George Bellas Greenough

George Bellas Greenough.

George Bellas Greenough (born January 18, 1778 in London as George Bellas , † April 2, 1855 in Naples ) was an English geologist .

Life

He was the son of a wealthy lawyer who lost his fortune and died when Greenough was six years old. His mother died soon after and he was adopted by his maternal grandfather who had a well-known pharmacy in London. He went to school in Eton for a year and then in Kensington. From 1795 he spent three years studying law at the University of Oxford ( Pembroke College ), but without making any statements. In 1798 he moved to the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen , where he also studied law and was inspired by the lectures of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach for natural history, especially for geology and mineralogy. For this purpose he made two trips to the Harz Mountains in 1799 . He also studied mineralogy at the Bergakademie Freiberg with Abraham Gottlob Werner . In Göttingen, he made friends with Samuel Coleridge and Clement Carlyon. In 1801 he returned to England, attended lectures by Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution and undertook geological field research while traveling in England and France. Since he was financially independent, he could devote himself to scientific research. In 1805 he traveled to Scotland with James Skene and in 1806 to Ireland with Humphry Davy, where he also began to be interested in social issues.

From 1807 to 1812 he was a member of the House of Commons for the constituency of the Borough of Gatton . In 1807 he was accepted into the Royal Society .

In 1807 he was one of the founders of the Geological Society of London , whose chairman and first president from 1811 he was.

In 1819 he published his famous geological map of England and Wales, the second edition in 1839 and the third edition in 1865. It was the result of many years of work by the Geological Society, whose map committee Greenough had chaired since 1809, and was based on the geological map published in 1815 by William Smith . Greenough himself, however, was skeptical of Smith's use of fossils in stratigraphy.

From the 1840s he started working on geological maps for India. Hydrogeological maps of Hindustan were published in 1852 and a geological map of India in 1854.

Greenough was instrumental not only in founding the Geological Society, but also in that of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831 and the Royal Geographical Society in 1830 , of which he was president from 1839 to 1841.

He traveled regularly across Europe on geological excursions and died in Naples of dropsy on a journey that would take him further east via Italy.

He had been a member of the Leopoldina since 1822 .

His estate is in University College London. The Greenough River in Western Australia is named after him. The plant genus Greenovia was named in his honor .

Fonts

• A critical examination of the first principles of geology, 1819