Patrick Marshall

Patrick Marshall
Born	1869 Sapiston, Suffolk, England, UK
Died	Novemeber 1950 (aged 81)
Known for	first used the term "andesite line"
Awards	Hector Memorial Medal (1915) Hutton Medal (1917)
Scientific career
Fields	geology
Institutions	University of Canterbury University of Otago

Dr. Patrick Marshall (1869 - November 1950) was a geologist living in New Zealand. He was for over forty years an outstanding figure among New Zealand scientists, and was well known to geologists in many lands as a very versatile and productive investigator. His research was also devoted to zoology. He first used the term "andesite line" in 1912.

Biography

Born in 1869, he was the son of the Reverend John Hannath Marshall, M.A., of Sapiston, Suffolk, who, chiefly for reasons of health, brought his family to New Zealand in 1876, and settled at Kaiteriteri in the Nelson District. Reverend John Hannath Marshall died, however, in 1878, and his widow and family went back to England, where Patrick Marshall entered school in Bury St. Edmunds. In 1881 his family returned to New Zealand and resided at Wanganui, and in the Wanganui Collegiate School Patrick Marshall completed his secondary education. He entered Canterbury University College in 1889 and in 1892 gained the B.A. and B.Sc. degrees with the Senior Scholarship in Geology which he had studied under Professor Frederick Wollaston Hutton, F.R.S. In the following year he completed with high honours the M.A. course in Geology, working at the University of Otago under Professor George Henry Frederick Ulrich, completing his first research, a study of the "Tridymite-Trachyte of Lyttelton", which was published in 1894.

Research

Appointed Lecturer in Natural Science at Lincoln Agricultural College in 1893, his researches for a time were devoted chiefly to entomology. Marshall and Hutton were the New Zealand pioneers on the study of our Diptera…" Marshall took up the study of two very difficult families of the Diptera, the Mycetophilidae and the Cecidomyiidae. He described some sixty-one species, which have stood the test of time except for the names of six of them, three of which were preoccupied in other parts of the world, and three were synonyms of his own species, a remarkable record when one considers that Marshall worked isolated from literature and colleagues specialising in these families. His three papers on the Diptera were published in the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute for 1896 (Vol. 28) together with a fourth, a record of a migrant butterfly. His interests in Biology were maintained after he took up Geology as a profession, and we find him presenting a discussion on the "Effect of the Introduction of Exotic Plants and Animals into New Zealand" to the Fifth Pacific Science Congress in 1933, which was published in its Proceedings.

In 1896 he became Science Master at the Grammar School, Auckland, and resuming his interests in geological research, he studied the volcanic rocks of that region, completing a thesis, the majority of which is still unpublished, for which he was granted the D.Sc. degree.

In 1901 he became Lecturer-in-charge of the Department of Geology in the University of Otago and was elected Professor of Geology and Mineralogy there in 1908. Here he remained for sixteen years, a period of great activity in many directions. His physical strength which had been displayed by his successes on the football and cricket fields and on the tennis court, was now exercised in field geology and mountaineering. He was a very vigorous and successful teacher, active in University administration, both in the University of Otago and in the University of New Zealand, of the Senate of which he was for some years a member. His list of publications during the period contains over fifty titles. They included a book on the Geography of New Zealand (1905, revised 1911), the Geology of New Zealand (1912), and the portions of the Handbuch der Regionalen Geologie dealing with New Zealand and the adjacent Islands, and with Oceania (1912). He was extremely active in research. His accounts of the Geology of the Dunedin District (1906) and "The Sequence of Lavas at North Head, Otago Harbour" (1914), which involved a great amount of field work, and petrographical and chemical study, are among the most notable of his many papers. With them there are also to be recalled many other papers on the igneous rocks and other features of New Zealand geology in both the South and North Islands. His petrographic interests were extended to deal with the volcanic rocks of the south-western Pacific, and on this ground of mutual interest he entered into frequent correspondence and later personal association with Professor Antoine Lacroix, and was in 1938 elected a Correspondent de l'Academie des Sciences Coloniales. His active membership in what is now the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science gave him occasion to discuss before it the distribution of the igneous rocks in New Zealand (1907), Ocean Contours and Earth Movements in the South-West Pacific (1909), and his Presidential Address to the Geological Section on the structural boundaries of the south-western Pacific (1911) which were shown to be related to the line separating the regions wherein andesitic lavas occur from those wherein there are basic alkaline lavas. This concept was crystallised in his use of the term "andesite line" for the structural boundary of the western half of the Pacific basin in his account of the Geology of Oceania (1912), a term which has come into very general use, though an alternative term, "the Marshall line" has also been used with the same significance. The many problems, geophysical, geological, and biological arising from a consideration of the natural history of the Pacific were often in Dr. Marshall's mind, and formed the subjects of his Presidential Address to the Geographical Section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science in 1932, and that given by him as President of the whole Association in 1946.

The preparation of his books on the Geology of New Zealand must have brought very vividly before him the unsatisfactory and to some extent contradictory conceptions regarding the stratigraphy of New Zealand during the opening decade of this century, and he devoted much effort towards the study of the sedimentary succession and molluscan faunas of the Tertiary and Cretaceous rocks, on which he wrote a number of papers, several of them in collaboration with malacologist Robert C. Murdoch. The most important of these papers was his elaborate study of the Cretaceous ammonites of New Zealand (1926), in part written by him while in the British Museum of Natural History. In this paper the Indo-Pacific affinities of the New Zealand forms are discussed. In connection with the Geological Survey he wrote the portions of the Dun Mountain Bulletin (No. 12, published 1912) dealing with Mesozoic stratigraphy and igneous rocks, also the Tuapeka Bulletin (No. 19, published 1918).

Leaving the University of Otago in 1917, he became Headmaster of his old school, Wanganui College, and retiring from this after several years of service, he devoted himself for a time to geological research in the Pacific Islands and elsewhere, dealing with their petrology and the features of coral reefs. In 1924 he was appointed Geologist and Petrologist to the Department of Public Works, where in addition to his general consultative work, he carried out several major lines of research resulting in important publications, a study of special local interest on the building stones of New Zealand (1929) and two of more widespread theoretical importance. In his investigation of the Wearing of Beach Gravels and Beach Gravels and Sands (1928, 1929), carried out both in the field and experimentally, he considered the change in the size and form of the pebbles and the amount and nature of the fine-grained or even colloidal material produced during the processes of attrition, impact and grinding, and in so doing threw much light on the conditions of origin of littoral and off-shore sediments. He also made (1935) elaborate studies of the rocks of rhyolitic composition which are widespread in the centre of the North Island of New Zealand and were originally though to be flows and tuffs. He concluded that they were largely composed of particles which had been explosively erupted and had emitted incandescent gases until they had become on cooling agglutinated into coherent rock-masses often showing marked columnar jointing. This mode of origin is comparable with that of the material derived from nuées ardentes of Katmaian cruptions. The occurrence of rocks of like origin is becoming recognised in regions around the Pacific, and the term “ignimbrite” suggested for them by Marshall is tending to replace the term “welded tuffs” which was often assigned to them.

In later years Dr. Marshall was greatly interested in the occurrence of orbicular granites in New Zealand, and gave a number of excellent polished specimens of these to geological museums, but published little thereon. He was active in the study of zeolitic minerals, believed by him to be of primary origin, occurring in volcanic rocks, especially in more or less alkaline lavas, and spent much time investigating various methods of recognising the presence and determining the nature of such minerals by their diagnostic reactions with various solutions principally of silver nitrate. His latest paper (1946), which gave a short account of such studies, was said to be the precursor of a more detailed study then in preparation, which unfortunately was never completed.

Dr. Marshall's activities in connection with the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, his presence at the meetings of the Pacific Science Congress in a number of lands, Japan, Java, and California as well as in Australia and New Zealand, and his presence at two European meetings of the International Geological Conference, as well as his many writings, made him well known to geologists in many parts of the world. His chief services to scientific societies were, however, given to the Royal Society of New Zealand, of which he was President in 1925–6, and from which he received the Hector Memorial Medal. He was the first recipient of the Hector Memorial Medal in 1915. He also received Hutton Medal in 1917. As an active member of its Executive Committee for many years he exercised much influence on its policy.

The latest of the honours accorded to him in recognition of his long life of varied service to science was the Honorary Doctorate of Science conferred on him by the University of New Zealand in 1948, nearly fifty years after he had received the degree by examination on the grounds of his first major research in Geology. His interest in research was maintained to the last. In a letter to the writer sent in October, 1950, he referred to the interesting carbonate-bearing magnesian rocks near Milford Sound, which he had described in 1904, regretting that he was unable to return to the field and laboratory investigations of their problematical origin. But he passed away early in November in the eighty-second year of his age.

Bibliography

Articles by Patrick Marshall published in Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand:

• Marshall P. (1894). "Tridymite-Trachyte of Lyttelton". Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 26: 368-387.
• (1895) "New Zealand Diptera: No. 1". 28
• (1895). "On Dodonidia helmsi, Fereday". 28'
• (1901) "On Leaf-beds in the Kaikorai Valley". 34
• (1902) "The Kingston Moraine".35
• (1903) "Boulders in Triassic Conglomerate, Nelson". 36
• (1904) "Magnesian Rocks at Milford Sound". 37
• (1907) "Geology of Centre and North of North Island". 40
• (1908) "Geology of Rarotonga and Aitutaki". 41
• (1908) "Contact Rocks from West Nelson". 41
• (1908) "Crater of Ngauruhoe". 41
• (1908) "Additions to the List of New Zealand Minerals". 41
• (1908) "Some New Zealand Fossil Cephalopods". 41
• (1909) "Note on the Geology of Mangaia". 42
• (1909) "The Glaciation of New Zealand". 42
• (1911) "Nephelinite Rocks in New Zealand". 44
• (1912) "Note on the Rate of Erosion of the Hooker and Mueller Glaciers". 45
• (1913) "Notes on the Geology of Moorea and Rurutu Islands". 46
• (1913) "The Geology of the Cape Runaway District". 46
• (1914) "The Geology of Tahiti". 47
• (1914) "Cainozoic Fossils from Oamaru". 47
• (1914) "The Recent Volcanic Eruptions on Ambrym Island". 47
• (1915) "The Younger Limestones of New Zealand". 48
• (1915) "Some New Fossil Gastropods". 48
• (1916) "Geology of the Central Kaipara". 49
• Marshall P. (1918). "The Tertiary Molluscan Fauna of Pakaurangi Point. Kaipara Harbour". Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 50: 263-278.

Books:

• Marshall P., Gregory J. W., Hamilton A. & Hogben G. (1905). The geography of New Zealand. Historical, physical, political, and commercial. Christchurch, Whitcombe and Tombs limited. 447 pp.
• Marshall P. (1912). New Zealand and adjacent islands. Heidelberg. 79 pp.

Species described

• some Diptera
• Conus abruptus Marshall, 1918

References

This article incorporates public domain text originating from the New Zealand from the reference .

External links

• Watters W. A. (2007) "Marshall, Patrick 1869 - 1950". Dictionary of New Zealand Biography http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/, updated 22 June 2007, accessed 22 March 2010.
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