– 29. Gregory, J. W. 1913. The Nature and Origin of Fiords. John Murray, London. Gregory, J. W. 1915. Moine pebbles in Torridonian conglomerates. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 447– 450. Gregory, J. W. 1915a. The physiography of South Georgia as shown by Mr Ferguson’s photographs. In: Ferguson, D. Geological Observations in South Georgia. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 50, 814–816. Gregory, J. W. 1916. The Pre-Cambrian of Scotland. In: Steinmann, G. & Wilckens, O. (eds) The British Isles: Morphology; Pre-Cambrian of Scotland. Handbuch der Regionalen Geologie, Carl Winters, Heidelberg, 12 – 17; 34 – 42. Gregory, J. W. 1917. Review of Bailey, E. B. & Maufe, H. B. 1917. ‘The Geology of Ben Nevis and Glen Coe and the surrounding country’. Memoir of the Geological Survey, HMSO. Nature, 99, 173– 174. Gregory, J. W. 1926. The Sudbury nickel ores. Geological Magazine, 63, 190– 192. Gregory, J. W. 1928. The Elements of Economic Geology. Methuen & Co, London. Gregory, J. W. 1929. The earthquake south of Newfoundland and submarine canyons. Nature, 124, 945–946. Gregory, J. W. (Editor & Contributor) 1929a. The Structure of Asia. Methuen, London. Gregory, J. W. 1929b. Earthquakes and Volcanoes. Benn’s Sixpenny Library, No. 97, Ernest Benn Ltd, London. Gregory, J. W. 1930. The fossil fauna of the Samana Range and some neighbouring areas: Part VII: The Lower Eocene Corals. Palaeontologica Indica, New Series, 15, 81 –128. Gregory, J. W. 1930a. The copper-shale (Kupferschiefer) of Mansfeld. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 40, 3 –30, discussion 30 –55. Gregory, J. W. 1930b. The dawn of mining. The Nineteenth Century, 107, 236– 244. Gregory, J. W. 1930c. The dawn of mining. Canadian Mining Journal, 51, 616– 618. Gregory, J. W. 1930d. Stone polygons beside Loch Lomond. Geographical Journal, 76, 415– 418. Gregory, J. W. 1930e. Geology of Albania. Review of Volume 3, Geologica Hungarica Geological Survey of Hungary, Nature, 125, 8 –9. Gregory, J. W. 1930f. Palestine and the stability of climate in historic times. The Geographical Journal, 76, 487–494. Gregory, J. W. 1931. Eomontipora, a new coral from the Cretaceous of Honduras and the affinities of The Montiporidae. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 10, 8, 91 –96. Gregory, J. W. 1931a. Hydroconophora and Hydrokerion: two new genera of Cretaceous Hydractiniidae. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 10, 7, 475–484. Gregory, J. W. 1931b. A deep trench on the floor of the North Sea. The Geographical Journal, 77, 548– 557. Gregory, J. W. 1931c. A submarine trough off the coast of Cyprus. The Geographical Journal, 78, 357– 361. Gregory, J. W. 1931d. Race as a Political Factor. Conway Memorial Lecture. Watts & Co, London. Gregory, J. W. 1931e. Geological researches in the Judean Desert. Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement, October 1931, 197– 202.

Gregory, J. W. 1931f. Raised beaches and variations of sea-level. Scientia, 49, February 1931, 95 –104. Gregory, J. W. 1931g. Problems of the Earth’s crust. The Geographical Journal, 78, 444– 445. Gregory, J. W. 1931h. Die Oszillationstheorie. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Geologischen Gesellschaft, 83, 299– 301. Gregory, J. W. 1931i. Mixed marriages and the colour bar. The Spectator, 147, 75– 76. Gregory, J. W. 1931j. Indian education and unemployment. The Political Quarterly, 2, 241–250. Gregory, J. W. 1931k. The Late Professor Schwarz’s contribution to the geology of the coast of Mauritania. The Geographical Journal, 77, 238– 245. Gregory, J. W. 1931l. The Story of the Road from the Beginning Down to AD 1931. A. Maclehose & Co., London & Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1931m. Dalradian Geology: The Dalradian Rocks of Scotland and their Equivalents in other Countries. Methuen & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1932. A submarine trough near the Strait of Gibraltar. The Geographical Journal, 79, 219–220. Gregory, J. W. 1932a. Problems of geology contemporary with the British Association. British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Centenary Meeting, London 1931. John Murray, London, 51 –70. Gregory, J. W. & Barrett, B. H. 1931. General Stratigraphy. Methuen, London. Gregory, J. W. & Trench, J. B. 1916. Eocene corals from the Fly River, Central New Guinea. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 3, 481–8; 529– 536. Gregory, J. W., Mckinnon-Wood, M. et al., 1930. Reports on geological collections from the coastlands of Kenya Colony made by Miss McKinnon-Wood. Includes the Introduction (p.1) and The fossil corals of Kenya Colony (185 –209) by J.W. Gregory. Monograph of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum University of Glasgow, 4. Gregory, J. W., Currie, E. D., Weir, J., Williams, S. & Tyrrell, G. W. 1930a. On the geological collection from the South Central Sahara made by Francis R. Rodd. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 86, 399– 412. Gregory, J. W., Ritchie, J., Kennedy, W. Q. & Leitch, D. 1930b. Some caves and a rock shelter at Loch Ryan and Portpatrick, Galloway. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 64, (Vol. 4, 6th Series), 247–264. Gregory, J. W., Woodward, A. S., Watts, W. W. & Seward, A. C. 1930c. From meteorite to man: The evolution of the Earth. Forum Series 11. Watts & Co., London. Holmes, A. 1929. Ore-lead and rock-lead and the origin of certain ore deposits. Nature, 124, 477– 478. McKinnon-Wood, M., Currie, E. D., Gregory, J. W., Ovey, C. D., Tyrrell, G. W., Neilson, A. & Williams, S. 1938. On a second collection of fossils and rocks from Kenya made by Miss M. McKinnon-Wood. (Gregory’s contribution was on the fossil corals, 90 –97.) Monograph of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, 5. Peach, B. N. & Horne, J. 1930. Chapters on the geology of Scotland. In: MacGregor, M., Bailey, E. B. & Campbell, R. (eds) Oxford University Press, Oxford. Picard, L. 1931. Geological researches in the Judean Desert. Max Weg, Leipzig. Shepard, F. P. 1933. Submarine troughs of the Mediterranean. The Geographical Journal, 82, 177–178. Tanner, P. W. G. & Thomas, P. R. 2010. Major nappe-like D2 folds in the Dalradian rocks of the Beinn Udlaidh area, Central Highlands, Scotland. Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 100, 371– 389. Willis, B. 1928. Dead Sea problem: Rift valley or ramp valley? Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 39, 490–542.

Chapter 22 The final fatal expedition to Peru

According to C. J. Gregory (1977), Gregory had made two unsuccessful attempts to visit parts of South America, and each time Gregory said ‘an international disaster had stopped him, so he had better not arrange a visit a third time lest some cataclysm took place’, which it did, but of a personal nature. One of his reasons for retiring early was that it freed him to depart during the austral summer, but it was not until 1932 that he was able to organize a party to explore part of Peru. The intention was to make a reconnaissance of the main Andean range and determine the age of the rocks, especially the time when they were exhumed from the Pacific, to examine the structure of parts of the Peruvian coast, the geology of the desert belt between the coast and the western front of the Andes, to visit Inca ruins and to return by one of the headwaters of the Amazon and the Amazon through Brazil to a seaport on the Amazon. However, from surviving correspondence (in the author’s possession) with one of Gregory’s old students, William Quarrier Kennedy (1903 –1979), it is clear Gregory was also hoping to bring some samples of the Andean volcanic rocks, probably typical andesites, for Kennedy who was working on establishing the primary igneous magmas. This was an arduous undertaking for a man of 68 years, whose last previous expedition had been nine years earlier. The high altitudes of up to 16 100 ft (c. 4900 m) with freezing cold and the tropical heat in the jungle plus the distance to be traversed would have tried anyone, even those who were young and physically active. Gregory had visibly aged and was now bald, as shown by the last close photograph of him (Fig. 22.1). He was accompanied from Glasgow by Miss Meta (Eileen) McKinnon Wood (1893 – 1969), a former Girton College student, and a fossil collector who had already worked in East Africa and contributed material from Kenya to the Hunterian Museum (Gregory et al. 1930). She seems to have first stayed at 4 Park Quadrant in April 1928 as a letter from Ursula Gregory dated 29 April 1928 states “We’ve just had a most charming visitor, Miss MacKinnon Wood who is taking up geology, a quiet young woman but conversable, widely read, tried many things from farming to helping with a book exhibition in New York, very competent and unusually clever.” On 17 December 1931, just over two weeks before Gregory left, he contributed to the IMM discussion of T. A. Rickard’s (1932) paper on ‘Gold and silver as money metal’. In this he stated that mankind had been saved ‘from utter ruin’ by the providential discovery of silver and gold in Mexico and Peru in the 16th century, and gold in California and Australia in the 19th century, and that Suess, in his book ‘The Future of Gold’ published 54 years earlier, had pointed out that there was not enough gold in the world for it to serve as a currency for all ‘civilized nations’, and silver would inevitably take over with a revaluation of silver relative to gold. This seems to have been Gregory’s last published contribution to a scientific discussion. His last review (Gregory 1931) records some of his thoughts on ‘The Origin of Inca Civilisation’ being a review of the 634 pages in two volumes of ‘The AyarIncas’ by Miles Poindexter (1868 –1946), who held that the Incas came from Polynesia, not from North America via the Bering Strait. In December 1931, just before Gregory departed, Christopher Gregory, by now the Publicity Manager of Mavor & Coulson, announced his engagement. Christopher married Marion Eastty Black (1902 – 1998), a classics teacher, in Woodham Walter

Church, Essex, on 30 April while Gregory was in South America. Christopher and Marion had four children, Elizabeth (1933 –1938), Ann Catharine (1938 –), Martin John (1941 –), and Jane Rosalind (1946 – ), whom Gregory never saw, and these were his only grandchildren (A. Mendell, pers. comm. 2005, 2008). The story of Gregory nursing a child on one knee while correcting a proof with the opposite hand, and also carrying on an animated conversation, must have applied to one of Gregory’s own children. Gregory and McKinnon Wood left Swansea on 4 January 1932 on the cargo steamer La Paz. It had only 11 passengers, and was bound for Callao (for Lima), according to the Pacific Steam Navigation Company’s records. The following account is based on ‘The Times’ (28 December 1931; 5 August 1932), Boswell (1936), Coverley-Price (1932) and Coverley-Price & McKinnon Wood (1933; read to the RGS on 1 May 1933). The last two references are taken where they conflict with that of ‘The Times’. The party consisted of four, Gregory, McKinnon Wood, Arthur Victor Coverley-Price (1901 –1988) of the British Diplomatic Service (who joined at Lima), and M. Mariano C. Tarnawiecki, a Pole widely known in Peru, where he had lived for nearly 30 years, as a mining engineer, explorer, and scientist. Tarnawiecki accompanied the expedition by the courtesy of the Peruvian Government to help them in any way possible. In return, Gregory was to supply a report on the results the expedition obtained. CoverleyPrice had asked to join the expedition and as an able-bodied man, an artist (later of great renown) and Spanish speaker, was welcomed. The party arrived in Lima at the beginning of February and spent four days there. Gregory was awarded an honorary degree in Lima (Boswell 1936) but since no mention is made in any of the accounts, it seems unlikely that it was awarded then. Lima has the oldest university in the two Americas. The expedition was to work in three distinct regions. The first was the Coastal Cordillera and the desert region along the coast south of Lima, a region that goes years without rain. The second covered the central section of the Peruvian Andes across which a geological traverse was planned. The third area comprised the eastern face of the Andes and passed into the Amazon plain. Only a brief summary of the published accounts, which have much more detail, follows. The party left Lima on 14 February 1932 and travelled south by car. They were accompanied by a lorry, driven by a hired man, Duncan Masson, who was experienced in this terrain (Fig. 22.2). The lorry carried, among other things, petrol and water, as the region was usually rainless desert, the last heavy rains having been in 1925. They reached Pisco in three days and made their base on the Paracas Peninsula about 30 km to the south, spending about 5 weeks making traverses, examining the coast and the districts of Ica and Nazca. Gregory wanted to observe the effects of alternate expansion and contraction, due to temperature variations, in a desert area where the influence of water was minimal and rivers of stone are formed by downward creep of dry, loose material, which has a higher angle of rest than under the influence of water transport. Unfortunately in 1932 an exceptionally wet year had washed away bridges and made what were usually dry river crossings impassable with flood water. It seems likely that most of the rock transport occurred during a few rare flood events, but they managed to collect and map the distribution of some of the rock flows, and were surprised to find the desert belt between the Coastal Cordillera and the main Andes was not a

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 201– 207. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.22

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Fig. 22.1. Gregory in the last available close-up photograph, probably about 67 years old. Cut from an unknown source, perhaps The Times, 5 August 1932, by Miss Johnston and placed in the Geologists’ Association Photographic Archive. Supplied by Marjorie W. Carreck and Norman Carreck.

long rift valley filled with marine deposits, but a series of separate basins. The Coastal Cordillera which they expected to be a fold mountain range, showed little folding, and was suggested to be a detached outlier of the main Andes, which had been cut off by faults. The first phase of the exploration ended at Nazca. At Nazca a delay of three weeks ensued while Tarnawiecki travelled 4 days to Lucanas to obtain 19 mules and a muleteer (who was as obstinate as his steeds and only came because Tarnawiecki threatened to shoot him otherwise) for the traverse of the Andes to Cuzco. From Nazca the route lay up the Blanco Valley, slightly to the south of that originally planned, because of floods and landslides. This turned out to comprise more interesting geology, as it was part of the hardly-known area between a northern belt of marine sedimentary rocks, with few volcanic rocks, and a southern region of volcanic rocks with different sediments from those reported in the north. The Blanco Valley emerged onto a wide plateau which rose inland over terrace after terrace of flat sheets of volcanic rocks, thought to be mostly trachytes. A laborious series of steep climbs and partial descents with crossings of freezing cold rivers and boulder-filled valleys, interspersed with wet and rocky ground, gradually gained them the high Pun˜a plateau at 3000– 4000 m, although drops of up to 2000 m to cross valleys were still necessary. Riding the mules softened the effects of the high altitude climbs but required rest days for the animals to recover, during which Coverley-Price painted watercolours, while Gregory and McKinnon Wood collected samples. They crossed the continental divide at 4938 m and camped at 4600 m amidst snow and frozen ground, before making a steep descent to Cabana, where the four stayed in a mud hovel for nearly 4 days, before leaving for the final 18-day trek to Cuzco. This involved another series of tremendous climbs and descents, including crossing the Rio Pampachiri and the valley of Andahuaylas, where they were initially mistaken for bandits. The heights were estimated by measuring the temperature of boiling water (and possibly by aneroid barometer). Gregory seems to have taken all this in his stride, noting the geology, which included many volcanic rocks, collecting samples and enduring mosquitoes and biting flies from above and prickly weeds from below. By 16 April, the mules were so exhausted the party had to dismount and walk. On 18 April they reached the motor road to Cuzco and drove

in a car for less than two hours to Cuzco, thus completing the second phase of the expedition (Fig. 22.3). The party stayed at Cuzco for 412 days. After they had inspected the Inca ruins, they packed up everything that was not absolutely essential for the next phase and sent it back by train from Cuzco to the coast to be shipped back to Britain, as only the minimum baggage could be taken in the canoes that they planned to use. Thus samples, notes, and for Coverley-Price, 73 watercolour sketches, were saved that would probably otherwise have been lost. The next objective was to proceed to Rosalina, the highest point of navigation on the Rio Urubamba, where it was hoped that a canoe would be waiting for the party as Gregory had written in 1931 and then again on reaching Peru, to two known traders, Sen˜ores Pereira and Landa, asking for a canoe to be made available at Rosalina by 20 April. With it they proposed to travel downstream to the Amazon. The lack of response, plus local information at Cuzco, was not reassuring. On 23 April the party left by train to Machu Picchu and slept the night under the stars in the Inca ruins overlooking the Rio Urubamba, which at this spot flows in a deep gorge with vertical sides. From there they went by car down the Urubamba valley to Huadquin˜a where they slept in a shack built of packing cases, and then obtained more mules. With these they pushed on down the hot valley crossing many landslides, some up to 1 km wide, on the sides of the steep valley, with the rushing river up to 50 m wide at the bottom. After a night in a mud hut and three at Quillobamba, on 29 April they moved on through increasing jungle in subtropical weather until eventually after a further few days, they reached the nearly deserted Rosalina, to find no canoe awaiting them. Sen˜ores Pereira and Landa lived at Maranquiato, at least 240 km downstream by the curving river, but only c. 96 km by an old, almost impassable trail relict from the rubber boom days, now so overgrown and landslipped that taking the whole party and their baggage down it was not feasible. So Tarnawiecki left on 6 May with four Indians to attempt the overland route to Maranquiata with the rest of the party waiting at Rosalina. The party had to wait for over two weeks until a message came back on 22 May that Tarnawiecki had been delayed by slipping down a landslide and spraining his ankle, but nevertheless was obtaining two

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Fig. 22.2. Map of the route of Gregory’s 1931 expedition across Peru from Lima to the fatal Pongo de Mainique gorge on the River Urubamba. With acknowledgements to Alun Rogers, cartographer.

canoes from Sen˜or Landa, who was being most helpful. Tarnawiecki also wrote ‘The trail is in terrible shape; at several landslides (and there were plenty) I had to take off my shoes to keep a hold on the ground, and even the Indians had difficulties. It is out of the question to pass our cargo over this trail, and even without it is positively dangerous’ (Coverley-Price & McKinnon Wood 1933). In characteristic Gregory fashion, he used the 24-day delay at Rosalina to examine the rocks nearby and to make notes for the first draft of what was probably one of his last intended papers entitled ‘A contribution to the geology of the Peruvian Andes’ (Hunterian Museum archives). The three waiting explorers lived on a raised platform with a leaky roof but no walls other than the encroaching jungle. All day long attacked by biting midges, while spiders, cockroaches and other insects added to the annoyances and (usually) outside were thousands of red, white and black ants, ranging from a pin head size to biting monsters almost 3 cm long, swarming along the paths. The party was short of food as a box of provisions bought in Cuzco had been lost on the way to Rosalina. The geology was of

red sandstones and clays like the English New Red Sandstones, and like them, deposited on land and in shallow lakes or lagoons. Surprisingly, the strike of the rocks was east –west, not north – south, and Gregory regarded this as an ancient persistent highland separating the different areas to the north and south. On 26 May two mahogany dug-out canoes, each over 13 m long but only 77 cm wide and 60 cm deep, appeared at Rosalina, paddled upstream by 12 Indians in the record time of six days, and the following day everyone left by the canoes for Maranquiato. After four exciting days they arrived, having bivouacked on sandbanks and walked round the worst of the rapids, while the Indians lowered the canoes over the rocks and through the most turbulent waters with the aid of ropes, although so much of the river was rough that the party were sodden within a few minutes of starting. In those days the use of life-jackets was not usual. They arrived at the house of Sen˜ores Pereira and Landa on 31 May and spent a day at Maranquiato. On 1 June, Sen˜or Landa accompanied them downstream to the entrance to the Pongo de Mainique (‘The Gateway of the Parrots’), the last and worst of the rapids by which the river

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Fig. 22.3. Looking west from the last camp before Cuzco; Miss McKinnon Wood and Professor Gregory (back to camera) at table.

breached the eastern foothills of the Andes. Moreover, recent landslides had not only ruled out any possible use of an old trail, but also narrowed the bed of the river still further and dangerously increased the current. In the circumstances, the party had no option but to embark with their baggage and steer the best course possible through the broken water; a very different experience from Gregory’s canoeing on the Murray River in Australia, when even there he had tipped over (Branagan, pers. comm., 2009). That night they camped on a flat boulder-covered mud

island between two branches of the Rio Urubamba, near the mouth of the Rio Yuyato (Fig. 22.4). The next morning, Wednesday 2 June, they rose as usual before 6 am and left at 8 am to enter the fearful 7 km long gorge with its succession of dangerous rapids. The initial stage of the aweinspiring rapids was successfully negotiated and the canoes landed alongside a rocky step; three hours was spent collecting fossils from limestone blocks that formed the canyon walls. Meanwhile, all the baggage was taken out of the canoes and carried a few

Fig. 22.4. Gregory’s last camp at the entrance to the Pongo de Mainique at the junction of the Urubamba and Yuyato Rivers. Painting by Coverley-Price from Coverley-Price & McKinnon Wood (1933).

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Fig. 22.5. Photograph downstream to the Pongo de Mainique, taken before entering by Coverley-Price. From The Times, 5 August 1932.

hundred metres further down the river, by the Indian crews, supplemented by 14 extra natives from Maranquiato. When the luggage had been removed, the empty canoes were lowered, one at a time, with the aid of ropes and passed through the Megantone Falls in which both canoes were swamped, to reach a new

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embarkation point, the Port of Megantone. Amazingly, CoverleyPrice not only photographed, but preserved the images of the waterlogged canoes at Megantone, only 10 minutes before the fatal accident (Figs 22.5 & 22.6). These eventually appeared in The Times of 5 August 1932 and in Coverley-Price & McKinnon Wood (1933). After bailing out and re-loading, the canoes were ready for the next stage which involved a gorge with such precipitous high walls that the canoes could not be manhandled. Tarnawiecki, six Indians and much of the baggage went first and managed to transit the rapids and beach their canoe near the exit from the Pongo de Mainique, albeit more than half full of water. Gregory, McKinnon Wood, Coverley-Price, Landa and six Indians went next but their canoe was rapidly swept into mid-stream and almost immediately filled with water from rough waves. Then it capsized and threw the occupants into the stream. One Indian sank and was never found. Despite being only about 13 m from the side when the canoe capsized, McKinnon Wood and CoverleyPrice swam towards the shore with difficulty and both were swept a long way downstream before being able to land and climb out of the water onto the gorge sides. From here the two could see the upturned canoe with Landa and five Indians clinging to it near the gorge walls and eventually they gained the shore. But amidst three or four, or more, whirlpools, Gregory was clinging with both hands to a floating package, moving upstream on the outer edge of a whirlpool. He then turned into midstream with the current and passed down towards the opposite bank, but was drifting with the current and making no attempt to swim or paddle with his hands. He finally disappeared from sight in the centre of a whirlpool. The oft-repeated oral account that Gregory swam to the shore, but finding his notebook missing dived in again to retrieve it and was then drowned, is completely untrue and would not have been mentioned here but for it being published elsewhere, for example, by Rich & van Tets (1985). Much valuable material was lost, including bags of geological specimens which sank in the river. Most of the rest of the baggage, packed in rubber bags, floated to the surface and

Fig. 22.6. Canoe filling with water at the Port of Megantone in the Pongo de Mainique, Urubamba River. Photograph taken by Coverley-Price ten minutes before the fatal accident (Coverley-Price & McKinnon Wood 1933).

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Fig. 22.7. 1936 Memorial Tablet to John Walter Gregory in Woodham Walter Church, near Malden, Essex by Walter Marsden (1882– 1946), FRBS, the renowned war memorial sculptor. Inscribed are the coats of arms of the universities of Glasgow and of London.

was recovered, although many of the delicate scientific instruments, photographic material and notes were irretrievably damaged by the water. The expedition was abandoned. CoverleyPrice went down the river to Masisea, the nearest telegraph station, to wire a report to England, an Indian was sent upstream to Quillobamba, the nearest upstream telegraph station, with a similar message, while McKinnon Wood and Tarnawiecki stayed behind to recover the body. This was recovered three days later and buried on the left bank of the river below the Pongo. Coverley-Price left to join the staff of the British Legation in Bucharest. Wood and Tarnawiecki flew to San Ramon and thence by road and rail to Lima, from where a full account was dispatched by airmail on 18 July and published in The Times on 5 August 1932. So ended a remarkable life. J. R. Norman, ichthyologist at the NHM, recorded in his memories of Charles Davies Sherborn (Norman 1944, p. 139), who was an old and intimate NHM friend of Gregory’s, that Norman was with Sherborn when the news of Gregory’s drowning came through. Sherborn remarked ‘That’s just the kind of death he would have wanted.’ Lord Lugard, former Governor of Nigeria and a friend of Gregory for 40 years, whom Gregory had successfully nominated for an Honorary LL D from Glasgow University before he retired (awarded 19 June 1929; Nature, 123, p. 999), wrote: ‘No obituary notice can adequately describe a life so extraordinarily full as Gregory’s . . . he was the most modest of men, always rating the achievements of others higher than his own, a loyal friend, and a man who always brought an original point of view to bear on every subject of conversation’ (The Times, 18 June 1932). There is a memorial to Gregory, ‘Scientist, explorer, teacher’ (Fig. 22.7) in Woodham Walter church, near Malden, Essex, where his wife and her parents lie in the churchyard (Gregory 1977). More widely, Gregory is remembered today mainly in the name of the ‘Gregory Rift Valley’ in Kenya and in a number of other ways, such as the brown carbonate mineral gregoryite (Na 0.78 K 0.05)2 Ca 0.17 (CO3) which has a disordered structure. It occurs in the carbonate lavas of Oldoinyo Lengai, Tanzania (Gittins & McKie 1980). A number of organisms, extant and fossil, are named after him such as the plant Lobelia Gregorii, the lungfish Neoceratodus gregoryi, and the ammonite

Fig. 22.8. The Gregory Building, University of Glasgow, opened in 1976 for the Department of Geology, later Geology and Applied Geology, and now occupied by Earth Sciences as part of Geographical and Earth Sciences, and by Archaeology.

THE FINAL FATAL EXPEDITION TO PERU

Gregoryceras Spath 1924, now divided into subgenera Gregoryceras (Gregoryceras) and Pseudogregoryceras Jeannet ?1951 (W. D. I. Rolfe, pers. comm. 2006). In Glasgow University, he is remembered in the name of the building which houses Earth sciences, formerly geology (Fig. 22.8), and in the name of the Gregory Lecture Theatre in that building and similarly in a room named after Gregory in the University of Melbourne. According to Boswell (1936) the first of Gregory’s Peruvian notebooks, recovered from the river, contained the following lines written by Gregory on the fly-leaf: I wander’d till I died. Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill. Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side.

References Boswell, P. G. H. 1936. John Walter Gregory—1864– 1932. Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, 1, 53 –59.

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Coverley-Price, A. V. 1932. Obituary: Professor J. W. Gregory. The Geographical Journal, 80, 270–272. Coverley-Price, A. V. & McKinnon Wood, M. 1933. Professor J. W. Gregory’s expedition to Peru. 1932. The Geographical Journal, 82, 16– 41. Gittins, J. & McKie, D. 1980. Alkali carbonate magma: Oldoinyo Lengai and its wider applicability. Lithos, 13, 213–215. Gregory, C. J. 1977. J. W. Gregory: A sketch. Privately printed. Gregory, J. W. 1931. The origin of Inca Civilization. Review of The Ayar-Incas by M. Poindexter, 1930. The Geographical Journal, 78, 555– 557. Gregory, J. W., McKinnon-Wood, M. et al., 1930. Reports on geological collections from the coastlands of Kenya colony made by Miss McKinnon-Wood. Monograph of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum University of Glasgow, 4. Norman, J. R. 1944. Squire; Memories of Charles Davies Sherborn. Harrap & Co, London. Rich, P. V. & Van Tets, G. F. (eds) 1985. Kadimakara: extinct vertebrates of Australia. Pioneer Design Studio Pty. Ltd, Victoria, Australia. Rickard, T. A. 1932. Gold and silver as money metal. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 41, 132–233.

Chapter 23 Some of Gregory’s students

It is not intended to detail the many students who studied under Gregory during his three decades of university teaching but to mention a few who in different ways throw some light on Gregory. All of the available accounts of Gregory by his old students, such as J. V. Harrison (e.g. Harrison in ODNB 1931– 40) emphasize how much they admired and loved him. In Harrison’s own words: Although slight in build and apparently diffident in manner, Gregory was wiry and tireless in body, tenacious and indomitable in purpose, and an indefatigable worker with a rare memory. As a teacher he was supreme and students thronged to hear him, whilst his stoutness of heart, enthusiasm, and geniality made him almost fanatically beloved by some who knew him best. No one came to him in vain for stimulus or inspiration.

He may have given the impression at dinner parties at home of being shy, but in the university and on field courses, he opened up and entranced his listeners with accounts of geological happenings, expeditionary incidents, logical deduction of past events, enlivened with personal and other experiences. Gregory had a remarkably retentive memory and could recall facts, evidence and relevant actual episodes that would bear on the matter under discussion in a most impressive way. Harrison himself was an indefatigable tough field man, working for 20 years with the Anglo-Persian Oil Co., mapping 60 000 sq. miles of Iran (e.g. Harrison 1924), and also working in Honduras, Mexico, Borneo, Peru, Jamaica, Venezuela, Trinidad and Columbia. He then became an inspiring teacher in the Oxford Department reflecting Gregory’s influence, according to Vincent (1994). Almost as homage to Gregory, Harrison undertook to complete in much more detail what Gregory was attempting in his Peruvian reconnaissance. During seven visits over 18 years he geologically surveyed, under most difficult conditions, a strip of country across the Peruvian Andes from the Amazon forest to the Pacific coast, assisted by selected students. The project was completed in 1957 and for this he was made a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit for Distinguished Service by the Peruvian Government (N. L. F., P.T.C. 1972). Gregory had very few PhD students, presumably because funding to support research students was difficult to obtain, especially until the Government Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) was founded after the First World War. Although Glasgow University was very old in foundation (1451) it was not as generously endowed as Oxford and Cambridge colleges and universities, nor were the students generally from such wealthy backgrounds. Consequently, not many of Gregory’s students became university academics; most went into geological surveys and resource exploration companies. One of Gregory’s early students was Alexander Stevens (1886 – 1966) who entered Glasgow University in 1904, the year Gregory arrived. He took an MA and then came back to study geology under Gregory, obtaining a BSc. Gregory recommended him to Ernest Shackleton, and Stevens was on Shackleton’s 1914 –17 expedition after which he served in the Royal Engineers as a surveyor for the last two years of the war. He returned to the university as Lecturer in Geography, expanding the embryo department, which became independent from geology; Stevens was eventually, in 1947, the first holder of the newly established Chair in Geography. Stevens was a friend of Gregory’s and they sailed Gregory’s yacht together. No doubt with Stevens’ Antarctic and surveying experience, and his knowledge of Stevens’ brilliance, it was Gregory who was

instrumental in getting Glasgow University to invite Stevens to the lectureship (Fairhurst 1966). Another early student of Gregory who also achieved both Arctic and Antarctic success, the latter with Shackleton in 1914–17, also as result of Gregory’s recommendation, was the geologist (Sir) James Mann Wordie CBE, who graduated in 1910 under Gregory before going to Cambridge and eventually becoming an able university administrator there. Wordie was largely responsible for the founding of the SPRI. After the reading of CoverleyPrice & McKinnon Wood’s (1933) paper, Wordie said ‘Many geologists . . . are not able to see the wood for the trees, but Professor Gregory was very different’. ‘He used to take his pupils out on to the hills in the depth of winter in rain and snow . . . he inspired many of us and his pupils to-day are scattered all over the world.’ Ernest Shackleton had a high opinion of Gregory and consulted him and corresponded with him over a number of years. For instance, there is a letter from Shackleton dated 17 April 1907 asking to see Gregory in Glasgow and another one dated 13 January 1914 (both in the SPRI) asking Gregory to which ‘meridian you think the Weddell Sea ship should proceed south of, taking into consideration your views on the drift of the ice and the winds that influence the said drift in that quadrant’– a highly significant query in view of what subsequently happened to the expedition. This, and the fact that two of Gregory’s old students were on the 1914 Shackleton expedition, accounts for Gregory’s particular interest in this venture, as shown by Gregory’s Nature article of 1916 (Gregory 1916). Wordie donated to the Hunterian Museum a collection of metamorphic rocks from Elephant Island, where most of the party were stranded in 1916, and later rocks from Jan Mayen Island, collected in 1921. Although little known in the West, Ven Kiang Ting, who graduated in zoology in Glasgow University in 1911, but received his training in geology from Gregory, went on in 1916–21 to be the Founder and first Director of the Geological Survey of China (Gregory 1923), now perhaps the largest geological survey in the world. Later he became the first Professor of Geology in Peking (Beijing) University (1931 –34) and Secretary-General of the Academia Sinica (1934 –36). He kept in touch with Gregory and fed him information about China. According to Lees (1953), a quite outstanding prote´ge´ was Bryce Kerr Nairn Wyllie (1888 –1952), originally a classics student at Glasgow University, the most brilliant of his year, winning all awards and a First Class Honours MA, after which he switched to science and soon achieved a BSc with Special Distinction in chemistry. Like many others, the influence of Gregory attracted him to geology, and with a research scholarship from the university, he worked for a year on the petrography of the Garabal Hill intrusion in Scotland, until in September 1913 he became assistant to (Sir) Albert Ernest Kitson (1868– 1937), the Director of the newly-established Gold Coast (Ghana) Geological Survey. Kitson himself was an Australian who had studied in Melbourne and was under Gregory in the Survey and owed his distinguished career (awarded CMG & KBE) in Africa to a recommendation from Gregory to a post in Nigeria (StateMaster Encyclopedia). In Ghana, Kitson and Wyllie were involved in important discoveries of manganese ores before Wyllie left for war service in Mesopotamia in the Royal Engineers, where his chemical knowledge helped in finding pure water supplies. Wyllie joined the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and remained for 33 years, until retirement. He worked in Persia, then Somaliland,

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 209– 210. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.23

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Palestine, Transjordan and Syria, Sudan, Borneo, Trinidad, Columbia and Venezuela, Central and South Africa, Papua, Spain, Germany and Romania with periodic returns to Iraq and Persia. ‘He was a master of all aspects of geological thought far beyond the limits of the economic purpose of his work’ (Lees 1953), although he published little. Even after retirement in 1940 he remained an advisor to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company until his death (Lees 1953). William Quarrier Kennedy (1903 –1979) FRS entered Glasgow University to study agriculture in which he graduated and was also student President of the University Society of Agricultural Science with Gregory as the Honorary President. Attracted by Gregory’s lectures, Kennedy went on to study for a further year for an honours degree in Geology, obtaining an outstanding first class. He went on to the Geological Survey of Great Britain, identified the tholeiite parent magma of the British Tertiary Province, did some of the earliest brilliant careful mapping of the Moine succession and its structure, wrote a classic paper on the Great Glen Fault and eventually became Professor of Geology at Leeds. Here the enthusiasm for East Africa and the Rift valley, that Gregory had inspired in him years before, prompted him to found the Leeds University Research Institute for African Geology (Sutton 1980; Dawson 2008). A colourful tall, gangling student was Archie Lamont (1907 – 1985), a palaeontologist, poet and writer who was a noted avid Scottish Nationalist who, like many others, was attracted to geology partly by his lectures, but in his case as much because Gregory had expressed sympathy with the cause of Scottish Nationalism. Lamont graduated MA in 1928, intending to enter the Divinity Faculty, but was attracted by Gregory and took a First Class Honours BSc in geology with geography, botany and zoology in 1932. He obtained a PhD in geology, became a Lecturer

in Geology in Birmingham and then Edinburgh universities, before becoming increasingly eccentric and reclusive, publishing his work in his own ‘Scottish Journal of Science’ (Waterston 1986) but donating over 2000 fossils to the Hunterian Museum from the Upper Ordovician of the Girvan district. His story reveals Gregory’s support of Scottish Nationalism not otherwise known.

References Coverley-Price, A. V. & McKinnon Wood, M. 1933. Professor J. W. Gregory’s expedition to Peru. 1932. The Geographical Journal, 82, 16– 41. Dawson, J. B. 2008. The Gregory Rift Valley and Neogene – Recent volcanoes of Northern Tanzania. Geological Society, London Memoirs, 33. Fairhurst, H. 1966. Obituary notice of Alexander Stevens. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 82, 58. Gregory, J. W. 1916. Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition. Nature, 97, 301– 303. Gregory, J. W. 1923. The Geological Society of China. Nature, 112, 883. Harrison, J. V. 1924. The gypsum deposits of SW Persia. Economic Geology, 19, 259–274. Lees, G. M. 1953. Bryce Kerr Nairn Wyllie. Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, No. 1502, cxlv– cxlvi. N. L. F., P. T. C. 1972. John Vernon Harrison (1892– 1972). Yearbook of the Geological Society for 1972, 34 –35. Sutton, J. 1980. William Quarrier Kennedy (1903– 1979). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 26, 275–303. Vincent, E. A. 1994. Geology and Mineralogy at Oxford 1860–1986. Author, Oxford. Waterston, C. D. 1986. Obituary notice of Archie Lamont, MA, BSc, PhD. Yearbook of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 190– 191.

Chapter 24 Overall assessment and summary

Gregory was small, lean, unbelligerently tough and strong with a characteristic drooping moustache and bushy eyebrows; he wore steel-rimmed spectacles in later life. He was a bundle of energy and activity, an 8 km per hour walker who even in his sixties strode ahead of a column of students, always working and an inspiration to be with. His upbringing, particularly the wise and purposeful training of his mother, was a major influence on his success, as was the enormous support and forbearance of his wife. His personal bravery, resilience, determination and dedication to research were proved early, and apart from recurrent attacks of malaria, he was healthy, a non-smoker and a teetotaller, and could lead a party in the field for miles even just before he retired. What all the publications of Gregory do not reveal, is the characteristic that made the most impression on those who knew him, namely the enervating nature of his conversation, his flow of interesting ideas, his unusually good memory which, combined with the extremely wide range of geology and geomorphology and other subjects that he had observed and read about and remembered, made him one of those people to whom his friends would turn to for advice and to test their proposals. Thus Flett (1932) wrote: Much of [his] success was due to his remarkable personality. No one could have been more free from assumption or arrogance. His enormous erudition, based on reading and a very retentive memory, was free from any kind of ostentation. He was very willing to discuss his subject with all comers, however superficial or ignorant; but only those who were experts could appreciate his extraordinary range of vision and realise how much he had seen and learnt.

Boswell (1936) emphasized: ‘An evening by the fireside with him, when the discussion would range over the whole gamut of geology, not to mention problems of the day, was a mental spring-cleaning for a younger student.’ Undoubtedly many of Gregory’s ideas and deductions were tested out informally by discussion or letter among his friends who acknowledged the originality of his mind (e.g. Lord Lugard; The Times, 18 June 1932) which seems to have been bubbling with ideas, and even though some of them inevitably were erroneous. For some, supporters could be found, as with Du Toit’s concurrence with the existence of plutonic water and Holmes’s with a sublithospheric metal-rich layer. As Lord Conway said ‘He was full of originality and his interests were not merely confined to geology: they embraced all things human. It was remarkable to note the rapidity and vividness with which he grasped a whole country; . . . his mind was stored with the remembrance of any similar phenomena that he might have observed elsewhere’ (Coverley-Price & McKinnon Wood 1933). Once Gregory was convinced of an interpretation he rarely changed his mind, surprisingly, even when the original premises, such as the reason for a shrinking Earth, had disappeared. This was a puzzling characteristic not understood by the writer and a decided negative aspect, perhaps almost of stubbornness. He was also quite inured to being ‘the odd man out’, whether in teetotalism, believing in an original view such as the non-glacial shape of drumlins, or holding views long since discarded by others such as the marine origin of the Pleistocene Boulder Clay, or the Tetrahedral Theory. At least part of this obduracy sprang from his experience that what is generally agreed can be completely wrong, such as the almost universal initial acceptance of the Eozoon pseudo-fossil, or the opinion that the Indian universities fostered increased criminality. Nevertheless, in other respects, such as his racial views, he went along with popular opinion. What also made discussion with him unusual and promoted fruitfulness were two further characteristics. First, he revealed

his erudition humbly without being superior, as so many ‘walking encyclopaedias’ can be. As Tyrrell (1933) put it ‘he was modest, simple, sincere, and carried his immense erudition with charming lightness’. Second, Gregory’s ability to disagree completely with opposing opinions, hold his own steadfastly, but not fall out personally with those who disagreed with him. Thus three contemporaries, Flett, Bosworth and Willis, all disagreed with some of his theories, but maintained a close friendship with him, as did others. Willis (1932, p. 184) of Stanford University, who first met Gregory in his Glasgow home in the 1920s wrote: ‘We were mutually aware of pronounced differences of opinion on theoretical questions (the compressional or tensional origin of the Great Rift Valley), but the frank cordial reception accorded me disarmed for all time any instinct of intellectual antagonism and quickly established happy relations. In long and earnest discussions, I found him a well-informed and aggressive opponent, strongly convinced of the essential soundness of the geologic philosophy of Eduard Suess’. While the above record shows Gregory’s childhood upbringing by an extremely wise mother was partly responsible for this, in the end, Gregory’s own personality must have been crucial, as proved by the written record of the lack of arguments within his marriage, and the surprising number of lifelong friends Gregory retained. Also largely hidden from assessment today are the thousands of students who were lectured to by Gregory (and listened), and took away something that enriched their lives or helped their careers. In the 1970s there were Ministers of Religion who spoke to the author about the first year geology course, taken as part of their theology degree in Glasgow, and who remembered field excursions and points from the course which were a surprise to them at the time. Gregory’s popularity as a public lecturer can be glimpsed from the number of different groups that he lectured to on a very wide range of topics, in particular actively promoting public interest in geology. His several Royal Institution lectures, his election twice (1907 and 1931) as President of Section C of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) and also of Section E (in 1924), at a time when the BA attracted attendances of several thousand, his BBC talks, and the exceptional warmth of thanks which are recorded repeatedly in the published discussions following his many lectures to the RGS, which go beyond the usual thanks that are offered to virtually all speakers as a matter of courtesy, all testify to the interest he engendered in his lectures, and his ability to present a subject in a lively, but easy-to-understand way, for the non-expert. Hence the constant flow of requests from different groups for a lecture from him. Gregory was obviously able to give a most interesting talk on topics of great complexity by sweeping generalizations that ignored all the uncertainties and were pitched at the level the audience could appreciate, even if the conclusions were completely erroneous. This was popularization of the type nowadays found in many television presentations. While there were many factors involved in his building up of the largest first year geology class in the UK to over 400 students, large even by today’s standards, the popularity of his lectures and the wide range of interest he catered for, were prime factors. Although he could not be an expert, even in his time, in so many disparate fields, the effect on his teaching of working on such a wide range of topics must have been electric because he could bring the enthusiasm, intimate knowledge and personal experience to his lectures that only those researching in the subject have, resulting in lectures that could not

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 211– 215. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.24

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be ‘obtained from the textbook’. Rastall’s (1928) comments on Gregory’s (1928) The Elements of Economic Geology expressed the view at the time that ‘The strongest point of the book is beyond doubt the impression that it gives that Professor Gregory has actually seen a large proportion of the things that he describes, and it differs in this respect from some other works, which though perhaps more strictly accurate in all points, yet lack the touch of a living personality’. Gregory also did much to popularize geology through the medium of newspaper articles and a whole series of readable books intended for the general public. Gregory’s published output (.400 items) was staggering: 33 books and monographs (26 of which were single-authored), c. 313 single-authored scientific papers and scientific review articles and 32 jointly authored ones, plus over 40 non-scientific (e.g. racial, anthropology and economics) writings listed in this account and in Appendices 1 and 2. The above totals do not include unascertained non-scientific reviews and abstracts which are known to be substantial in number. Most of his output was singleauthored to an extent unthinkable today, although the number of his joint papers (.30) increased in his last decade. Moreover, there was an astonishing range of subject matter, both within and without geological and geographical science, with a substantial content of paid journalistic material for example, The proposed German barrier across Africa (Gregory 1896), The fur seals: the American case (Gregory 1897), and even books such as the Living Races of Mankind (Hutchinson et al. 1900), the last being a joint publication with well over one hundred pages by Gregory. There were also the socio-economic articles and books on racial matters, human migration, and white labour in tropical agriculture. Nevertheless Gregory’s main systematic contribution to science must be the massive sum of palaeontological material concerning echinoids, corals and bryozoa published mainly as result of his NHM work, and amounting to nearly 2000 pages by the time of his death. A casualty of his move away from palaeontology was the loss of the accumulated experience of the 13 years of intense study in the field, which would have enabled him to contribute much more than he did to the study of faunal provinces, environmental and evolutionary influences on echinoids, corals and bryozoa, as was hinted at by the few papers that did emerge after the appearance of the last of his palaeontological catalogues (Gregory 1909). His publications demonstrating the nature of the African Rift Valley, on mining geology in Australia and southern Africa, and on geomorphology in various locations, probably follow behind his palaeontological work in their long-term value, but his 1919 field recognition of what turned out to be an extremely important archaeological site in Kenya, Olorgesaile, should not be overlooked. The resultant humanoid discoveries by Louis and Mary Leakey in 1943 searching at Gregory’s site and thereafter excavating, would have been seriously delayed if Gregory had had less perceptive eyes. His book on ‘The Great Rift Valley’ (Gregory 1896a), which first brought him to the notice of the educated public, revealed bravery, incredible determination, and an extremely wide range of interests from anthropology and archaeology to zoology, botany, geology and geography. Most important was the correct recognition that the African Rift Valley was an extensional structure with downward block faulting of the valley, genetically accompanied by volcanism, and, most significantly, preceded by a period of uplift, which only subsequently has been understood to be the result of the early swelling due to magma under the Gregory Rift, or as some suppose, the activating plume. In African mining geology, his unequivocal support for fluid mobilization of detrital gold and its subsequent re-deposition in the Witwatersrand, has proved to be precisely correct, although it has taken over 100 years to be generally agreed. Another success was his insistence, again against opposition, on a structural weakness, such as a fault or joint set, as being usual for the initiation of what might later become a fjord or a linear freshwater loch. This was found to be correct for Norway, with its

superb examples of fjords, when oil exploration off the Norwegian coast took place. Likewise his dogged maintenance of the importance of tectonics in denudation and geomorphology, which few accepted in his time, has been amply confirmed (e.g. Clark & Dempster 2009; Burbank & Anderson 2000). But Gregory persistently underestimated the erosive power of glaciers. Fjords are generally thought to be old river valleys greatly deepened and widened by glacier erosion (Evans 2008), but the river valley itself may often have had some structural origin. Although his later glacial studies have not brought him credit, his early recognition of the vital importance of establishing how far glaciers extended down the equatorial mountains of East Africa during the last ice age, was an important indication of the past equatorial climate at a time when many simply did not believe such ice could be widespread in the tropics. Later work has only broadened the known extent of these tropical Pleistocene ice-covered areas, but puzzlingly, Gregory did not cite the existence of equatorial glaciers when Wegener’s proposed past equator passed close to the Squantum Tillite in Massachusetts. On the negative side, Gregory’s espousal of the Tetrahedral Theory, his implicit opposition to the theory of continental drift, his superficial anthropological publications, his belief in plutonic water emerging into the Australian and other water tables, his views on the existence of a metal-rich layer under the lithosphere from which most primary ores were derived in solution by these ascending waters, and his insistence on the past ‘stability of the Earth’s climate’, only propagated erroneous explanations. To the above list can be added his eccentric views on the origin of eskers, the erosional shape of drumlins, the non-glacier origin of cirques and the supposed marine depositional origin of Boulder Clay from floating icebergs, his publications on the Dalradian rocks and the geology of Scotland north of the Highland Boundary Fault, his sweeping generalizations, for instance about the structure of Asia and the origin of island arcs, did not advance knowledge and justly gained him the reputation of an advocate of lost causes. Probably the most serious of these was Gregory’s erudite, and therefore persuasive, explanation of the non-drift origin of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. There is little doubt that this was influential in adding to the doubt that most British geologists had about Wegener’s theory, even if few actually embraced Gregory’s views in detail. The scientific climate of pre-plate tectonic thinking was very different from now with so many different tectonic theories for the origin of the continents and oceans, each with its strengths and fatal weaknesses, as shown by Le Grand (1988), Oreskes (1999) and Donovan (2008), that most geologists did not know which was correct. This doubt was understandable in that geologists, particularly in the past, have usually ascribed the most geological knowledge, not to armchair geologists, but to those who have seen the most rocks. Gregory’s record was unsurpassed. In a time before flying enabled many to travel widely with ease, his journeys were remarkable. He had seen the geology of the Alps, many parts of Australia, New Zealand, the Lesser Antilles, Angola, Libya, East Africa, several parts of the USA and Canada, including the Rockies and central Canada, India, Burma, parts of Tibet and the Himalayas, Dalmatia, Norway, Sweden, Spitzbergen, Spain, France, Germany and, even if briefly, Siberia, China and Russia, not to overlook his acquaintance with most parts of the British Isles and Ireland. When this experience was combined with his laboratory studies of samples from such far-flung places as South Georgia, Sinai, Egypt, Central Sahara, Somaliland, Iraq, Armenia, Eastern Venezuela, Barbados, the West Indies, Christmas Island, New Guinea and the Aru Islands (of the Banda Arc), Australia, and nearer home, Malta and England, plus his impressive syntheses such as ‘The Structure of Asia’ (Gregory 1929), the origin of the African Rift Valley and his world-wide survey of coastal types, together with his prominence as a writer, a lecturer and a public figure, FRS and President of the Geological Society of London, etc, casual

OVERALL ASSESSMENT AND SUMMARY

rejection of his considered and well argued views seemed unwise. Of course, few scientists’ views stand after far less than a century of advance, and for one who entered so many disparate fields the subsequent rejection rate is by no means surprising. One aspect of Gregory’s rejection of Wegener’s theory was correct and significant; namely his demonstration of the equally close biological connections across the Pacific as across the Atlantic, despite the Pacific Ocean allegedly being very much wider in the past than now. This insight was perceptive and in effect, when combined with the Suess –Gregory recognition of a significant difference between Pacific and Atlantic coastlines, highlighted, without being able to explain, the serious deficiency in Wegener’s theory that was only remedied with the recognition of subduction. Gregory was the most prominent and faithful of Suess’s anglophone disciples, starting from the early 1890s and continuing until Gregory’s death. Clearly Gregory regarded Suess with some wonder. As Bailey Willis (1932, p. 185) put it: Suess had voluntarily become sessile, early in life. His scientific thought was contemplative. He read, absorbed and moulded the observations of others to create the Antlitz of the world of his imagining. Gregory, by contrast, was intensely active. His habit of observation was objective. He travelled far and wide to accumulate facts. But he also possessed a creative imagination that was strong of wing.

In retrospect Suess’s influence on Gregory was probably a mixed blessing for the best advancement of science. Most commendable was Suess’s extraordinarily broad vision, which inspired in Gregory and others a global approach to studies, and encouraged thinking about concepts that would eventually reach fruition in plate tectonics. Gregory certainly represented the opposite of an insular British view of geology, a characteristic emphasized by his voluminous correspondence with scientists throughout the world (e.g. 18 letters written on one train journey from London to Hull in 1896), his ability to read (but not speak) about five foreign languages and his unusually wide and astonishingly quick reading, plus, of course, his foreign travelling. The great unexplained paradox in Gregory’s thinking was his continued belief in the Tetrahedral Theory, which only a few ever accepted. This supposed the permanence of the oceans, which directly conflicted with Gregory’s belief in the oceans as being merely submerged parts of the continents. The fact that his GSL presidential addresses made no reference to the Tetrahedral Theory means that in the end, when forced to choose between the two views to a professional geological audience, he did not give priority to the Tetrahedral Theory. However, clearly from his closely following 1931 BA presidential address (Gregory 1932) and what Boswell (1936) wrote, Gregory still felt the Tetrahedral Theory had truth in it, and did not mentally reject it, right to his death. In part this may have been a mixture of his stubborn adherence to long-held views, and in part because no one else had proposed an elegant explanation for the present arrangement of the oceans and continents as regards their shapes and their antipodal nature. Even today the antipodal arrangement is unexplained and simply regarded as a coincidence of no significance. Gregory, however, had early accepted the Tetrahedral Theory when he regarded the present dispositions of the continents being fundamental ones, albeit with some temporary variations such as his Barbados work indicated, before he had appreciated the former widespread extent of Gondwanaland. This in itself nullified two of the basic premises of the Tetrahedral Theory, namely that the continents had originally formed along the edges of a tetrahedron and that they were antipodal to oceanic areas. Nevertheless, for whatever reasons, he still held onto the Tetrahedral Theory with its permanence of the oceans and continents (e.g. Gregory 1932, 1931) and to the existence of Gondwanaland (a perceptive Suess recognition) under the present South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Convincingly explaining this paradox is difficult. It might lie in Gregory’s own words that he wrote to his close friend Boswell, which the latter (Boswell 1936) quoted. [Gregory was] ‘afflicted

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by two ingrained habits of mind. The first was an interest in what was likely to be the thought of the future rather than in current opinion’; [the other] ‘was the belief that science should take a definite part in social and educational development’, though Boswell did add that ‘with equal fairness Gregory might have claimed a lively interest in the thought of past decades, for nobody was more active in resuscitating theories long since abandoned’. Perhaps then Gregory, convinced that aspects of the opposing views, such as an explanation of the antipodal continent –ocean pattern, would emerge in the future as correct, continued to support both. The opinion that rationalized this by regarding the present oceans and continents as generally permanent but with temporary episodes of emergence and submergence, is not supported by his categorical denial that the Pacific Ocean was permanent; a view we now know to be correct. This required him, mistakenly, to reject the concept of a fundamental difference between the oceanic and continental crust that isostasy implied and Wegener’s theory was based on. Umbgrove (1947, p. 217) was one who not only emphasized Gregory’s antipodal distribution of the continents and oceans, but put it as one of the most important characters of the permanent (since the Precambrian) oceans, namely that 95% of the present ocean is antipodal to land. Today with plate tectonics, the antipodal puzzle is regarded as simply the consequence of having the Earth covered 70% by sea and 30% by land, making it likely that even in a random distribution of land most of it would be antipodal to water, but why 95% should be is puzzling. Umbgrove (1947) also supposed that the Atlantic and Indian oceans were underlain by a thin layer of sial, whereas the Pacific had a purely simatic floor, views which tended to Gregory’s over the sinking of oceans on each side of Africa. Like all but the most unusual older scientists, Gregory returned again and again to the same ideas he had espoused when younger; the supposed overall constancy of the Earth’s climate; plutonic water, the oceans as sunken continents, superficial erosion by icesheets and glaciers, sea-level changes reflecting rises and falls of both land and water, and most of all, what Suess had written, for instance on the sinking origin of the Banda Arc (Gregory 1923). The faltering, erratic advance of scientific understanding is well illustrated by Gregory’s concurrence in the deep submergence of the crust in the Banda Arc, without ever realizing how near to the concept of subduction in the Indonesian trench that this was. Gregory’s field methods were those best suited to explorers in virgin territory where a quick superficial survey was all that could be done. This was ideal given the limited time he had in Kenya and Spitzbergen, and even to some extent in Australia at that time, but not for the relatively well mapped British Isles. Thus his lack of mapping of the Dalradian rocks and his quick summaries of British and Irish glacial and geomorphological phenomena, were not the best way to advance long-term understanding in these fields in Britain. Gregory had no expertise in the structural geology of metamorphic terrains, which was then poorly understood before the general recognition in Britain of either sedimentary methods of determining way-up (and therefore the distinction of isoclinal anticlines from isoclinal synclines), or the use of schistosity– bedding or foliation intersections to identify fold hinges. In viewing the whole of Gregory’s scientific output, which this account tries to outline, it is difficult to discern any single thread that links all his varied activities. It seems that apart from the palaeontological output that he was employed on in the NHM, and his evident desire to contribute significantly to the mining of metals in Victoria, most of the topics he researched on were ones that aroused his admittedly remarkably wide interests and were not guided primarily by some underlying ‘masterplan’. However, they were influenced by Gregory’s insatiable love of travelling. In a time before air travel made ‘travel junkies’ of so many, Gregory was an early prime example. He almost never concentrated on work in one locality or area, but was always restlessly

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moving on to fresh challenges, and the wonder of his career was the faithful way in which he wrote up most of his work for publication, whereas most others in his position would have intended to, but rarely got round to doing it. As far as can be determined, his travelling was paid for by a combination of publication royalties, reviewing fees and paid articles plus consultancy work, grants and probably his own salary. Gregory’s efforts to promote the study of geography were sustained over a wide field of the subject and over several decades, formally starting with his university extension lectures in Victoria in 1902 and immediately following with his five Austral geographies, The Teaching of Geography and The Geography of Victoria (Gregory 1903, 1903a, 1903b), continuing with his New Zealand geographies, and then Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative (Gregory 1908), all of which seem to have been used for many years. In fact, his books such as The Foundation of British East Africa (Gregory 1901), Australia (Gregory 1916) and The Story of the Road (1931a) are also geography-based, so his total book writings in this field amounted to thousands of pages. His revival of the Geography Section of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow in 1909 and his initiation of distinct geography lectures in 1910 by Captain Lyons, and eventually the founding of a separate Geography Department in Glasgow University, all owe their initiation to Gregory (Leake & Bishop 2009). He would no doubt have been delighted both at the topographic eminence achieved by the Geography Department and the present union of the Geology and Geography Departments in Glasgow University. Gregory believed that science should take a definite part in social and educational development (Boswell 1936) and the improvement of living for mankind. One of the reasons for his admiration of Suess, was his splendid work, against great opposition, in getting a clean water supply for Vienna, although the main attachment was to Suess’s overall synoptic vision of the topographic features of the Earth as expressed in Suess’s remarkable series of volumes on ‘The Face of the Earth’. This desire to make a useful addition to human life probably ultimately motivated his efforts in the field of mining as Gregory realized how much development depended upon limited natural resources, in contrast to the (almost) purely academic palaeontological studies he had been employed to undertake at the NHM. In his opinion, his racial writings were also prompted by trying to avoid the serious racial antagonisms that had beset Africa and the USA from being transferred to Australia, but there was also an element of the Victorian belief in the inherent superiority of the white race. Likewise, his socio-economic writings stemmed from his urge to improve human life which at least in part originated in his home upbringing, combined with his belief that the application of science would yield a rational solution. Nevertheless, underlying the racial writings is the constant re-iteration (e.g. Gregory 1925) of the ‘keep Australia White’ campaign that he conducted for decades, which surely sprang from the 1900 –1904 shared company of those with common beliefs and backgrounds in a pioneer environment that he enjoyed in Australia, and contrasted with his times in Africa. Most of Gregory’s books have no acknowledgements and some (though not his NHM publications) have missing references, both of which suggest that the books were in general not refereed, shown to others before submission, or edited significantly. Considering the number of books he published, this indicates that on the whole his publishers sold enough copies of his books to accept them without demurring, or getting independent reviews, and his royalties must have been significant. His many books written for the educated general public are known to have attracted to the Earth sciences some who made later outstanding contributions, just as some of his students went onto notable service from the Antarctic to China and Africa. Considering that Gregory freely acknowledged that some of his writing (and therefore some of his lectures) were based on speculative ideas, it is surprising that he was so firmly, indeed

obstinately, attached to certain interpretations: ‘Pioneer geology has to choose between the rashness of using imperfect evidence or the sterility of uncorrelated, unexplained facts. These sentences must be remembered by the reader; otherwise he may sometimes be startled at the big leap, taken with a bold “therefore” from the narrowness of the stated fact to the breadth of the deduction’ (Gregory 1921). He must have drawn a mental line between views he considered certain and those he did not. Although his constant travelling, repeated switches of research topic and his generally superficial studies (e.g. the Dalradian and the glacial geology of Ireland) might suggest a hyperactive temperament, that judgement is not borne out by the persistence with which he continued to work on certain topics, extending over many years, or the discipline required to complete the immense catalogues of the corals, echinoids and bryozoa which, with his later papers on such fossils, totalled over 1800 pages. Even his 1902 Australian vertebrate collections, which took over 20 years to be worked up by others, required persistence on Gregory’s part. Moreover, the rapidity and thoroughness with which he produced accounts of his investigations into certain mining districts and of his expeditions, which required some months of work and much reading, together with the record of his unusually retentive memory for salient facts, is not consistent with a ‘butterfly mind’ or an attention-deficit! Nevertheless Gregory had a distinct tendency to flit restlessly from one study to another without going into real depth, except for certain topics like his NHM monographs, and the Rift Valley with his two books (Gregory 1896, 1921) which totalled over 900 pages and identified factors still important today in the plate tectonic age. His GSL presidential addresses contain material better understood today than when they were given, such as his biological correlations across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. More generally it could be tritely claimed that he might have achieved more if he had spent more time on fewer topics, but this would have depended on the topics chosen. As knowledge advanced it became impossible to maintain the breadth of interests that Gregory possessed, and also to keep at the front of research. Even in Gregory’s time, he was quite unusual for the wide range of work he undertook, as is clear from the citation accompanying his first award in 1892 of part of the Lyell Fund (Geikie 1892). This breadth of work was again emphasized in Gregory (1894) when after giving an account of his first venture into East Africa, T. G. Bonney repeated in the discussion, ‘As Sir William Flower said, he [Gregory] is a singularly all-round man; in fact, even as a geologist, I never know where to classify him, He is supposed to be a palaeontologist, but he is quite as much a petrologist’. Although with time, and Tyrrell’s expertise, petrology slipped into lower priority in favour of geography, geomorphology, glacial studies, mining topics etc., as his interests broadened, he continued looking at petrological thin sections all his life as those in his Dalradian collection in the Hunterian Museum show, and his papers on the origin of the Sudbury nickel ore demonstrate. Equally, he never completely dropped his palaeontological work as is shown by his papers written after retirement. Of course such broad interests certainly made a basis for interesting teaching. Quite vital elements, without which few of Gregory’s publications would have been completed, were his ability to manage permanently with only a few hours sleep each night, his iron discipline of writing most nights undisturbed for many hours and Audrey’s remarkable support. Despite his determination and drive, he seems to an almost unbelievable extent to have had an exceptionally equable temperament, attested to by the citation that accompanied the plaque presented to him on leaving Melbourne and by his son’s record (C.J. Gregory mss) of asking his mother whether she and Gregory had ever had a quarrel! His former students gave no hint of having to choose the right time to approach him. Gregory’s energy, love of fieldwork, his dedication to science, his very effective service as Director of the Geological Survey of

OVERALL ASSESSMENT AND SUMMARY

Victoria and his deep involvement in the mining scene with the accompanying publications, his geography teaching and textbooks, and his newspaper articles, meant he was very much appreciated in Australia, even if his departure was necessary before the University of Melbourne made adequate provision for the Geology Department. In a sense, he became a life-long advocate near the centre of the Empire of maintaining the Australian way of life and its immigration policies, perhaps more effectively than he would have done if he had remained in Australia. His iconic book ‘The Dead Heart of Australia’ coined a name that made him famous in Australia long after he left, just as his continued writings on Australia, whether controversial, as with his plutonic water theory, or not, kept him in the Australian mind as a man who understood white Australia and whose loss they regretted. Apart from his palaeontological work, Gregory’s immense scientific output has to be seen for its quite remarkable breadth, rather than its profound depth, or for its ultimately acceptable originality except for a few gems, which is more than most bequeath. As Willis (1932, p. 310) wrote: The scope of his knowledge was all-embracing. An eager student, a bold investigator, a rapid thinker, endowed with a capacious memory for facts and constructive capacity for synthesis, he became, as the result of his far-flung explorations, an outstanding authority on the world as a whole.

The penultimate words might belong to C. W. Hobley (1932, p. 270), who helped him in Kenya in 1893 and 1919: Only those who have been in close contact with him can realize his amazing industry, his powers of physical endurance, and his extraordinary memory. His range of knowledge was immense: primarily a great geologist, who will be remembered as the author of the tension theory of rift valley formation . . . he looked on the world as a whole, and his outlook knew no frontiers, for there were few countries which he had not visited; at the same time his great human sympathies kept the problems of humanity always before him. Of modest and unassuming bearing, full of kindness . . . and a brain so active that he was always able to stimulate discussion by a new point of view

and so a life worth recording.

References Boswell, P. G. H. 1936. John Walter Gregory – 1864–1932. Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, 1, 53 –59. Burbank, D. W. & Anderson, R. S. 2000. Tectonic Geomorphology. Blackwell Science, Oxford. Clark, S. J. P. & Dempster, T. J. 2009. The record of tectonic denudation and erosion in an emerging orogen: an apatite fission-track study of the Sierra Nevada, southern Spain. Journal of the Geological Society, London, 166, 87 –100. Coverley-Price, A. V. & McKinnon Wood, M. 1933. Professor J. W. Gregory’s expedition to Peru. 1932. The Geographical Journal, 82, 16– 41. Donovan, S. K. 2008. The ‘Forbidden Theory of Mountain Uplift’ of Charles Taylor Trechmann (1884 –1964): a tectonic theory of the 1950s in context. Geological Journal, 43, 605– 619. Evans, I. S. 2008. Twentieth century thought on glacial erosion. In: Burt, T. P., Chorley, R. J., Brunsden, D., Cox, N. J. & Goudie, A. S. (eds) A History of the study of Landforms or the Development of Geomorphology, Volume 4: Quaternary and Recent Processes and Forms (1890 –1965) and the Mid-Century Revolutions. Geological Society, London, 413– 494. Flett, J. S. 1932. Prof. J. W. Gregory (Obituary Notice). Nature, 129, 930– 931. Geikie, A. 1892. Proceedings of the Geological Society. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, p. xxxiv. Gregory, C. J. mss. Unpublished incomplete account of the life of C. J. Gregory in A. Mendell’s possession. Gregory, J. W. 1894. Contributions to the physical geography of British East Africa. The Geographical Journal, 4, 289–315, 408– 424, 505–524.

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Gregory, J. W. 1896. The proposed German barrier across Africa. The Nineteenth Century, 39, 240– 248. Gregory, J. W. 1896a. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London. Reprinted in 1968 The Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1897. The fur-seals: the American case. Contemporary Review, No 384, December 1897, 846–853. Gregory, J. W. 1901. The Foundation of British East Africa. Horace Marshall & Son, London. Gregory, J. W. 1903. The Austral Geographies, Classes ii, iii, iv, v and vi. (5 vols). Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd., London & Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1903a. The Teaching of Geography. Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd, London & Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1903b. The Geography of Victoria: Historical, Physical and Political. Whitcombe & Tombs, London & Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1908. Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative. Blackie, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1909. The Cretaceous Bryozoa, Volume 2. Catalogues of the Fossils in the Department of Geology British Museum (NH). Gregory, J. W. 1916. Australia. Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature, 90. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gregory, J. W. 1921. The Rift Valleys and Geology of East Africa: An Account of the Origin & History of the Rift Valleys of East Africa & Their Relation to the Contemporary Earth-movements which Transformed the Geography of the World. With Some account of the Prehistoric Stone Implements, Soils, Water Supply and Mineral Resources of the Kenya Colony. Seeley, Service & Co. London. Gregory, J. W. 1923. The Banda Arc: its structure and geographical relations. The Geographical Journal, 62, 20 –30. Gregory, J. W. 1925. Inter-racial problems and white colonization in the Tropics. British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-second Meeting, Toronto 1924. John Murray, London, 124– 145. Gregory, J. W. 1928. The Elements of Economic Geology. Methuen & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. (Editor & Contributor) 1929. The Structure of Asia. Methuen & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1931. Problems of the Earth’s crust. The Geographical Journal, 78, 444–445. Gregory, J. W. 1931a. The Story of the Road from the Beginning down to AD 1931. A. Maclehose & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1932. Problems of geology contemporary with the British Association. British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Centenary Meeting, London 1931. London, 51– 70. Hobley, C. W. 1932. Obituary: Professor J. W. Gregory. The Geographical Journal, 80, 269– 272. Hutchinson, H. N., Gregory, J. W. & Lydekker, R. 1900. Living Races of Mankind: A Popular Illustrated Account of the Customs, Habits, Pursuits, Feasts and Ceremonies of The Races of Mankind Throughout the World. Volumes 1 & 2. Hutchinson & Co, London. Leake, B. E. & Bishop, P. 2009. The beginnings of geography teaching and research in the University of Glasgow: the impact of J. W. Gregory. Scottish Geographical Journal, 125, 273– 284. Le Grand, H. E. 1988. Drifting Continents and Shifting Theories: The Modern Revolution in Geology and Scientific Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Oreskes, N 1999. The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Rastall, R. H. 1928. Review of elements of economic geology. Geological Magazine, 65, 190. Tyrrell, G. W. 1933. John Walter Gregory. Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 89, xci–xciv. Umbgrove, J. H. F. 1947. The Pulse of the Earth (2nd edn). Martinus Nijhoff, Amsterdam. Willis, B. 1932. John Walter Gregory. Science, 76, 184– 185; also Nature, 130, 310–311.

Appendix 1 Published works of J. W. Gregory Cole, G. A. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1890. The variolitic rocks of Mont Gene`vre. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 46, 295– 333. Davies, A. M. & Gregory, J. W. 1894. The geology of Monte Chaberton. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 303–310. Ferguson, D., Tyrrell, G. W. & Gregory, J. W. 1914. The geology of South Georgia. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 1, 53 – 64. Flower, W. H., Morfill, W. R., Lowinson-lessing, F. et al. 1890. A uniform system of Russian transliteration. Nature, 41, 396– 397. Frater, M. & Gregory, J. W. 1917. The volcanic eruption of 1913 on Ambrym Island, New Hebrides. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 4, 496– 503. Garwood, E. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1896. The geological work of the Conway Spitsbergen expedition. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 3, 437– 439. Garwood, E. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1898. Contributions to the glacial geology of Spitsbergen. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 54, 197– 226. Gregory, J. W. 1885. The age of the Malvern Hills. Hardwicke’s ScienceGossip, 21, 125– 126; 174–176. Gregory, J. W. 1886. Eozoon Canadense, the pseudo-dawn of life. Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, 22, 82– 86; 102– 106. Gregory, J. W. 1888. The geology of Puffin Island. Proceedings of the Liverpool Biological Society, 1, 78– 94. Gregory, J. W. 1888a. The new Darwinism; or, the segregation of the fit. City of London College Science Society. Gregory, J. W. 1888b. The theory of coral reefs. Abstracts of the Metropolitan Scientific Association, No 23. Gregory, J. W. 1889. Recent theories bearing on glaciation in Britain. Abstracts of the Metropolitan Scientific Association, No 32. Gregory, J. W. 1889a. On Cystechinus crassus from the Radiolarian Marls of Barbados. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 45, 640– 650. Gregory, J. W. 1889b. On a new species of the Genus Protaster (P. Brisingoides) from the Upper Silurian of Victoria, Australia. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 6, 24– 27. Gregory, J. W. 1889c. On Zeuglopleurus, a new Genus of the Family Temnopleuridae from the Upper Cretaceous. Annals & Magazine Natural History, Series 6, 3, 490– 500. Gregory, J. W. 1890. On Rhynchopygus woodi, Forbes sp., from the English Pliocene. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 300– 303. Gregory, J. W. 1890a. Some additions to the Australian Tertiary Echinoidea. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 481– 492. Gregory, J. W. 1890b. Invertebrate palaeontology in some continental museums. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 441– 447. Gregory, J. W. 1890c. The geology of Mont Blanc (Review of Bulletin by M. Michel-Le´vy). Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 380– 381. Gregory, J. W. 1890d. Le rocce erupttive dell ‘Eocene Superiore nell’ Apennino. By Prof. De Carlo Stefani. Bolletino della Societa´ geologica italiana VIII No. 2, 1889 (Review). Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 323–325. Gregory, J. W. 1890e. The occurrence of Radiolaria in albite crystals (Review of papers by A. Issel). Geological Magazine, 27, 417– 418. Gregory, J. W. 1890f. Friedrich August Von Quenstedt (Obituary notice). Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 237– 238. Gregory, J. W. 1890g. Melchior Neumayr (Obituary notice). Geological Magazine, Decade III, 7, 238– 240. Gregory, J. W. 1891. Peter Martin Duncan (Obituary notice) Geological Magazine, Decade III, 8, 332– 336. Gregory, J. W. 1891a. A catalogue of the Pliocene Echinoidea in the Reed Collection in the Museum of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. Yorkshire Philosophical Society Report for 1890, 37 –43. Gregory, J. W. 1891b. A revision of the British fossil Cainozoic Echinoid faunas. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 12, 16 – 60.

Gregory, J. W. 1891c. The Maltese fossil Echinoidea, and their evidence on the correlation of the Maltese rocks. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 36, 585–640. Gregory, J. W. 1891d. The relations of the American and European Echinoid faunas. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 3, 101– 108. Gregory, J. W. 1891e. The Tudor specimen of Eozoon. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 47, 348–355. Gregory, J. W. 1891f. The variolitic diabase of the Fichtelgebirge. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 47, 45 – 62. Gregory, J. W. 1892. Archaeopneustes abruptus, a new genus and species of Echinoid from the Oceanic Series in Barbados. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, 163–169. Gregory, J. W. 1892a. Archaeopneustes abruptus, a new genus and species of Echinoid from the Ocean Series in Barbados. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 9, 89. Gregory, J. W. 1892b. Further additions to Australian fossil Echinoidea. Geological Magazine, Decade III, 9, 433–437. Gregory, J. W. 1892c. The exploration of coral reefs by boring. Natural Science, 1, 50 –52. Gregory, J. W. 1892d. The physical features of the Norfolk Broads. Natural Science, 1, 346–355. Gregory, J. W. 1892e. The microscopic structure of some Trinidad rocks. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 48, 538–540 (Appendix in Guppy 1892). Gregory, J. W. 1893. Tables for the Determination of the Rock-forming Minerals by F. Loewinson-Lessing. Translated from the Russian by J. W. Gregory. Macmillan, London. Gregory, J. W. 1893a. The natural history of East Equatorial Africa’. Nature, 49, 12. Gregory, J. W. 1893b. The British Palaeogene Bryozoa. Transactions of the Zoological Society of London, 13, 216– 279. Gregory, J. W. 1893c. The Jurassic fauna of Cutch. The Echinoidea of Cutch. Palaeontologica Indica, Series IX, Vol. 2, Part 1.14. Gregory, J. W. 1894. Mountaineering in Central Africa, with an attempt on Mount Kenya. Alpine Journal, 17, 89 –104. Gregory, J. W. 1894a. The Waldensian Gneisses and their place in the Cottian sequence. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 232– 277. Gregory, J. W. 1894b. Contributions to the physical geography of British East Africa. The Geographical Journal, 4, 289– 315, 408– 424, 505–524. Gregory, J. W. 1894c. John Tyndall. Natural Science, 4, 10 –18. Gregory, J. W. 1894d. An expedition to Mount Kenya. Fortnightly Review, New Series, 55, 327–337. Gregory, J. W. 1894e. The natives of East Africa. Phonographic Quarterly Review, 1, 8– 13 & 72 –82. Gregory, J. W. 1894f. Some factors that have influenced zoological distribution in Africa. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for 1894, 165–166. Gregory, J. W. 1894g. Catalogue of the Jurassic Bryozoa in the York Museum. Report of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society for 1893, 58–61. Gregory, J. W. 1894h. On some Jurassic species of Cheilostomata. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 1, 61– 64. Gregory, J. W. 1894i. Excursion to Guildford and Shalford. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 13, 377– 381. Gregory, J. W. 1894j. Abstracts of Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, 620, 58. Gregory, J. W. 1894k. Contributions to the Geology of British East Africa. Part I. The glacial geology of Mount Kenya. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 50, 515–530. Gregory, J. W. 1894l. The evolution of the Thames. Natural Science, 5, 99– 108.

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 217– 224. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.App01

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Gregory, J. W. 1894m. The parasites of malarial fevers. Natural Science, 5, 195–201. Gregory, J. W. 1894n. Review of ‘Man and the Glacial period’. Glacialists Magazine, 1, 263–266. Gregory, J. W. 1895. Contributions to the palaeontology and physical geology of the West Indies. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 51, 255– 310. Gregory, J. W. 1895a. Excursion to Chilworth. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 14, 120– 124. Gregory, J. W. 1895b. On a collection of fossils from the Lower Greensand of Great Chart, Kent. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 2, 97 –103. Gregory, J. W. 1895c. Recent contributions to the geology of the Western Alps. Science Progress, 3, 147– 174. Gregory, J. W. 1895d. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa—Part I. The Genus Stomatopora. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 15, 223–228. Gregory, J. W. 1895e. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa—Part II. The Genus Proboscina. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 16, 447–451. Gregory, J. W. 1895f. Two methods of colonization. The Saturday Review, No. 2058, 6 April 1895, 448– 449. Gregory, J. W. 1896. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London. Reprinted in 1968. The Cass Library of African Studies, Frank Cass & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1896a. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa— Part III. The Genus Berenicea. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 17, 41 – 49. Gregory, J. W. 1896b. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa— Part IV. The Genera Reptomultisparsa and Diastopora. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 17, 151 –155. Gregory, J. W. 1896c. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa— Part V. The Families Idmoniidae and Entalophoridae. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 17, 194–201. Gregory, J. W. 1896d. A revision of the British Jurassic Bryozoa— Part VI. The Fascigeridae, Theonoidae, Dactylethrata, and Tepostomata. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 17, 287– 295. Gregory, J. W. 1896e. The Jurassic Bryozoa. Catalogues of Fossils in the British Museum (Natural History). Gregory, J. W. 1896f. Pseudodiadema Jessoni, sp. n., an Echinoid from the English Oxford Clay. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 6, 18, 465–466. Gregory, J. W. 1896g. Archaeodiadema, a new genus of Liassic Echinoidea. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 3, 289– 294. Gregory, J. W. 1896h. On Lysechinus, a new genus of fossil Echinoderms from the Tyrolese Trias. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for 1896, 1000–1005. Gregory, J. W. 1896i. On the classification of the Palaeozoic Echinoderms of the Group Ophiuroidea. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for 1896, 1028–1044. Gregory, J. W. 1896j. The ‘Schistes Lustre´s’ of Mount Jovet (Savoy). Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 52, 1– 11. Gregory, J. W. 1896k. A note on the geology of Somali-land, based on collections made by Mrs E. Lort-Phillips, Miss Edith Cole, and Mr G. P. V. Aylmer. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 3, 289– 294. Gregory, J. W 1896l. The proposed German barrier across Africa. The Nineteenth Century, 39, 240–248. Gregory, J. W 1896m. Review of Through Jungle and Desert. Travels in Eastern Africa by W. A. Chanler, 1896. Macmillan, London, Nature, 54, 313–314. Gregory, J. W 1896n. The Conway expedition to Spitsbergen. Nature, 54, 437– 438. Gregory, J. W. 1897. The fur-seals: the American case. Contemporary Review, 384, December 1897, 846– 853. Gregory, J. W. 1897a. Across Spitsbergen. Transactions and Sixth Annual Report of the Council of the Liverpool Geographical Society for the year ending December 31st 1897, 41 – 58. Gregory, J. W. 1897b. Some problems of Arctic geology. Nature, 56, 301– 303, 351–352. Gregory, J. W. 1897c. On the affinities of the Echinothuridae and on Pedinothuria and Helkodiadema, two new genera of

Echinoidea. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 53, 112– 122. Gregory, J. W. 1897d. On Echinocystis and Palœodiscus—two Silurian genera of Echinoidea. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 53, 123– 134. Gregory, J. W. 1897e. Trespassers beware! Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 4, 427. Gregory, J. W. 1897f. On the age of the Morte Slate fossils. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 4, 59– 62. Gregory, J. W. 1898. Review of the Stramberg Corals. Nature, 58, 282– 283. Gregory, J. W. 1898a. A collection of Egyptian fossil echinoidea. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 5, 149– 161. Gregory, J. W. 1898b. A collection of Egyptian fossil Madreporaria. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 5, 241– 251. Gregory, J. W. 1898c. Millestroma: a Cretaceous milleporoid coral from Egypt. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 5, 337–342. Gregory, J. W. 1898d. Theories on the distribution of the oceans and continents. Abstracts of Section E, Report of the 68th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Bristol. 938– 939. Gregory, J. W. 1898e. Suess’s theories of geographical evolution. Natural Science, 12, 117–122. Gregory, J. W. 1899. The Jurassic fauna of Cutch; the corals of Cutch. Palaeontologica Indica, Series IX, Vol. 2, Part 2. Gregory, J. W. 1899a. Reports on fossil echinoidea and corals. In: Gunther, R. T. (1899) Journal of the Linnean Society of London (Zoology), 27, 419–424; 424– 430. Gregory, J. W. 1899b. The plan of the Earth and its causes. The Geographical Journal, 13, 225–251. Gregory, J. W. 1899c. Chapter 4: The Plan of the Earth. In: Mill, H. R. (1899) International Geography, 36 –45. Gregory, J. W. 1899d. Chapter 50: Eastern Equatorial Africa. In: Mill, H. R. (1899), International Geography, 930–940. Gregory, J. W. 1899e. On Lindstromaster and the classification of the Palaeasterids. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 6, 340– 354. Gregory, J. W. 1899f. The Cretaceous Bryozoa, Volume 1. Catalogues of the Fossils in the Department of Geology British Museum (NH), London. Gregory, J. W. 1899g. New species of Cladophyllia, Prionastraea and Stylina. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 7, 4, 457– 461. Gregory, J. W. 1899h. A note on the geology of Socotra and Abd-el-Kurl. Geological Magazine, Decade IV, 6, 529– 532. Gregory, J. W. 1900. Class II Stelleroidea (Chapter 14) & Class III Echinoidea (Chapter 15). In: A Treatise on Zoology, (Ed. Lankester, E. R.); Part III The Echinoderma by F. A. Bather, J.W. Gregory & E. S. Goodrich. A & C Black, London. Gregory, J. W. 1900a. On the West-Indian species of Madrepora. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 7, 6, 20– 31. Gregory, J. W. 1900b. Polytremacis and the ancestry of the Helioporidae. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 66, 291– 305. Gregory, J. W. 1900c. The geology and fossil corals and echinoids of Somaliland. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 56, 26 – 45. Gregory, J. W. 1900d. Appendix A in Rowe (1900) Zeuglopleurus rowei, n. sp. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 16, 353– 354. Gregory, J. W. 1900e. Contributions to the Geology of British East Africa—Part II. The Geology of Mount Kenya. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 56, 205–222. Gregory, J. W. 1900f. Contributions to the Geology of British East Africa—Part III. The nepheline-syenite and camptonitic dykes intrusive in the Coast Series. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 56, 205– 222. Gregory, J. W. 1900g. The fossil corals of Christmas Island. In: Andrews, C. W. (1900). A Monograph of Christmas Island (Indian Ocean). British Museum Publications, London. 206–225. Gregory, J. W. 1901. The Foundation of British East Africa. Horace Marshall & Son, London. Gregory, J. W. 1901a. The work of the National Antarctic expedition. Nature, 63, 609– 612.

APPENDIX 1: PUBLISHED WORKS OF J. W. GREGORY

Gregory, J. W. 1901b. Cyphaspis spryi, a new species of trilobite from the Silurian of Melbourne. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 13, (New Series), 179– 182. Gregory, J. W. 1902. Scientific Literature; The International Catalogue. The Age, September 13 1902. Gregory, J. W. 1902a. The Geology of Mount Macedon, Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 14, (New Series), 185– 217. Gregory, J. W. 1902b. The factors that control the depth of ore deposits. Transactions of the Australasian Institute of Mining Engineers, 8, 127– 154. Gregory, J. W. 1902c. Some remains of an extinct kangaroo in the Dune-rock of the Sorrento Peninsula, Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 14, (New Series), 139–144. Gregory, J. W. 1902d. Antarctic exploration. Popular Scientific Monthly, 60, 209– 217. Gregory, J. W. 1902e. The West Indian eruptions: The whole world trembled: the crust we live on; Australia’s safety. The Argus, 7 June 1902. Gregory, J. W. 1902f. The Lake Eyre Basin: question of flooding from the sea. The Argus, 5 July 1902. Gregory, J. W. 1903. Artesian water in Victoria. The Argus, 8 January 1903. Gregory, J. W. 1903a. The geology of the Berry Lead at Spring Hill and Central Leads. Bulletins of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 1. Department of Mines, Victoria. Gregory, J. W. 1903b. The age of the metamorphic rocks of north-eastern Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 15, (New Series), 123– 131. Gregory, J. W. 1903c. The Heathcotian –a pre-Ordovician series– and its distribution in Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 15, (New Series), 148– 175. Gregory, J. W. 1903d. Instructions for the use of the aneroid barometer. Bulletins of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 8. Department of Mines, Victoria. Gregory, J. W. 1903e. Some features in the geography of Northwestern Tasmania. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 15 (New Series), 177– 183. Gregory, J. W. 1903f. The Austral Geographies, Classes ii, iii, iv, v and vi. (5 vols). Whitcombe & Tombs, London & Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1903g. The Teaching of Geography. Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd, London & Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1903h. The Geography of Victoria: Historical, Physical and Political. Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd, London & Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1903i. How geysers work. Review of Reviews (Australasian Edition for Schools). 1903, 244– 247. Gregory, J. W. 1904. Note on the desiccation of the world. The Argus, 1 May 1904. Gregory, J. W. 1904a. Note on the Mosley Commission Report. The Argus, 10 June 1904, Gregory, J. W. 1904b. The glacial geology of Tasmania. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 60, 37– 53. Gregory, J. W. 1904c. The first record of glacial action in Tasmania. Nature, 70, 101– 102. Gregory, J. W. 1904d. The Climate of Australasia in Reference to its Control by the Southern Ocean. Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd, Melbourne. Gregory, J. W. 1904e. The antiquity of man in Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 17 (New Series), 120– 144. Gregory, J. W. 1905. The Southern Ocean and its climatic control over Australasia. Transactions of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Proceedings of Section E, 329–349. Gregory, J. W. 1905a. The Imperial Geography for New Zealand Schools Standard II; Standards III – IV,; Standard V–VI, Geographical Readers, [for New Zealand schools] Standard III; Standard IV; Standard V-VI. Whitcombe & Tombs, Christchurch, New Zealand. Gregory, J. W. 1905b. The Mount Lyell Mining Field, Tasmania; with some account of the geology of other pyritic ore bodies. The Australasian Institute of Mining Engineers, 10, 26– 196. Also issued separately as a book of 172pp. Gregory, J. W. 1906. The Dead Heart of Australia. A Journey Around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 1901–2 with Some Account of the

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Lake Eyre Basin and the Flowing wells of Central Australia. John Murray, London. Gregory, J. W. 1906a. On a collection of fossil corals from Eastern Egypt, Abu Roash, and Sinai. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 3, 50– 58; 110– 118. Gregory, J. W. 1906b. Fossil echinoidea from Sinai and Egypt. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 3, 216– 227; 246– 256. Gregory, J. W. 1906c. The education of mining engineers. Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers, 31, 502– 525. Gregory, J. W. 1906d. The work of the National Antarctic expedition. Nature, 73, 297– 300. Gregory, J. W. 1906e. The geological plans of some Australian mining-fields. Science Progress, 1, (New Series), 117– 136. Gregory, J. W. 1906f. The mining fields of Southern Rhodesia in 1905. Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers, 31, 46 –103. Gregory, J. W. 1906g. Mining in Australia. Mining Journal, 79, 273. Gregory, J. W. 1906h. The economic geography and development of Australia. The Geographical Journal, 28, 130– 145; 229–245. Gregory, J. W. 1906i. The ancient auriferous conglomerates of Southern Rhodesia. Transactions of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 25, 563– 578; discussion 579–587. Gregory, J. W. 1906j. Climatic variations, their extent and causes. International Geological Congress, 10th Session, Mexico 1906, 407– 426. Gregory, J. W. 1906k. The indicators of Ballarat. Mining Journal, 79, 78– 79. Gregory, J. W. 1907. The Ballarat East gold-field, with plans of the mines by Wm. Baragwanath. Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 4. Gregory, J. W. 1907a. A contribution to the bibliography of the Economic Geology of Victoria. Records of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 2, Part 3. Gregory, J. W. 1907b. The Mount Cudgewa tin-field. Bulletins of the Geological Survey of Victoria, 22. Gregory, J. W. 1907c. A glaciated rock surface at Lugton, North Ayrshire. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 13, 10– 18. Gregory, J. W. 1907d. Ore deposits and their distribution in depth. Lecture published in the Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 18, 305– 321. Gregory, J. W. 1907e. The problem of the Palaeozoic glaciation of Australia and South Africa. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1906 York Meeting, 576–577. Gregory, J. W. 1907f. Gold mining and gold production. Cantor Lectures to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Journal of the Society for Arts, 55, 1003– 1014; 1022–1032; 1037– 1047. Gregory, J. W. 1907g. The origin of the gold in the Rand banket. Transactions of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 17, 2– 41; discussion 41– 85. Gregory, J. W. 1907h. Ballarat East goldfield and the indicators. The Mining Journal & Railway & Commercial Gazette, 82, 84. Gregory, J. W. 1907i. Presidential address. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 4, 409–418; 451–459. Gregory, J. W. 1907j. The Rotiform Bryozoa of the Isle of Wight. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 4, 442– 443. Gregory, J. W. 1907k. Australia and the Australians. Introductory Chapter in Australasia, Vol. 1 in Stanford’s Compendium of Geography and Travel, 2nd edn. Stanford, London, 1– 32. Gregory, J. W. 1908. Recent literature on the plan of the Earth. The Geographical Journal, 32, 151–156. Gregory, J. W. 1908a. Some scientific results of the Antarctic expeditions, 1901–1904. The Geographical Journal, 32, 25– 47. Gregory, J. W. 1908b. The Great Scandinavian Overthrust. Science Progress, 2, 399– 412. Gregory, J. W. 1908c. Lord Kelvin’s contributions to geology. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 13, 170–186. Gregory, J. W. 1908d. A journey around Lake Eyre. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 24, 355– 365. Gregory, J. W. 1908e. Address to the Geological Section. British Association for the Advancement of Science: 1907 Leicester Meeting, 490– 502.

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Gregory, J. W. 1908f. Origin of the Sudbury nickel ores. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 5, 139–140. Gregory, J. W. 1908g. Report of Professor Gregory to the Earl of Sheffield on the prospects of Iron mining and smelting in the neighbourhood of the Sheffield Park, Sussex. Southern Publishing Co. Ltd, Brighton. Gregory, J. W. 1908h. Report of Professor Gregory to the Earl of Sheffield on the prospects of finding coal in the district of Newhaven, Sussex. Southern Publishing Co. Ltd, Brighton. Gregory, J. W. 1908i. Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative. Blackie, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1908j. Review of fifty years’ work; physical and dynamical geology, In: Macnair, & Mort, (eds) History of the Geological Society of Glasgow 1858– 1908. Glasgow Geological Society, Glasgow, 58 –74. Gregory, J. W. 1908k. Lord Kelvin and the age of the Earth. Glasgow Herald, February 22 1908. Gregory, J. W. 1908l. The geology of South Victoria Land. Review of National Antarctic expedition 1901– 4. Natural History, 1, Geology (Field Geology; Petrography). British Museum, 1907. In: Nature, 77, 561– 562; see also 78, 100. Gregory, J. W. 1908m. A history of geographical evolution. Review of Die Entwicklung der Kontiente und Ihrer Lebewelt ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Erdgeschichte by T. Arlt. 1907. Nature, 78, 266– 267. Gregory, J. W. 1908n. Review of ‘The Geological Structure of the North-West Highlands of Scotland’ by B. N. Peach, J. Horne, W. Gunn, C. T. Clough, L. W. Hinxman & J. J. H. Teall. 1907 Memoir, Geological Survey of Scotland. Nature, 77, 272–274. Gregory, J. W. 1908o. Russian transliteration. Nature, 78, 42 –43. Gregory, J. W. 1909. Obituary notice of John George Goodchild, born 26th May 1844, died 21st Feb. 1906. Transactions of the Geological Society of Edinburgh, 9, 331– 350. Gregory, J. W. 1909a. The Cretaceous Bryozoa, Volume 2. Catalogues of the Fossils in the Department of Geology British Museum (NH). Gregory, J. W. 1909b. The origin of the gold of the Rand goldfield. Economic Geology, 4, 118– 129. Gregory, J. W. 1909c. New species of Cretaceous Bryozoa. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 6, 61 –66. Gregory, J. W. 1909d. ‘Structural Geography’. Nature, 80, 157–158. Gregory, J. W. 1909e. The level of the sea. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 25, 311–324. Gregory, J. W. 1909f. What is a mineral? Transactions of the Institute of Mining Engineers, 37, 13– 42. Gregory, J. W. 1909g. What is a mineral? Geological Magazine, Decade V, 6, 520–521. Gregory, J. W. 1909h. Report on the work of the Commission sent out by the Jewish Territorial Organisation under the auspices of the Governor-General of Tripoli to examine the territory Proposed for the purpose of a Jewish settlement in Cyrenaica. ITO office, London. Gregory, J. W. 1909i. Further Antarctic reports of the expedition of 1901– 1904. The Geographical Journal, 34, 290–297. Also further Antarctic results, Nature, 79, 460–462. Gregory, J. W. 1909j. The Mountains of the Moon. Review of ‘Ruwenzori: an account of the Expedition of H. R. H. Prince Luigi Amadeo of Savoy, Duke of Abruzzi’ by F. de Filippi. 1908. Nature, 80, 281– 282. Gregory, J. W. 1909k. Niagara as a geological chronometer. Review of the Falls of Niagara: their evolution and varying relations to the Great Lakes by J. W. W. Spencer. 1909. Nature, 79, 11. Gregory, J. W. 1909l. Geology. Dent Scientific Primer. Dent, London. Gregory, J. W. 1910. The Glenboig Fireclay. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 30, 348– 360. Gregory, J. W. 1910a. Tuesite –A Scotch variety of halloysite. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 30, 361– 363. Gregory, J. W. 1910b. Work for Glasgow geologists—The problems of the South-Western Highlands. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 14, 1 –29. Gregory, J. W. 1910c. Problems of the South-Western Highlands of Scotland. Geological Magazine, Decade V, 7, 119– 121. Gregory, J. W. 1910d. White labour in tropical agriculture: a great Australian experiment. The Nineteenth Century, 67, February 1910, 368– 380.

Gregory, J. W. 1910e. The geographical factors that control the development of Australia. The Geographical Journal, 35, 658– 682. Gregory, J. W. 1910f. The Heart of the Antarctic. Review of E. H. Shackleton’s ‘The Heart of the Antarctic, being the story of the British Antarctic expedition, 1907– 9’. Nature, 82, 280– 283. Gregory, J. W. 1910g. The Face of the Earth. Reviews of Vol III, Part 2, by E. Suess and Vol IV in translation by H. B. C. Sollas and of the Topographic Index to the volumes by L. Waagen. Nature, 83, 451– 453. Gregory, J. W. 1910h. The Iron Ore Deposits of Victoria, 875–877. In: Andersson, J. G. (ed.) The Iron Ore Resources of the World. International Geological Congress 1910, Stockholm, 2 vols. Gregory, J. W. 1910i. The First Inhabitants of the World. In: Lydekker, R., Johnston, H. & Ainsworth-Davis, J. R. (eds) Harmsworth’s Natural History, 1, 13 – 25. Harmsworth, London. Gregory, J. W. 1911. The fossil Echinoidea of Cyrenaica. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 67, 661– 680. Gregory, J. W. 1911a. The flowing wells of Central Australia. Geographical Journal, 38, 34– 59, 157–181. Gregory, J. W. 1911b. Report of the South African Strata Committee. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1910 Sheffield meeting. John Murray, London, 123– 142. Gregory, J. W. 1911c. The geology of Cyrenaica. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 67, 572– 615. Gregory, J. W. 1911d. Tripoli and Cyrenaica. Proceedings of the Glasgow Geological Society, 14, 349– 351. Gregory, J. W. 1911e. The resources of Tripoli. The Contemporary Review, 100, 768– 781. Gregory, J. W. 1911f. The iron-ore supplies of the World. Science Progress, 19, 371–382. Gregory, J. W. 1911g. Constructive waterfalls. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 27, 537–546. Gregory, J. W. 1911h. The Glasgow earthquake of 14th December 1910. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 14, 89 –114. Gregory, J. W. 1911i. The Glasgow earthquake of 14th December 1910 in relation to mining. Transactions of the Institute of Mining Engineers, 41, 1– 9. Gregory, J. W. 1911j. The terms ‘denudation’, ‘erosion’, ‘corrosion’, and ‘corrasion’. The Geographical Journal, 37, 189– 195. Gregory, J. W. 1911k. The scientific misappropriation of popular terms. Nature, 88, 7. Gregory, J. W. 1912. The snow-patches of Ben Nevis and the occurrence of black snow in Scotland. Scottish Ski Club Magazine, January 1912, 1, 147– 175. Gregory, J. W. 1912a. The employment of white labour in the sugar planations of Queensland. Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 43, 182– 194. Gregory, J. W. 1912b. The wet-bulb thermometer and tropical colonisation. Journal of the Meteorological Society, Series 3, 16, 3– 9. Gregory, J. W. 1912c. Constructive waterfalls. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Portsmouth Meeting, 445– 446. Gregory, J. W. 1912d. The Polmont Kame and on the classification of Scottish kames. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 14, 199– 218. Gregory, J. W. 1912e. The relations of kames and eskers. The Geographical Journal, 40, 169– 175. Gregory, J. W. 1912f. The Making of the Earth (Home University Library Series). Williams & Norgate, London. Gregory, J. W. 1912g. The structural and petrographic classifications of coast-types. Scientia, 11, 36 – 63. Gregory, J. W. 1912h. Fiords in relation to Earth movements. Nature, 89, 179– 183. Gregory, J. W. 1912i. The scientific misappropriation of popular terms. Address to the Conference of delegates. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Portsmouth Meeting 1911. Gregory, J. W. 1913. The Nature and Origin of Fiords. John Murray, London. Gregory, J. W. 1913a. Corries, with special reference to those of the Campsie Fells. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 15, 84 – 98. Gregory, J. W. 1913b. Report on the work of the Commission sent out by the Jewish Territorial Organisation under the auspices of the

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Portuguese Government to examine the Territory proposed for the purpose of a Jewish settlement in Angola. ITO Office, London. Gregory, J. W. 1913c. Livingstone as an Explorer; an Appreciation. James MacLehose, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1913d. Livingstone as an explorer– an appreciation. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 29, 225– 242. Gregory, J. W. 1914. The Kynuna Wells –a test case of rock pressure. Economic Geology, 9, 768–775. Gregory, J. W. 1914a. Is the Earth drying up? The Geographical Journal, 43, 148– 172; 293–318. Gregory, J. W. 1914b. The Lake System of Westralia. The Geographical Journal, 43, 656– 665. Gregory, J. W. 1914c. The Loch Morar Basin and the tectonic associations of the Scottish Sea lochs. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 30, 251– 259. Gregory, J. W. 1914d. The educational value of the kinematograph. The School World, 16, 132–134. Gregory, J. W. 1914e. The structure of the Carlisle– Solway Basin. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 1, 286–287. See also 287–288 (Correspondence). Gregory, J. W. 1914f. The Structure of the Carlisle –Solway Basin, and the sequence of its Permian and Triassic Rocks. Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Geological Society, 958, 93 –96. Gregory, J. W. 1914g. The correlation of the Australian marine Kainozoic deposits—evidence of the Echinoids, Bryozoa and some vertebrates. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 1, 516–517. Gregory, J. W. 1914h. Home by Siberia in war time. Glasgow University Magazine, 27, 94 –95. Gregory, J. W. 1914i. The obituary of Eduard Suess. The Geographical Journal, 43, 701– 704. Gregory, J. W. 1914j. The evolution of the Essex river-system, and its relation to that of the Midlands. Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Geological Society, 957, 83– 87. Gregory, J. W. 1914k. The Permian and Triassic Rocks of Arran. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 15, 174– 187. Gregory, J. W. 1914l. The Chiltern Wind Gaps. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 1, 145–148. Gregory, J. W. 1914m. The Rand Banket. Mining and Scientific Press, 108, 1020–1022. Gregory, J. W. 1915. The reported progressive desiccation of the Earth. Scientia, 17, 328–344. Gregory, J. W. 1915a. Pseudo-glacial features in Dalmatia. The Geographical Journal, 46, 105–117. Gregory, J. W. with others. 1915b. The Geology of the Glasgow district. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 26, 151– 194. Gregory, J. W. 1915c. The age of Loch Long, and its relation to the Valley System of Southern Scotland. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 15, 295– 310. Gregory, J. W. 1915d. The Tweed Valley and its relations to the Clyde and Solway. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 31, 479– 486. Gregory, J. W. 1915e. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war and the geology of the Potash salts. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 71 –72. Gregory, J. W. 1915f. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war. The Contemporary Review, No. 600, 769–779. Gregory, J. W. 1915g. The Scottish Lochs and their origin. Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 45, 183– 196. Gregory, J. W. 1915h. The relative distribution of fiords and volcanoes. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 31, 257– 261. Gregory, J. W. 1915i. The geological relations and some fossils of South Georgia. In: Ferguson, D. Geological Observations in South Georgia. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 50, 817– 822. Gregory, J. W. 1915j. The physiography of South Georgia as shown by Mr Ferguson’s photographs. In: Ferguson, D. Geological Observations in South Georgia. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 50, 814– 816. Gregory, J. W. 1915k. The Solway Basin and its Permo-Triassic sequence. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 241– 249. Gregory, J. W. 1915l. A deep bore at Seascale in Cumberland. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 146– 149. Gregory, J. W. 1915m. Deserts. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 31, 241– 244.

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Gregory, J. W. 1915n. Suess’s classification of Eurasian Mountains. The Geographical Journal, 45, 499–513. Gregory, J. W. 1915o. Temperance Regulations in the Russian & Australian Armies. Walter Black & Co., Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1915p. Geology of Today: A Popular Introduction in Simple Language. Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd, London. Gregory, J. W. 1915q. The Danbury Gravels. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 529 –538. Gregory, J. W. 1915r. Moine pebbles in Torridonian conglomerates. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 2, 447–450. Gregory, J. W. 1916. Australia. Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature, 90. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gregory, J. W. 1916a. The flowing wells of Western Queensland. Queensland Geographical Journal, 30, 1– 29. Gregory, J. W. 1916b (with bibliography by C. M. Leitch). Henry Darwin Rogers. J. MacLehose & Sons, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1916c. Cyrenaica. The Geographical Journal, 47, 321– 345. Gregory, J. W. 1916d. The Central Lakes of Westrailia and the Westrailian Peneplain. The Geographical Journal, 48, 326– 331. Gregory, J. W. 1916e. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war and the geology of the potash salts. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 16, 1 –33. Gregory, J. W. 1916f. The Auld Wives’ Lifts –A Pseudo-Megalithic Tor. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 32, 279– 282. Gregory, J. W. 1916g. Contributions to the geology of Benquella. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 51, 495–536. Gregory, J. W. 1916h. On some Cretaceous Echinoida from the neighbourhood of Lobito Bay. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 51, 585–587. Gregory, J. W. 1916i. The age of the Norseman Limestone, Western Australia. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 3, 320–321. Gregory, J. W. 1916j. By General Wade’s Road over Corrieyairack. The Cyclists’ Touring Club Gazette, 35, 170–172. Gregory, J. W. 1916k. The British Isles: morphology; Pre-Cambrian of Scotland. In: Steinmann, G. & Wilckens, O. (eds) Handbuch der Regionalen Geologie. Carl Winters, Heidelberg, 12 – 17; 34 – 42. Gregory, J. W. 1916l. Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. Nature, 97, 301– 303. Gregory, J. W. 1916m. Fiords and earth movements. Scientia, 20, 253– 264. Gregory, J. W. 1917. The geology of phosphates and their bearing on the conservation of mineral resources. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 16, 116– 163. Gregory, J. W. 1917a. The geological factors affecting the strategy of the war and the geology of the potash salts. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 4, 84. Gregory, J. W. 1917b. Mineral fields of the Franco-German borderlands. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 33, 358– 363. Gregory, J. W. 1917c. Thomson’s genera of Scottish Carboniferous corals. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 16, 222– 243. Gregory, J. W. 1917d. The evolution of the map of the world. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 33, 49 –65. Gregory, J. W. 1917e. Octotremacis, its structure, affinities, and age. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 4, 9– 12. Gregory, J. W. 1917f. Review of Bailey, E. B. & Maufe, H. B.1917. The Geology of Ben Nevis and Glen Coe and the Surrounding Country. Memoir of the Geological Survey, HMSO, in Nature, 99, 173–174. Gregory, J. W. 1918. Geology of Mesopotamia and its Borderlands. The Geographical Section of the Naval Intelligence Department, H. M. Stationery Office, Great Britain. Gregory, J. W. 1919. A low-level glaciated surface in the Eastern Himalayas. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 6, 397– 406. Gregory, J. W. 1919a. The geological history of the Rift Valley. Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society, 6, 429– 440. Gregory, J. W. 1919b. The prospects of oil wells in Britain. The Contemporary Review, No. 648, December 1919, 672–680. Gregory, J. W. 1919c. The Genesis of the Earth. Popular Lectures of the Astronomical Society of India, Session 1918–19, 11 – 12. Gregory, J. W. 1920. The African Rift Valleys. The Geographical Journal, 56, 14– 47.

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Gregory, J. W. 1920a. The red rocks of a deep bore at the north end of the Isle of Man. Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers, 59, 156– 168. Gregory, J. W. 1920b. The preglacial valleys of Arran and Snowdon. Geological Magazine, 57, 148–164. Gregory, J. W. 1920c. The African Rift Valley. Nature, 104, 518– 519. Gregory, J. W. 1920d. Conservation of our Coal Resources. Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 50, 3 –24. Gregory, J. W. 1920e. The conservation of our coal resources. The Contemporary Review, 654, 817– 825. Gregory, J. W. 1920f. The Irish eskers. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 210, 115– 151. Gregory, J. W. 1920g. Review of Scottish county geographies. Nature, 106, 561– 562. Gregory, J. W. 1921. The glaciation of Ireland. Geological Magazine, 58, 137– 140. Gregory, J. W. 1921a. Note on the sequence across Central Spitsbergen from Advent Bay to Agardhs Bay. Geological Magazine, 58, 295– 296. Gregory, J. W. 1921b. The Rift Valleys and Geology of East Africa: An Account of the Origin & History of the Rift Valleys of East Africa & their Relation to the Contemporary Earth-movements which Transformed the Geography of the World. With some Account of the Prehistoric stone Implements, Soils, Water Supply and Mineral Resources of the Kenya Colony. Seeley, Service & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1921c. The conservation of coal resources. Scientia, 29, March 1921, 185–192. Gregory, J. W. 1921d. The future of oil supply. The Contemporary Review, 666, June 1921, 778– 786. Gregory, J. W. 1921e. The glaciation of Ireland. Geological Magazine, 58, 239. Gregory, J. W. 1921f. Glasgow and its geographical history. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 37, 2 –12. Gregory, J. W. 1921g. National contributions to geology. Scientia, 30, 1 –12. Gregory, J. W. 1922. Evolution of the Essex Rivers and of the Lower Thames. Benham & Co Ltd, Colchester. Gregory, J. W. 1922a. Ore deposits and their genesis in relation to geographical distribution. Journal of the Chemical Society, 121, 750– 772. Gregory, J. W. 1922b. Supplementary note on the geology of Benquella in relation to its cephalopods and the history of the South Atlantic. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 53, 161–163. Gregory, J. W. 1922c. The English ‘eskers’ –their structure and distribution. Geological Magazine, 59, 25 –44. Gregory, J. W. 1923. On recent records from the flowing wells of Eastern Australia. Proceedings of the Pan-American Science Congress Australia, 1291– 1296. Gregory, J. W. 1923a. The structure of the Great Rift Valley. Nature, 112, 514– 516. Gregory, J. W. 1923b. The geological relations of the oil shales of Southern Burma. Geological Magazine, 60, 152– 159. Gregory, J. W. 1923c. The Mepale oil shales, Southern Burma. Mining Journal, 140, 145. Gregory, J. W. 1923d. The Banda Arc: its structure and geographical relations. The Geographical Journal, 62, 20 – 30. Gregory, J. W. 1923e. Asia’s claim to migration into Australia. The Empire Review, 37, 356– 361. Gregory, J. W. 1923f. Climatic changes and continental drift. The Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, 238, 85 –103. Gregory, J. W. 1923g. The Geological Society of China. Nature, 112, 883. Gregory, J. W. 1923h. Climatic changes. Nature, 111, 561. Gregory, J. W. 1924. The scientific renaissance in China. Nature, 113, 17 –19. Gregory, J. W. 1924a. Tropical colonisation and the future of Australia. Nature, 114, 314–317. Gregory, J. W. 1924b. The geology of the Aru Islands. Geological Magazine, 61, 52 –56. Gregory, J. W. 1925. Magmatic ores. Transactions of the Faraday Society, 20, 449– 458.

Gregory, J. W. 1925a. Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative. 2nd edn. Blackie, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W. 1925b. Inter-racial problems and white colonization in the tropics. British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Ninety-second Meeting, Toronto 1924. London, 124– 145. Gregory, J. W. 1925c. The Menace of Colour: A study of the difficulties due to the association of white & coloured races, with an account of measures proposed for their solution, and special reference to white colonisation in the Tropics. Service & Co. Ltd., Seeley, London. Gregory, J. W. 1925d. Science and administration in East Africa. Nature, 115, 753– 755. Gregory, J. W. 1925e. Introduction and also the fossil corals. In: Wyllie, B. N. K. & Smellie, W. R. (1925). Gregory, J. W. 1925f. The Evishanoran Esker, Co. Tyrone. Geological Magazine, 62, 451–458. Gregory, J. W. 1925g. The moraines, boulder clay and glacial sequence of South-western Scotland. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 17, 354–376. Gregory, J. W. 1925h. The evolution of the river system of South-Eastern Asia. The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 41, 129–141. Gregory, J. W. 1925i. The mountain structure and geographical relations of South-Eastern Asia. Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 24, 511–519. See also Nature, v115, 203– 204; 464– 465. Gregory, J. W. 1925j. Continental drift. Review of The Origin of Continents and Oceans by Alfred Wegener. Translated from the 3rd German edition by J. G. A. Skerl. Nature, 115, 255– 257. Gregory, J. W. 1925k. The future of East Africa. Review of Kenya by N. Leys (1924) and Report of the East Africa Commission. In: The Edinburgh Review, 242, No. 493, (July 1925), 20 –31. Gregory, J. W. 1926. The Sudbury nickel ores. Geological Magazine, 63, 190– 192. Gregory, J. W. 1926a. The relative influence of denudation and earthmovements in moulding the surface of the Earth. Scientia, 40, (October 1926) 218– 230. Gregory, J. W. 1926b. The Carlisle Basin. (Review of Dixon et al. 1926). Geological Magazine, 63, 377–379. Gregory, J. W. 1926c. Scottish drumlins. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 54, 433–440. Gregory, J. W. 1926d. The Evishanoran Esker, Co. Tyrone. Geological Magazine, 63, 336. Gregory, J. W. 1926e. The Scottish kames and their evidence on the glaciation of Scotland. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 54, 395– 432. Gregory, J. W. 1926f. The reported metamorphic zone at Castlefern near Moniaive, Southern Uplands. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 17, 438–439. Gregory, J. W. 1927. Origin and distribution of underground water. British Waterworks Association Circular, 69, 644– 671. See also Sources of Underground Water, Nature, 120, 383. Gregory, J. W. 1927a. The sea lochs of the Outer Hebrides. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 18, 27– 39. Gregory, J. W. 1927b. The fiords of the Hebrides. The Geographical Magazine, 69, 194–216. Gregory, J. W. 1927c. Further Jurassic fossils from Kenya colony. Geological Magazine, 64, 325. Gregory, J. W. 1927d. Swaledale glacial geology. The Naturalist, No. 849, October 1927, 293–295. Gregory, J. W. 1927e. The relations of the Thames and Rhine and age of the Strait of Dover. Geographical Journal, 70, 52– 59. Gregory, J. W. 1927f. The Thames –Rhine problem. The Geographical Journal, 70, 509– 511. Gregory, J. W. 1927g. Variations of climate in the past. International Geological Congress, 14th Meeting in Spain, 1926, 181– 192. Gregory, J. W. 1927h. Note on the geological age of the Sturtian tillite in South Australia. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, 51, 414. Gregory, J. W. 1927i. The Carlisle Basin, Geological Magazine, 64, 384. Gregory, J. W. 1927j. The diamond fields of South-West Africa. Review of Die Diamantenwu¨ste Sudwest-Africas in The Geographical Journal, 69, 146– 148.

APPENDIX 1: PUBLISHED WORKS OF J. W. GREGORY

Gregory, J. W. 1927k. Some Lower Cretaceous corals from Eastern Venezuela. Geological Magazine, 64, 440–444. Gregory, J. W. 1928. The Elements of Economic Geology. Methuen & Co, London. Gregory, J. W. 1928a. The geology of Loch Lomond. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 18, 301– 323. Gregory, J. W. 1928b. The geology of Loch Lomond. Geological Magazine, 65, 331– 332. Gregory, J. W. 1928c. Raised beaches and variations of sea-level. Reports of the International Geographical Congress at Cambridge, 1928, 157–158. Gregory, J. W. 1928d. Human Migration and the Future: A Study of the Causes, Effects and control of Migration. Seeley Service & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1928e. Wegener’s hypothesis. In: van W. van der Graht, W. A. J. M. et al. Theory of Continental Drift. American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Tulsa, 93 –96. Gregory, J. W. 1928f. The nickel-cobalt ore of Talnotry. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 37, 178– 186; discussion 186– 195. Gregory, J. W. 1928g. The population capacity of Australia. Review of Die Wirthschafts-und Lebensrau¨me des Festlandes Australien by W. Geisler (1928). In: Kolonial Studien, Hans Meyer Festscrift, 199– 222, Reimer & Vohsen, Berlin. Geographical Journal, 72, 468– 469. Gregory, J. W. 1928h. Raold Amundsen: An appreciation. Discovery, 9, 243– 245. Gregory, J. W. 1929. Eduard Suess memorial tablet. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 85, cxxxvi –cxli. Gregory, J. W. 1929a. Earthquakes and Volcanoes. Benn’s Sixpenny Library, No. 97, Ernest Benn Ltd, London. Gregory, J. W. 1929b. The geological history of the Atlantic Ocean. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 85, lxviii– cxxii. Gregory, J. W. (Editor & Contributor) 1929c. The Structure of Asia. Methuen, London. Gregory, J. W. 1929d. Dendroseris n. g. and other corals from Trinidad. Geological Magazine, 66, 65 –68. Gregory, J. W. 1929e. Review of ‘The Peopling of Australia’ edited by Phillips, P. D. & Wood, G. L. The Geographical Journal, 74, 290– 291. Gregory, J. W. 1929f. The capacity of Australia for immigration. The Contemporary Review, No. 766, October 1929, 476–482. Gregory, J. W. 1929g. Migration. The Nineteenth Century, 106, 672– 682. Gregory, J. W. 1929h. Water Divining. Smithsonian Report for 1928. US Government Printing Office, Washington, 325– 348. Reprinted from British Waterworks Association. Final Report of the Public Works, Roads and Transport Conference and Exhibition, 1927, 368– 389. Gregory, J. W. 1929i. The new eruption of Etna. Discovery, 10, 3 –6. Gregory, J. W. 1929j. The earthquake south of Newfoundland and submarine canyons. Nature, 124, 945–946. Gregory, J. W. 1930. Proceedings of the Geological Society of London. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 86, xliii–xliv. Gregory, J. W. 1930a. The geological history of the Pacific Ocean. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 86, lxxii –cxxvi. Gregory, J. W. 1930b. The sequence in Islay and Jura. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 18, 420– 441. Gregory, J. W. 1930c. The machinery of the Earth. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 119, 957– 980. Gregory, J. W. 1930d. Upper Triassic fossils from the Burmo-Siamese frontier. The Thaungyin Trias and description of the corals. Records of the Geological Survey of India, 63, 155–167. Gregory, J. W. 1930e. A new Ceratotrochus. Geological Magazine, 67, 475– 477. Gregory, J. W. 1930f. The fossil fauna of the Samana Range and some neighbouring areas: Part VII: The Lower Eocene corals. Palaeontologica Indica, New Series, 15, 81– 128. Gregory, J. W. 1930g. The copper-shale (Kupferschiefer) of Mansfeld. Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 40, 3 – 30, discussion 30– 55.

223

Gregory, J. W. 1930h. The dawn of mining. The Nineteenth Century, 107, 236– 244. Gregory, J. W. 1930i. The dawn of mining. Canadian Mining Journal, 51, 616– 618. Gregory, J. W. 1930j. Stone polygons beside Loch Lomond. Geographical Journal, 76, 415– 418. Gregory, J. W. 1930k. Geology of Albania. Review of Volume 3, Geologica Hungarica Geological Survey of Hungary. Nature, 125, 8– 9. Gregory, J. W. 1930l. Palestine and the stability of climate in historic times. The Geographical Journal, 76, 487– 494. Gregory, J. W. 1930m. The older rocks and physiography of Scotland. Nature, 126, 234– 235. Gregory, J. W. 1931. Dalradian Geology: The Dalradian Rocks of Scotland and their Equivalents in other Countries. Methuen & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1931a. A deep trench on the floor of the North Sea. The Geographical Journal, 77, 548–557. Gregory, J. W. 1931b. Eomontipora, a new coral from the Cretaceous of Honduras and the affinities of The Montiporidae. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 10, 8, 91 – 96. Gregory, J. W. 1931c. Hydroconophora and Hydrokerion: two new genera of Cretaceous Hydractiniidae. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 10, 7, 475– 484. Gregory, J. W. 1931d. A submarine trough off the coast of Cyprus. The Geographical Journal, 78, 357–361. Gregory, J. W. 1931e. Race as a Political Factor. Conway Memorial Lecture. Watts & Co, London. Gregory, J. W. 1931f. Geological researches in the Judean desert. Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement, October 1931, 197– 202. Gregory, J. W. 1931g. Raised beaches and variations of sea-level. Scientia, 49, February 1931, 95 – 104. Gregory, J. W. 1931h. Problems of the Earth’s crust. The Geographical Journal, 78, 444–445. Gregory, J. W. 1931i. Die Oszillationstheorie. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Geologischen Gesellschaft, 83, 299– 301. Gregory, J. W. 1931j. Mixed marriages and the colour bar. The Spectator, 147, 75– 76. Gregory, J. W. 1931k. Indian education and unemployment. The Political Quarterly, 2, 241– 250. Gregory, J. W. 1931l. The Late Professor Schwarz’s contribution to the Geology of the Coast of Mauritania. The Geographical Journal, 77, 238– 245. Gregory, J. W. 1931m. The Story of the Road from the Beginning Down to AD 1931. A. MacLehose & Co., London. Gregory, J. W. 1931o. The origin of Inca civilization. Review of The Ayar-Incas by M. Poindexter, 1930. The Geographical Journal, 78, 555– 557. Gregory, J. W. 1932. Problems of geology contemporary with the British Association. British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Centenary Meeting, London 1931, London, 51– 70. Gregory, J. W. 1932a. A submarine trough near the Strait of Gibraltar. The Geographical Journal, 79, 219– 220. Gregory, J. W. & Barrett, B. H. 1927. The stratigraphical position of the Keewatin. Journal of Geology, 35, 141–149. Gregory, J. W. & Barrett, B. H. 1927a. The major terms of the Pre-Palaeozoic. Journal of Geology, 35, 734–742. Gregory, J. W. & Barrett, B. H. 1931. General Stratigraphy. Methuen, London. Gregory, J. W. & Currie, E. D. 1920. Echinoidea from Western Persia. Geological Magazine, 58, 500– 503. Gregory, J. W. & Currie, E. D. 1928. The Vertebrate Fossils from the Glacial and associated Post-Glacial Beds of Scotland in the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow and their Evidence on the Classification of the Scottish Glacial Deposits. Monograph of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, 2. Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1922. The Alps of Chinese Tibet and their geographical relations. Nature, 110, 826–827. Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1923. To the Alps of Chinese Tibet: An Account of a Journey of Exploration up to and Among the Snow-Clad Mountains of the Tibetan Frontier. Seeley, Service & Co Ltd., London.

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Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1923a. The Alps of Chinese Tibet and their geographical relations. The Geographical Journal, 61, 153– 179. Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1923b. A note on the map illustrating the journey of the Percy Sladen Expedition, 1922, in North-Western Yunnan. The Geographical Journal, 62, 202–205. [Map is on p. 240.] Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1923c. Zoological results of the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to Yunnan under the leadership of Professor J. W. Gregory, FRS (1922). Journal of the Asiatic Society, Bengal, (New Series), 19, 383–384. Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. 1925. Geology and physical geography of Chinese Tibet, and its relations to the mountain system of SouthEastern Asia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 213, 171– 298. Gregory, J. W., Evans, J. W., Lamplugh, G. W. & Freshfield, D. 1917. Erosion and resulting land forms in sub-arid Western Australia, including the origin and growth of dry lakes: discussion. The Geographical Journal, 50, 434– 437. Gregory, J. W., Paton, D. N. & Millar, J. D. 1917a. Food Waste & Hoarding in Alcoholic Beverages. Glasgow Citizens’ Committee for War-time Prohibition, Glasgow. Gregory, J. W., Bothroyd, T. W. & Leach, J. A. 1921– 1926. The Federal Geography: Grade III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII. Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd, Melbourne. Gregory, J. W., Mckinnon-Wood, M., Spath, L. F., Weir, J., Cox, L. R., Thomas, H. D., Currie, E. D., Latham, M. H., Williams, S. & Neilson, A. 1930. Reports on geological collections from the coastlands of Kenya colony made by Miss McKinnon-Wood. Monograph of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum University of Glasgow, 4. Includes the Introduction (p.1) and The fossil corals of Kenya Colony (185–209) by J. W. Gregory. Gregory, J. W., Ritchie, J., Kennedy, W. Q. & Leitch, D. 1930a. Some caves and a rock shelter at Loch Ryan and Portpatrick, Galloway. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 64, (vol. 4, 6th Series), 247–264. Gregory, J. W., Currie, E. D., Weir, J., Williams, S. & Tyrrell, G. W. 1930b. On the geological collection from the South Central Sahara made by Francis R. Rodd. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 86, 399– 412. Gregory, J. W. & Smith, F. V. 1903. A new ammonite from the Cretaceous rocks of Queensland. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 15, (New Series), 141–144.

Gregory, J. W. & Trench, J. B. 1916. Eocene Corals from the Fly River, Central New Guinea. Geological Magazine, Decade VI, 3, 481– 488, 529– 536. Gregory, J. W., Woodward, A. S., Watts, W. W. & Seward, A. C. 1930. From Meteorite to Man: the evolution of the Earth. Forum Series 11. Watts & Co., London. Horne, J. & Gregory, J. W. 1916. The Annan Red Sandstone Series of Dumfriesshire. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 15, 374– 386. Hutchinson, H. N., Gregory, J. W. & Lydekker, R. 1900. Living Races of Mankind: A Popular Illustrated Account of the Customs, Habits, Pursuits, Feasts and Ceremonies of the Races of Mankind Throughout the World. Volumes 1 & 2, Hutchinson & Co, London. Johnston-Lavis, H. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1895. Eozoonal structure of the ejected blocks of Monte Summa. Science Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society, Series 2, 5, 259– 286. Johnston-Lavis, H. J. & Gregory, J. W. 1895a. Eozoon and the Monte Somma Blocks. Natural Science, 5, 403–404. Renwick, J. & Gregory, J. W. 1907. The Loch Lomond moraines. Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow, 13, 45– 55. Scott-Elliot, G. F. & Gregory, J. W. 1895. The Geology of Mount Ruwenzori and some adjoining regions of equatorial Africa. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 51, 669–680. Smith, A. D. 1897. Through Unknown African Countries. Appendix E by J. W. Gregory, ‘Note on Dr Donaldson Smith’s Geological Collection. Edward Arnold, London. Weir, J., Currie, E. D., Latham, M. & Gregory, J. W. 1929. Jurassic fossils from Jubaland, East Africa, collected by V. G. Glenday and the Jurassic Geology of Somaliland by J. Weir with descriptions of Echinoidea by Dr E. D. Currie and of Corals by Mary Latham. Introduction by J. W. Gregory. Monograph of the Geology Department of The Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, 3. Wyllie, B. N. K. & Smellie, W. R. 1925. The collection of Fossils and Rocks from Somaliland made by B. N. K. Wyllie and W. R. Smellie. With an account by them of the Geology of part of Somaliland, an Introduction– the Geology of Somaliland and its relations to the Great Rift Valley by J. W. Gregory (pp. 1– 7) and descriptions of the Collections by E. D. Currie, W. N. Edwards, J. W. Gregory (Fossil Corals, pp. 22– 45), A. T. Neilson, R. B. Newton, L. F. Spath & J. Weir. Monographs of the Geology Department of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University, 1.

Appendix 2 List of books published by Professor J. W. Gregory

Second editions not listed. All single authored unless otherwise noted. All listed in Appendix 1.

1893. Tables for the Determination of the Rock-Forming Minerals by F. Loewinson-Lessing. Translated from the Russian by J. W. Gregory with a chapter on the Petrological Microscope by Prof. Grenville A. J. Cole. Macmillan, 55pp. 1896. The Great Rift Valley. John Murray, London, 422pp. 1896. The Jurassic Bryozoa. Catalogues of Fossils in the British Museum (Natural History), 239pp. 1899. The Cretaceous Bryozoa. Vol. 1. Ditto, 457pp. 1899. The Jurassic Fauna of Cutch; the Corals of Cutch. Palaeontologica Indica. 223pp. 1900. Hutchinson, H. N., Gregory, J. W. & Lydekker, R.1900. Living Races of Mankind: A Popular Illustrated Account of the Customs, Habits, Pursuits, Feasts and Ceremonies of the Races of Mankind Throughout the World. Volume 1, 288pp; 2, 289–584. Hutchinson & Co, London. 1901. The Foundation of British East Africa. H. Marshall & Son, London, 267pp. 1903. The Austral Geographies, Classes ii, iii, iv, v, and vi. Five vols; 46, 48, 116, 112, & 144pp. Whitcombe & Tombs, London & Melbourne. 1903. The Teaching of Geography. Whitcombe & Tombs, London & Melbourne, 50pp. 1903. The Geography of Victoria: Historical, Physical & Political. Whitcombe & Tombs, London & Melbourne, 290pp. 1904. The Climate of Australasia in Reference to its Control by the Southern Ocean. Whitcombe & Tombs, London & Melbourne, 96pp. 1905. The Mount Lyell Mining Field, Tasmania: With Some Account of the Geology of Other Pyritic Ore Bodies. Australian Institute of Mining Engineers, Melbourne, 172pp. 1906. The Dead Heart of Australia. A Journey Around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 1901– 2 With Some Account of the Lake Eyre Basin and the Flowing Wells of Central Australia. John Murray, London, 384pp. 1908. Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative. Blackie, Glasgow, 305pp. 1909. The Cretaceous Bryozoa, Vol. 2. Catalogues of Fossils in the British Museum (Natural History), 346pp. 1909. Geology. Dent Scientific Primer, Dent, 140pp. 1912. The Making of the Earth. (Home University Library Series), Williams & Norgate, London, 256pp. 1913. The Nature and Origin of Fiords. John Murray, London, 542pp.

1915. Geology of Today: A Popular Introduction in Simple Language. Seeley, Service & Co., London, 328pp. 1916. Australia. Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature, 90. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 156pp. 1918. Geology of Mesopotamia and its Borderlands. The Geographical Section of the Naval Intelligence Department, Admiralty. H. M. Stationery Office, 116pp. 1921. The Rift Valleys and Geology of East Africa: An Account of the Origin & History of the Rift Valleys of East Africa & their Relation to the Contemporary Earth-Movements which Transformed the Geography of the World. With Some Account of the Prehistoric Stone Implements, Soils, Water Supply & Mineral Resources of the Kenya Colony. Seeley, Service & Co., London, 499pp. [Over 400 pages by Gregory] 1922. Evolution of the Essex Rivers and of the Lower Thames. Benham & Co., Colchester, 68pp. 1923. Gregory, J. W. & Gregory, C. J. To the Alps of Chinese Tibet: An Account of a Journey of Exploration up to and Among the Snow-Clad Mountains of the Tibetan Frontier. Seeley, Service & Co., London, 321pp. 1925. The Menace of Colour: A Study of the Difficulties due to the Association of White & Coloured Races, with an Account of Measures Proposed for their Solution, and Special Reference to White Colonisation in the Tropics. Seeley, Service & Co., London, 264pp. 1928. Elements of Economic Geology. Methuen & Co., London, 312pp. 1928. Human Migration and the Future: A Study of the Causes, Effects and Control of Migration. Seeley, Service & Co., London, 218pp 1929. Earthquakes and Volcanoes. Benn’s Sixpenny Library, No. 97. Ernest Benn, London, 80pp. 1929. Gregory, J. W. (Editor & contributor). The Structure of Asia. Methuen, London, 227pp. 1930. Gregory, J. W., Woodward, A. S., Watts, W. W. & Seward, A. C. From Meteorite to Man; the Evolution of the Earth. Forum Series 11. Watts & Co., London, 58pp. 1931. Dalradian Geology: The Dalradian rocks of Scotland and their Equivalents in Other Countries. Methuen & Co., London, 188pp. 1931. (With B. H. Barrett) General Stratigraphy. Methuen & Co., 285pp. 1932. The Story of the Road from the Beginning Down to A.D. 1931. A. Maclehose, London, 312pp. 33 books totalling c. 6500 pages single-authored & c. 1500 pages jointly authored.

B. E. Leake, University of Cardiff ([email protected]) Leake, B. E. The Life and Work of Professor J. W. Gregory FRS (1864–1932): Geologist, Writer and Explorer. Geological Society, London, Memoirs, 34, 225. 0435-4052/11/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2011. DOI: 10.1144/M34.App02

Index Page numbers in italics refer to Figures. Page numbers in bold refer to Tables. A Treatise on Zoology 49 abrasion, defined 147 abstracting scientific literature 63 Academy of Science, Halle 171 accident in Tasmania 86 Aden, Gulf of 63 Africa anthropology interests 58 exploration 4 first interests in 2 see also British East Africa, Angola, Libya, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia Africa-India correlations 40 African Rift Valley 1, 74, 159– 161, 174, 189–190, 212 1892– 3 expedition 19–21 1893 expedition 23– 27 1919 expedition 159 book 40, 159 Ahmed, Zin-ud-din 156, 157 alcohol abstinence 5, 102, 107, 150, 211 Aletsch Glacier 37 Allison, Archibald 199 Alpine Club 30 Alps 39, 74, 160, 174, 212 see also Cottian Alps Ambrym Island 156 America see USA American Association of Petroleum Geologists 187 ammonite work 85 Amundsen, Roald 181 Anderson, J. G. C. 193 Andre´e, Salomon August (balloonist) 44, 45, 46 Andrews, Charles William 57–58 aneroid barometer 85 Angola travel 125, 139, 143–144, 212 Antarctic expedition (1901) 48, 65 financial arrangements 66, 77 involvement 65– 66, 67–68 publications 112 resignation from 68–69 review 70 anthropology father of 161 interests in 30, 58–59, 84, 87, 90, 175 archaeology interests 195, 212 Archaeopneustes abruptus 13 Arctic Ocean 47, 74 Arran 151 Arrhenius, Svante August 122 Asteroidea 57 artesian water 90, 148, 181 Asia, synthesis of structure 173– 174, 212 assessment of achievements 73–74, 96– 97, 211–215 Asteroida 57 Athenaeum 139, 155 Atlantic Ocean cruise 56 history 144, 212 Presidential address 73, 187, 188– 190 Atlantic Ocean cruise 56 Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science 81, 86–87 Australia 1900– 1904 stay 61–63, 77– 98 1909 trip 111, 127–128 1914 trip 139, 147–149 echinoid work 12, 13 general geographical interests 117, 120–121 mining 84– 86, 94, 112 paper on immigration 139– 140 travel 212 see also Melbourne University also Victoria Australian Institute of Mining Engineers 81, 85 awards 15, 73, 102, 158, 171, 193

Ayrton, Edith 126 Ayrton, Edward Nugent 126 Ayrton, William Edward 126 Bailey, Edward Battersby 107, 124, 173, 193, 198, 199 Ballarat East Goldfield 84, 94, 116 Banda Arc 213 Barbados echinoid papers 13, 33–34, 74 map 35 subsidence and uplift 12, 34– 35, 190 Barbour, George Brown 174 Barents, Wilhelm 44 Baringo, Lake 19, 23, 25, 26, 29, 195 Barnett, S. A. 99 Baron, Richard 33 Barrett, Benjamin Hilton 163, 182, 193, 194 Barrow, George 124, 172 Bartholomew, Arthur 77 Bassetts (Chaplin family home, Little Baddow, Essex) 196 early days 37, 38, 62, 66, 67, 102 Glasgow days 109, 112, 133, 136, 137, 150, 156, 172, 193 Bather, Francis Arthur 11, 12, 16, 40, 49, 50, 181 Bendigo mining district 115 Bendigo Mining Science Society 85 Benguella see Angola Bent, Thomas 95, 96 Berkey, George 174 Bernard, Henry Meyners 50 bestman at wedding 149 Biblical quotations 136, 172 Bicavea rotaformis 116 bicycling exploits 151, 164, 166 Bigsby Medal (GSL) 4, 102 bipolarity theory 70 Birkbeck Institution 6 birth date 1 Black, Joseph 100 Blackman, Vernon Herbert 56 Blanford, William Thomas 43, 73 Bonney, Thomas George 14, 29, 32, 40, 47, 51, 58, 73, 99, 123, 155, 214 books and textbooks vii, 1, 9, 117, 193, 225 African Rift Valley 30, 40, 41, 43, 67, 84, 87–88, 159, 174 Australia 140, 214 Dalradian Geology 173, 198– 199 Earthquakes and Volcanoes 141, 197–198 Essex rivers 172 From Meteorite to Man 197 General Stratigraphy 194, 198 Geographical Readers 85, 111, 176 Geography, Structural, Physical and Comparative 121–122, 176, 214 Geology (Dent Scientific Primer Series) 128– 129 Geology of Mesopotamia and its Borderlands 155 Geology of Today 150 Human Migration and the Future 180 Imperial Geography for New Zealand Schools 85, 94, 111 Livingstone as an Explorer 149 Mount Lyell mining field 86, 94, 97, 111, 114 Tables for the determination of the Rock-Forming Minerals 16–17 The Ballarat East Gold-Field 94, 97 The Climate of Australasia 87 The Dead Heart of Australia 88–90, 97, 111, 215 The Elements of Economic Geology 106, 179, 193, 212 The Foundation of British East Africa 87– 88, 214 The Geography of Victoria 214 The Great Rift Valley 40, 43, 159, 212 The Making of the Earth 142– 143 The Menace of Colour 140, 175 The Nature and Origin of Fiords 144 The Rift Valleys and Geology of East Africa 159 The Story of the Road 198, 214

228

books and textbooks vii (Continued) The Structure of Asia 155, 173, 194, 197 The Teaching of Geography 91, 214 To the Alps of Chinese Tibet 169 Bosnia 140 Boswell, Percy George Hamnall 54, 167, 171, 172, 182, 211, 213 Bothroyd, T. W. 176 boulder clay 12, 165, 166, 172, 211, 212 Boulton, William Savage 100, 149 British Antarctic Expedition (1901) vii, 65–71 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) 16 Committees 51, 149, 166, 173 meetings 111 Australia 137, 147–148 Bath 7 Birmingham 146 Bristol 51–52, 195 Dublin 117 Dundee 147 Glasgow 173 Ipswich 51 Leicester 112, 114, 139 Liverpool 173 London 195 Manchester 147, 149 Newcastle-upon-Tyne 149 Oxford 99 Portsmouth 140, 147 Sheffield 113, 139, 147 South Africa 113, 195 Southampton 173, 187 Toronto 114, 163, 173 Winnipeg 111, 127 York 112, 114 membership 51, 113 President of Section C & E 112, 113, 114, 163, 173, 195, 211 British Astronomical Association (West of Scotland Branch) 149, 177 British East Africa (Kenya) 25, 159– 161, 178, 212 books 30, 40, 41, 43, 67, 84, 87– 88 expedition 23– 27 papers 29, 63 British Museum of Natural History see Natural History Museum British Waterworks Association 181 broadcasting 181, 211 Broken Hill ore body 96, 112 Bromehead, Cyril Edward Nowgill 172 brothers-in-law Henry Jarries Nicholson 37, 62, 67 John Ward Young 37 Brouwer, Hendrik Albertus 174 Brown, Henry Yorke Lyell 89 Bruce, William Speirs 149 bryozoa 148, 212, 214 Catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa 58, 61, 67, 73, 112, 116– 117, 118, 119 Catalogue of Jurassic Bryozoa 39, 50 Monograph 31 BSc 6, 19, 99 burial 206 Burma, visit 163, 167, 212 Burton, John Balfour 80 Burton (Wirral) 1 Calcutta University Commission 156 –158 Caledonian correlation 187 Cameron, Ewan Hugh 80 Canada travel 111, 114, 212 visits 163, 173 canoeing 49–50 Cantor Lectures 112, 115 carbon dioxide and climate 122 Carboniferous glaciation 187 Caribbean Islands 56–57 Carlisle-Solway Basin 146–147 Carruthers, William 29 Catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa 58, 61, 63, 67, 112, 116– 117, 118, 119 Catalogue of Jurassic Bryozoa 39, 50 Cauldron Snout 40

INDEX

Cenozoic, uplift in England 32–33, 74 Cephalopods 46, 144 Chamberlain, Thomas Chrowder 122 Chaplin, Ayrton (father-in-law) 3, 37, 91, 94 Chaplin, Edith (mother-in-law) 37, 67, 70, 91, 94 letters to 81, 82, 91, 94 Chaplin, Matilda Charlotte 126 Chaplin, Ursula (sister-in-law) 62 Chapman, Frederick 32, 127, 182 Charlesworth, John Kaye 165 Chemical Society lecture 179 Cherry, Thomas 148 children see daughter also sons China lectures on 176 travel 139, 148, 212 see also Tibet china clay, legal status 49, 125 Christmas Island 57–58 cinema, value of 146 cirques, views on 212 City of London College 6 City of London College Science Society 11 Clarke, George Sydenham 99 climate change and constancy 1 interests in 122, 173, 212, 213 lectures 86–87, 150 Clyde River drainage 142 Clypeasters 51 coal reserves, management of 142, 163–164 coast type classification 144– 145 Cobden Club Prize 7 Cole, Grenville 6, 8, 11, 13– 14, 16, 17, 19, 32, 113, 137 Coleman, Arthur Philemon 114 Colorado School of Mines 111 Committee on Mineral Resources within the Empire 155 Conjoint Board of Scientific Studies 155 continental drift theory, opposition to 1, 55, 73, 163, 187– 191, 195, 213 Conway, Ted 43 Conway, William Martin 29, 44, 94, 158 Spitzbergen expedition leader 43–46 Cooke, J. H. 12 cooking skills 3 copper mines visited 94, 114 –115, 127 corals 63, 73, 163, 179, 194, 212, 214 Egyptian collection 50, 112 Christmas Island collection 57–58 Kutch fauna 31, 53, 54, New Guinea 139, 150–151 reefs, interest in 11, 13, 16 Scottish Carboniferous 142 West Indies collection 33– 34 corries 141, 151 Corrieyairack Road 151 corrosion, defined 147 Cottian Alps 14, 15, 16, 17, 32, 74 Coverley-Price, Arthur Victor 201, 202, 205, 206 Cox, Leslie Reginald 109 Crick, George Charles 11 Croatia (Dalmatia), visits 139, 140 Cryptocoenia lort-phillipsii 40 Currie, Ethel Dobbie 108, 109, 163 Cutch see Kutch Cuthbert Peek Award (RGS) 29, 99, 158 Cyphaspis spryi 84 Cyrenaica papers 147 travel 111, 125– 127 Cystechinus crassus 12 Dalmatia lectures on 141 visits 139, 140, 212 Dalradian 124, 139, 167, 198 –199, 212, 213 Danbury Gravels 150 Darwin, Charles Robert 11, 37, 51 Darwin, Leonard 68 Darwinian evolution 176

INDEX

daughter (Ursula) early life 43, 66, 133, 156 housekeeping 136, 167, 193 travelling companion 87, 137, 147, 148, 163, 173, 177 typist and secretary 161, 172 daughter-in-law (Marion) 201 Davies, William 11 Dawson, William 32 de Bo¨ckh, Hugo 173 Dean of Faculty 139 death 1, 205 Deccan Plateau lava 160, 189, 190 Deer, William Alexander 114 degrees see BSc; DSc; LLD denudation 147, 179 deserts, paper on 148 Desmoceras jonesi 85 dessication theory 85 Devon, visits 50 Dickson, Frederick, fraud 66, 77, 95 dinner parties 136 Dixon, James Stedman 107 Doctor of Laws (Liverpool) 171, (Glasgow) 193 Double, Ivan Sydney 172 Douglas, Henry Percy 173 dowsing 181 drowning 205 drumlins 142, 164, 166, 176, 211, 212 DSc London 12, 19, 29, 51 Melbourne 77 Du Toit, Alexander Logie 148 Duff, M. B. 126 Duncan, Peter Martin 12, 51 earth origin, talk on 149 Ecca Conglomerate 32 Echinocystis 50 echinoids 12, 39, 50, 51, 63, 73, 112, 144, 148, 179, 212, 214 Egyptian collection 50, 112 Kutch fauna 31 Maltese fauna 51 Echinothuridae 50 eclipse of sun 166 Eder, M. D. 126 Edgeworth David, Tannatt William 51, 90, 112, 148, 149 Edinburgh City Business Club 195 Edinburgh Geological Society 124– 125 education beliefs about 155, 196, 214 schooling 2 –3, 5, 96 university degree 6 E´lie be Beaumont, Jean-Baptiste 196 Elles, Gertrude L. 169, 199 employment farming 5 wool trade 5 see also Glasgow University; Melbourne University; Natural History Museum energy studies 163–164 Eomontipora harrisoni 194 Eozoon canadense 7, 13, 211 erosion, defined 147 esker formation 11, 47, 141, 164–165, 212 Essex rivers 172 Etheridge, Robert 11 Etna, articles on 181 Eugenics Education Society 175 evangelical tradition 2 Evans, John William 198 evolution, writings on 11 examining work 40, 49, 61, 81, 91, 99 exocylism 73 expert witness 49, 125 Eyre, Lake, expedition 88–90, 111, 112, 122 Falconer, John Downie 117 Faraday Society lecture 179 father (John James) 1, 2, 3, 5 father-in-law (Ayrton Chaplin) 3, 37, 206

Ferguson, David 146 Ferrar, H. T. 70 field excursions, love of vii, 16, 80, 102, 106, 107, 135, 141, 164, 173, 214 Finckh, Alfred Edmund 51 Fink, Theodore 77 fiords, origin of 144–145, 212 Fisher, Andrew 140 Fitzgerald, W. W. A. 29 fjords see fiords Fletcher, Lazarus 56, 73 Flett, John Smith 56, 145, 177, 193, 211 Flower, William Henry 14, 19, 29 fluvial-glacial problems 172 Fly River Eocene corals 150–151 Forbes, Douglas 66, 82 Forbes, Henry Ogg 58 foreign language skills 2, 6, 9, 12, 14, 41, 179, 187, 213 Forrest, John 117 fossil collecting 45, 47 Fowler, T. W. 84 France, visits 3, 49, 112, 139, 171, 212 fur seals 40, 212 Gallois Medal 171 Gardiner, John Stanley 195 Garwood, Edmund Johnston 29, 43, 45, 103, 183 Geike, Archibald 49, 51, 61, 62, 65, 73 correspondence 77, 99, 100, 107, 111, 152 obituary 181 President of Geological Society 13, 15, 123, 124 geography general interests 117 textbooks written 91–92, 117, 121–122, 225 Geological Society of America 13, 14 Geological Society of Australasia 81 Geological Society of Belgium 171 Geological Society of Glasgow 111, 193 field trips 102, 123, 141 lectures and papers 112, 123, 140, 141, 142, 145, 164, 166–167, 189 Presidency 123, 124, 140, 141, 142, 155 Geological Society of London activities 34, 37, 111 anniversary dinner 39 Bigsby Medal 4, 102 centennial dinner 112 Council 32 Dining Club 38, 182 Fellowship application 7, 8 papers 12, 37, 40, 47, 48, 50, 63, 67, 84, 86, 146–147, 172, 195 President 11, 181– 182, 193, 212 Presidential Addresses vii, 144, 163, 170, 187, 188–190, 190–191, 193, 214 Geological Society of South Africa 158–159 Geological Survey of Kenya 176 Geological Survey of Victoria vii, 1 Directorship 80–81, 139, 214– 215 new publications 85, 116 resignation 92– 93, 96 Geologists’ Association 7, 111 Council 16, 19 excursions 16, 141 papers 12, 14, 15 geology, first interests in 4 geomorphology, interest in 27, 35, 61, 86, 139, 163 geothermal power, views on 164 Germany, visits 14, 139, 140, 195, 212 geyserite 127 geysers 91 Gillespie, William 125 glaciation and glacial features, interests in 26, 212, 213 aspects of climate change 11– 12, 29, 114, 173, 187 other writings on Antarctica 70 Britain and Ireland 112, 123, 151, 164– 166 Dalmatia 141 Mounts Kenya and Ruwenzori 32, 38, 74 Spitzbergen 46, 47, 74 Tasmania 86 Victoria 84 see also eskers also kames

229

230

Glasgow earthquake 140–141 home 133–135 home life 135– 137 International Kinematograph Exhibition 146 see also Geological Society of Glasgow Glasgow Rotary Club 176 Glasgow University 100–102, 101, 104 Chair of Geology 102–104 appointment vii, 1, 70, 95, 99– 100 retirement 193 Dean of Science Faculty 139 early research activity 111–113 Gregory Building 206, 207 Gregory Lecture Theatre 104 honorary degree 193 mining degrees 107– 108 Monograph series and publications 108– 109, 150, 163 teaching programme 104– 107, 135, 211 Glasgow University Company of Honourable Alchemysts 149 Glasgow University Egyptian Research Students Association 110, 150 Glasgow University Engineering Society 112 Glasgow University Geological Society 151–152, 167 Glasgow University Jewish Society 109, 149 gold and gold mining 212 lectures on 112, 115, 116 mines visited 85, 87, 113, 127 Gondwanaland 188 Goodchild, John George 6, 7, 8, 100, 124–125 Goodrich, Edwin Stephen 49 Gordon, William Thomas 172 Gould, Charles 86 Gowers, William Richard 29, 73 grandchildren Ann Catharine vii, 201 Elizabeth 201 Jane Rosalind vii, 201 Martin John 201 grandfather maternal (James) 1 paternal (William) 1 grandmother, maternal (Dorothy) 1 Grant, O. 58 Grayson, Henry Joseph 77, 84 Great Lake Rudolph Expedition 19–21 Great Rift Valley Expedition 23– 27 Green, Alexander Henry 179 Green, William Lowthian 52, 53 Greenock Philosophical Society 176 Gregory & Prentice (wool merchants) 1 Gregory Rift Valley (Kenya) 21, 206 Gregoryceras 207 gregoryite 206 guano 125 Gu¨nther, Robert Theodore 50 Haarmann’s Oscillation Theory 196 Haig, Herbert de Haga 33 Hall, Arthur Lewis 182 Hamilton, Richard Vesey 65 Hardwicke’s Science Gossip 7, 8, 16 Harker, Alfred 144 Harrison, John Burchmore 13 Harrison, John Vernon 179, 194, 209 Hartog, Philip Joseph 156, 157 Hatch, Frederick Henry 113, 155 Hatfield Robert 155 Heathcotian 85 Heliopora caerula 63 Herbertson, Andrew John 91 Herries, Robert Stansfield 39 Hicks, Henry 50 Higgins, Henry Bournes 95 Himalaya visit 157, 212 Hinde, George J. 73 Hinxman, Lionel Wordsworth 102 Hobley, Charles William 23, 159, 215 Holdich, Thomas Hungerford 158 holidays 49, 102, 111, 112, 139, 140, 149, 166, 171 Holloway, George Thomas 155

INDEX

Holmes, Arthur 189, 191 Holroyd, Henry North 116 homes and homelife childhood 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 15– 16 lodgings 37 marital 37, 38, 62 Australia 82 Glasgow 1– 9, 133–135, 134 retirement 193, 196 Honeyman-Gillespie lectureship 125 honeymoon 37 honorary degrees 171, 173, 196, 201 Horne, John 101, 102, 112, 123, 128, 141 Hornell, W. W. 156 horse riding 3 Howarth, Henry Hoyte 99 Howchin, Walter 173 Howitt, Alfred William 80 Huggins, William 69 Hull, Edward 30 human migration, opinions on 180 Hume, William F. 100 Hunter, William 100 Hunterian Museum 13, 86, 100, 101, 102– 103, 108– 109, 123, 125, 163, 170, 173 Huxley, Thomas Henry 39– 40 hydropower, views on 164 immigration and race, views on 140 Inca ruins 202 India Calcutta University Commission 156–158, 197 Kutch faunal studies 51, 52, 53, 54, 74 travel 212 writings on Eocene corals 194 Indian Ocean, theory of formation 33, 159– 161, 160, 161, 189 Institute of Mining & Metallurgy, London 87, 111, 112, 115, 116, 179, 182, 195, 201 Institute of Mining Engineers 111, 113, 141 Institution of Water Engineers 181 International Geological Congress meetings 11, 14, 112, 122, 139, 173 International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems 195 Ireland, esker study 11, 164– 165 iron ore reserves 114, 139, 142 isostasy 196 Italy, visits 3, 139, 140 Jack, R. L. 90 Jamieson, Leander Starr 29 Jeffreys, Harold 187, 189 Jehu, Thomas J. 100 Jewish family connections 126 Jewish refugee colony 109–110, 143, 149 Jewish Territorial Organization 126, 127 Johnston, Harry 29 Johnston-Lavis, Henry James 13 Jordon, River 30, 31 Jørgensen, Eugen Honoratus 46 journalism 5, 30, 40–41, 84, 88, 90, 96, 124, 141, 181, 212, 215 Jubilee Singers 2 Judd, J. W. 6, 7, 12, 13, 37, 51, 61, 73, 99, 103, 112, 137 Jukes-Brown, Alfred 13 Kalgoorlie gold mine 87 kames 141, 165, 166 kangaroo fossils 84 Keep Australia White Campaign 140, 175 Keewatin rocks 173 Keith, Arthur 195 Keith Prize 102, 171 Kempe, Alfred Bray 67, 68, 70 Kendall, Percy Fry 47, 100, 147, 164, 165– 166, 165, 173 Kennedy, William Quarrier 201, 210 Kenya see British East Africa Kenya, Mount 19, 25, 26–27, 26, 29, 30 papers on 32, 63, 74, 194 kenyte 63, 70, 74 Kerr, John Graham 100, 102, 125, 163 Kingdon-Ward, Francis 176

INDEX

Kinghorn, William 108 Kingsley, Mary Henrietta 29, 41 Kipling, Rudyard 29, 56 Kitson, Albert Ernest 209 Kupferschiefer 195 Kutch, Jurassic faunal studies 51, 52, 53, 54, 74 Lake, Philip 100 Lamont, Archie 210 Lamplugh, George William 161 Lankester, Edwin Ray 49, 73, 99 Lapworth, Charles 61, 62, 73, 82, 115, 124, 141, 196 laterite, origins 116 Latham, Charles 107 Latham, M. H. 109, 194 Laurentian studies 15 Leach, J. A. 176 lecturing and teaching to students 9 Glasgow University 104– 106 Melbourne University 86–87 outside of university 50, 91, 109– 110, 115, 176, 211, 214 Lees, George Martin 173 legal profession, interest in 49, 125 Leighton, Thomas 31, 33 Leslie, T. N. 113 Libya, travel 111, 112, 125–127, 212 life, origins of 149 Lindromaster antiqua 57 Lister, Joseph 100 literary evenings 15– 16 lithophyses 15 Little Baddow (Essex) see Bassetts (Chaplin family home) Liverpool Biological Society 11 Liverpool Geological Society 158–159 Liverpool University, Doctor of Laws 171 Liversidge, Archibald 147 Livingstone, David 149, 150 LLD 171, 176, 193 Lobelia gregorii 29, 206 Loch Lomond Moraines 112 lochs, origin of 145, 212 lode terminology 116 Loewinson-Lessing, Franz Youlievich 16 Loftus, William Kennet 51 Longonot 30 Longstaff, Llewellyn Wood 65 Lugard, John Dealtry 29 Lyell, Charles 123, 196 Lyell Fund award 15, 99, 214 Lyons, Henry George 50, 117, 158 MacAlister, Donald 117, 193 McArthur, George 81, 86 McCallien, William John 167, 177, 193, 198 McCoy, Frederick 61, 77, 78 Macdonald, George 108 Macedon, Mount 84 MacGregor, William 150 McGurk, Alastair Angus Archibald 90 Mackie, William 100 Mackinder, Halford 26, 63 McKinnon-Wood, Meta (Eileen) 109, 194, 201, 205, 206 McMahon, C. A. 73 Madden, John 61 Madrepora 56– 57 Mahony, Daniel James 77, 81 Major, Charles Immanuel Forsyth 56 malaria attacks 23, 27, 35, 45, 211 Mallotus villosus 173 Malta, echinoid work 12, 51, 74 Malvern Hills 7 Manson, Patrick 35 Markham, Clements Robert 61, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70 Marks, Phoebe Sarah 126 Marr, John Edward 61, 102 marriage 37, 211 see also homes and homelife marsupials, study of bones 89 Martin, Charles James 33, 77, 83, 99, 143, 147 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 111

231

Masson, David Orme 148 Masson, Duncan 201 matriculation 6 Maude, Frederick S. 155 Maufe, Herbert Brantwood 182 Maxwell, Herbert 172 Melbourne University (Australia) 78, 79 Chair of Geology appointment 1, 61 resignation 91– 92 Geology Department 77 arrives in 62, 77 contributions to 96–97 fieldwork 77, 80 Gregory Lecture Theatre 207 publication work 87– 90 survey work 81 work programme 84–87 honorary degree 77 Melbourne School of Mines proposal 77–78 memorial tablet (Woodham Walter church) 206 Mennell, Frederick Philip 179 Methuen, General Editor 193 metric system, opposition to 116 Metropolitan Scientific Association 11 microscopy, interest in 16 Middleton in Teesdale 40 migration, opinions on 180 Milankovic´, Milutin 122 Mill, Hugh Rowland 55, 67 Millestroma 50 Milne, John 141, 196 Milner, Alfred 7 Milngavie remnant blocks 142 mineral, defined 125 mineralogy 16 mining consultancy 116 mining engineering, training interests 66–67, 111, 114, 115 mining geology, interests in 77–78, 84, 114–116, 139, 195, 212, 213, 215 Mining Institute of Scotland 125, 147 Mongolia, travel 139 monographs 31, 108–109, 163, 212, 225 Montessori education 2 Montiporid corals 194 –195 Montlivaltia cornutiformis 55 Morley Davies, Arthur 6, 17, 19, 182 Morte Slate 50 mother (Jane) 1, 1– 2 death 5– 6, 37 illness 37 influence of vii, 2, 3, 4, 211 mother-in-law (Edith Chaplin) 37, 62, 67, 70, 206 Mount Bischoff tin mine 115 Mount Cudgewa tin-field 887 Mount Lyell Mining Field 86, 94, 96, 111, 114 Mount Morgan mine 127 mountain building, talk on 150 Muir, John Ramsay 156 Mukharji, Ashutosh 156 Murray, George Robert Milne 56 Murray John 12, 65, 70 Murray Reginald Augustus Frederick 80 Murray, S. 90 museum work see Natural History Museum museums, support for 176 Mushketov, Dmitrii Ivanovich 174 Myanmar see Burma Nansen, Fridtjof 45, 65 Natural History Museum 1, 50, 63 appointment 11 bryozoa, work on 148, 212, 214 Catalogue of Cretaceous Bryozoa 58, 61, 67, 73, 112, 116–117, 118, 119 Catalogue of Jurassic Bryozoa 31, 39, 50 Caribbean trip 56– 57 frustrations 49 resignation 61 Spitzbergen collecting 46 corals, work on 63, 73, 163, 179, 194, 212, 214 Egyptian collection 50, 112

232

Natural History Museum (Continued) Christmas Island collection 57–58 Kutch fauna 31, 53, 54, reefs, interest in 11, 13, 16 West Indies collection 33– 34 echinoids, work on 12, 39, 50, 51, 63, 73 Egyptian collection 50, 112 Kutch fauna 31 Maltese fauna 51 Natural Science: A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress 16, 40 Neilson, Agnes T. 102 –103, 109, 163, 180, 193 Neoceratodus gregoryi 206 Neolithic canoes 176 New Guinea corals 139, 150–151 New Hebrides volcanic eruption 156 New Zealand visit 86– 87 volcanic line 68, 70 New Zealand Institute 171 newspaper articles see journalism newspapers, for family home 135 Newton, Richard Bullen 11, 127 Newton, E. T. 73 Nicholson, Henry Jarries (brother-in-law) 62, 67 nickel ores 114 nickname (Jack) 1, 3, 37 Nile, River 29, 30, 31 Nordensk, G. 43 Norfolk Broads 16 Norman, J. R. 23 North London School of Music, Art and Science 9 Northey, Edward 159 Norway, travel 111, 212 Notasaphus fergusoni 85 Nyanza (Victoria), Lake 30 obituary for Gregory 56 obituary notices written 14, 30, 124, 150, 181 Obsidian Cliffs 15 ocean basins opinions on 12, 13, 51– 52, 74, 144, 213 see also Atlantic; Indian; Pacific oil reserves, shortages predicted 142, 163–164, 166 Okey, Prof. Thomas 3 Ophiuroidea 50 ores and economic geology 85, 96, 139, 179–180, 193, 214 osars 165 Otaria ursine 40 Oxford University, Chair application 49 Pacific Ocean history 144, 212 Presidential address 73, 187, 190–191 palaeontology 213 see also named fossils Palestine 195, 197 Paloediscus 50 Palorchestes azael 84 Panama closing 74 papers vii, 1, 9, 212 East Africa 29, 32, 40 first publication 11 palaeontological topics 11, 12, 13, 57 petrology 14, 40 see also Geological Society of Glasgow; Geological Society of London, Geologists’ Association; Royal Geographical Society; Royal Society of London Parallel Roads of Glen Roy 102 Parallelodon edgertonianus 40 Peach, Benjamin Neeve 101, 102, 112, 123, 128 Peacock, Alexander James 80, 93 Pele´e, Mount eruption 84 Perry, John 114 personality 1, 4– 5, 37, 55–56, 97, 105, 135, 136, 211, 214 Peru expedition 1, 201– 206 Pestalozzi education system 2, 3 petroleum, organic origins of 116 petrological microscope see microscopy Phonographic Quarterly Review 40– 41 petrology, interests in 13– 14, 74

INDEX

phonolites 70 phosphates 58, 125, 142 photographs vii, 3, 8, 24, 80, 81, 107, 151, 178, 181, 194, 202 physical features 2, 211 Picard, Leo 195 Pickering Collection of Pleistocene Mollusca 16 Pikes Peak Batholith 15 Pittman, Edward Fisher 77, 90, 96, 148 ‘Plan of the Earth’ 74 Plio-Pleistocene river systems 172 Polar Basin 47 political allegiances 2, 5, 120 Polmont kame 141 Polytremacis 62– 63 polyzoa 31 Portuguese West Africa see Angola potash reserves 142 Poulton, Edward Bagnall 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73 Prior, George Thurland 84 probate records 193 Protaster 12 provincialism, first recognized 51 Pseudogregoryceras 207 publications see Appendix Puffin Island 11 Quaker influences 1–2 quantitative palaeontology 73– 74 Quenstedt, Friedrich August 14 Rabot, M. C. 43 racial matters, interests in 111, 139– 140, 163, 173, 175– 176, 181, 195, 197, 211, 212, 214 radiolarian marls 12 Rait, Robert Sangster 193 Rand goldfield, blanket and conglomerate 115, 116, 123 Rationalist Society 3 reading, rapid 135 Reck, Hans 161 Red Sea 30, 161 Redmayne, Richard A. S. 115 Reed, Frederick Richard Cowper 169 religious education and family tradition 2, 136 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 111 research output, pre-Australia 73–74 retirement 193 review articles written 14, 26, 128, 177– 178, 201, 212 Reynolds, Sidney H. 100 Rhodes, Cecil John 29 Rhondda, Lord 155 Richardson, F. D. S. 173 rift valley lectures 166 in Palestine 195, 196 term first used 15, 19, 29 theory of formation 30, 31, 159 see also African Rift Valley river gravels 150 rock phosphate 125 Rodd, Francis James Rennell 195 Rogers, Henry Darwin 100, 124, 151– 152 Romanes, George John 11 Ross, William Macgregor 159 Rowe, Arthur Walton 116 rowing skills 2 Royal Geographical Society 19, 27, 34–35, 111, 121, 127, 159 Antarctic Expedition 32, 65, 68, 69 Great Rift Valley Expedition flag 27 lectures 112, 117, 139, 141, 145, 150, 171, 211 papers 29, 53, 54, 90, 217 Victoria Medal 158 Royal Geographical Society of Australia 158 Royal Institution of Great Britain 48, 112, 115, 145, 156, 211 Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow 102, 117, 139–140, 141, 145, 149, 163, 214 Royal School of Mines 6 Royal Scottish Geographical Society 117, 171, 176 Royal Society of Edinburgh 12, 102, 123– 124, 139, 166, 171 Royal Society of London Antarctic expedition 65, 68, 69, 73 Conversazione 43

INDEX

Council 155, 163 Fellowship vii, 73, 97, 212 funds coral research 51 papers 62, 63 presentation maps 77, 107 scientific literature catalogue 63 Tibet expedition lecture 169 War Committee 155 Royal Society of Victoria 81, 84, 85, 86, 87 Russell, Ann 3, 5 Russia, travel 139, 148, 212 Rutherford, Ernest 147 Rutley, Frank 6, 15, 13, 32 Ruwenzori, Mount 38, 74 Sadler, Michael Ernest 156 sailing interests 163, 177 sandwich courses, supporter of 115 Scandinavian overthrust 112, 140 Schistes Lustre´s 39, 40 Schuchert, Charles 189 Science Gossip 7, 8, 16 Science Progress 39, 112, 114, 139 schooling 2 –3, 5 Scotland field work 102, 123, 141, 195, 197 see also Dalradian Scott, Robert Falcon 66, 67, 69, 70 Scott-Elliot, George Francis 38 Scottish Association of Secondary Teachers 122 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition 146 Scottish Nationalism support 210 Scottish Ski Club 107, 139 sea-level change, interest in 53, 113, 122–123, 196 Seward, Albert Charles 11, 113, 149, 181, 182 sewing skills 3 Shackleton, Ernest Henry 107, 209 Shepard, Francis Parker 195 Sherborn, Charles Davies 23 Siberia, travel 148, 212 sideroplesite 123–124 Sikes, H. L. 159 Simpson, Edward Sydney 149 sisters Anne vii, 1, 19, 37, 67, 99 Eleanor (Nellie) vii, 37 Sjo¨gren, Stens Anders Hjalmar 139 Skeats, E. W. 149 skiing interests 107, 163 sleep pattern 135 Slousch, M. Nahum 126 Smellie, William Robert 108, 163, 167, 179 Smith, John 182 Smith, Adam 100 Smith, Arthur Donaldson 40 Smith Woodward, Arthur 8, 11, 14, 16, 49, 73, 90, 99, 100 Socie´te´ de Ge´ographie de Paris 171 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce 112 socio-political views 120, 180 Socotra 58 Soddy, Frederick 100 soil maps, Victoria 81 solar power, views on 164 Sollas, William Johnson 49, 51, 55, 128, 182 Solonastraea turonensis 51 solution, defined 147 Somaliland 63 Somerset, visits 50 sons Christopher John (Kit) vii, 201 early days 62, 66 Glasgow days 103, 106, 133, 136, 137, 156, 163, 171, 180, 193 travelling companion 164, 165, 166, 167 –168, 177 unnamed 49 South Africa gold mining report 113 travel 111 South Africa Strata Committee 147 South Georgia 146 South Place Ethical Society 195

233

Southern Rhodesia gold mining report 113 travel 111, 112 Spain, visits 3, 139, 163, 173, 212 Spath, Leonard Frank 46, 109, 144, 161, 167 Spencer, Walter Baldwin 77 spherulitic texture 14 Spitzbergen expedition 43–46, 74 sporting prowess 2, 3 stag night 38 Stamp, Laurence Dudley 172 Stanford, Bennett 19 Stanley, Henry Morton 29 starfish, Palaeozoic 57 statistics in palaeontology 51, 74 Stepney Grammar School 2 –3, 5, 37 Stepney Parliament 9 Stevens, Alexander 117, 177, 209 Stirling James 80 stone polygons 197 Subblefield, Cyril James 198 submarine troughs 195 Sudbury (Canada) nickel ores 114 Sudbury nickel ore 214 Suess, Franz Eduard 173 Eduard 56, 99 African Rift work 20, 23, 31 Gregory’s admiration for 52–53, 121, 123, 143, 144, 150, 174, 182, 187, 196, 213, 214 memorial 182 Suess, Lake 31 Sunday School 2 Swaledale visit 166 Sweden, travel 111, 112, 123, 139, 212 swimming skills 2, 3 Switzerland visits 3, 37, 140, 163, 171 Tana, River 27, 29 Tarnawiecki, M. Mariano C. 201, 202, 203, 205, 206 Tarr, Ralph Stockman 34 Tasmania visit 86 see also Mount Lyell mining field Taylor, John Ellor 16 teaching career commenced 9 Teall, (Jehu) Jethro Justinian Harris 39, 68, 123 tectonism, writings on 179 teetotaller 5, 102, 107, 150, 211 Teleki de Szek, Samuel 20 temperament see personality terminology, scientific 147 Tethys Ocean 188 tetrahedral theory 52, 53, 54, 55, 114, 122, 190, 196, 211, 212, 213 textbook writing see books and textbooks Thames Basin 172 Thomas, Henry Dighton 109 Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin) 33, 74, 100, 123, 124, 143 Tibet lectures 167 visit 163, 167– 170, 212 tidal power, views on 164 Ting, Ven Kiang 176, 182, 209 Tizard, Thomas Henry 65, 73 Toynbee Hall 7, 39, 40, 61, 99, 125 Toynbee Natural History Society 7, 16, 19 Toynbee Travellers Club 3 translation work 16 Traquair, Ramsay H. 124 travel, appetite for 1, 3, 212, 213 see under named countries Trevor-Battye, Aubyn Bernard Rochfort 43 trilobites 84, 85 Trotter, J. 126 tuberculosis (TB), effects on family 3, 5, 38, 171 Tyndall, John 30 Tyrrell, George Walter 103, 107, 151, 156 as Glasgow colleague 106, 123, 146, 149, 163, 173, 179, 183, 189, 193, 199, 211, 214 Tyrrell, Joseph Burr 181, 182

234

uniformitarianism 122 upbringing 2 uplift and drainage studies 74 USA, visits 14–15, 66–67, 111, 163, 175 valleys, origins of 151 Van Hise, Charles Richard 15 variation and statistical palaeontology 51 variolitic rock 14 vertebrate palaeontology 89–90 Victoria (Australia), life in 82–83, 91, 94 see also Melbourne Victoria Medal of RGS 158 Victorian Chamber of Mines 81 Villiers, C. H. viii, 19, 20, 21 Wager, Lawrence Rickard 114 Waldensian Gneiss 16, 17, 32, 74 Wales visits 11, 151 walking prowess 3–4, 11, 27, 211 Wallace, Samuel Williamson 95 war effort, support for 150 War Office (First World War) vii, 155 –156 water, plutonic 85, 213, 215 water divining 181 water supply, talk on 149 waterfalls study 140 Watt, James 100 wedding present 37 Wegener’s theory see continental drift Weir, John 109, 161, 163, 167, 173, 193 West, William Dixon 174 West Indies 33–34, 56–57, 73, 74, 84 Wharton, William 66 Whitechapel Museum 29, 43 Whittaker, William 54 wife (Adriana/Audrey) 38, 214

INDEX

as an artist 38, 57, 82, 82, 86, 92, 139 family life 126 Australia family life 66, 69, 80, 82, 84, 87, 88, 102 Bassetts (Essex) family life 38, 109, 112, 150, 156, 172 Glasgow family life 133, 134, 135, 136, 137 death and burial vii, 37, 206 health 1, 82, 90, 94–95, 133, 140, 193 holidays 56, 139, 140, 166, 171 pregnancies 43, 62 thimble collection 143, 148 will 62 Williams, S. 109 Willis, Bailey 195, 211, 215 wind power, views on 164 Woodham Walter church 37, 62, 201, 206 Woodward, Henry 11, 12, 40, 49, 61, 73 Woodward, Horace B. 73 wool trade employment 5 Wordie, James Mann 144, 167, 209 writing skills 1, 9 writing time 43, 57, 135, 158 Wyllie, Bryce Kerr Nairn 209 yacht purchase and trips 57, 163, 167, 177 Yellowstone Park 15 York Museum 31 Yosemite Valley 15, 29 Young, John 100, 108, 125 Zangwill, Edith 38 Zangwill, Israel 126, 143 Zeuglopleurus 12 Zeuglopleurus rowei 63 Zimbabwe see Southern Rhodesia Zoological Society of London 30, 31 Fellowship 11 papers 56 resignation 57, 63