Patrick William Stuart-Menteath

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Patrick William Stuart-Menteath (born October 4, 1845 in Douglas (Isle of Man) , † November 20, 1925 in Ciboure ) was a British geologist who worked in France and explored the geology of the Basque Country and the Pyrenees .

He is portrayed as a strong, idiosyncratic and almost Don Quixoteque character , which was expressed in many of the controversies in which he was involved. He made the first geological map of the inner Basque Country (1881).

Early years

Stuart-Menteath came from a wealthy Scottish family with an officer tradition and spent his youth with his parents in Italy and in the region of Pau , where his parents settled. He was a cadet in the Navy and studied at the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Mines with Andrew Ramsay . As a mining geologist, he was also trained at the Clausthal mining academy and spent some time in Greece. In 1866 his first geological publications appeared and he was accepted into the French geological society. In 1868 he was involved in a geological controversy with Félix Garrigou about the nature of the molasse- like layers of the Poudingues de Palassou, named after Pierre Bernard Palassou . After that there is little information about him until 1878. He seems to have been a geologist for the Rio Tinto Group in the Spanish Basque Country and, according to his own statements, was a war correspondent in the Third Carlist War (1872 to 1876).

Pyrenees geologist

In 1878 he returned with a contribution to the controversy surrounding the so-called Pliocene man . These are paleolithic and Neolithic finds of human relics in the lignite of Mouligna in the area of Biarritz and Bidart , which Eugène Jacquot (1817-1903) described in 1864. Stuart-Menteath did not classify them correctly in the Pliocene , but much later.

After that he seems to have traveled again for Rio Tino and published reports (Leisure Hour) for a popular British magazine. In 1881 he published in the Bulletin of the French Geological Society a geological map of the Basque part of the Pyrenees on a scale of 1: 200,000. Despite its shortcomings (it lacked a topographical base) it established his reputation as a geological expert on the Pyrenees. He correctly recognized the importance of Devon and chalk, the role of Ophit --Kuppen from the Triassic (igneous rocks of a continental grave breach splitting) and the occasional presence of Jura at the northern edge of the Basque Pyrenees.

Commissioned by Edmond Hébert (1812–1890) and Charles-Philippe-Ernest Munier-Chalmas (1843–1903), he supervised the dissertation of Jean Seunes ( Recherches géologiques sur les terrqins secondqires de l'Eocène inférieur de la région sous-prénéenne du Sud-Ouest de la France ) published in 1891. This was followed by a fierce dispute about the priority claims of Stuart-Menteath on the one hand, and questions of interpretation (partly stratigraphic problems from the turbidites question, which was only clarified much later ) on the other . In 1894 he was also the first to recognize the presence of Eocene deposits (in addition to chalk) in the flysch deposits near San Sebastian, later recognized as Turbidite . In the same year he decided to devote himself entirely to geological research and became a lifetime member of the French Geological Society for the then high sum of 400 francs. After he was involved in a scientific dispute with Marcel Alexandre Bertrand over tectonic issues in 1899 , he broke with the French geological society, from which he left in 1901. Among other things, his adversary Seune had become vice president and Stuart-Menteath and Jules Marcou accused society of being involved in the Panama scandal . Despite assurances to the contrary, from then on he could not publish in the bulletin of the French geological society (nor for a long time in the Compte Rendu of the Academie des Sciences) and turned to Spanish and British journals (the publications of the Société aragonaise des Sciences naturelles, of which he was also once president, and the Geological Magazine, also in the Bulletin of the Biarritz Association).

Additional controversy it came to the 1902 developed and published in the Compte Rendu 1911 overthrust ceiling theory of building the Basque Pyrenees Léon Bertrand , that of Pierre-Marie Termier was supported. Stuart-Menteath thought this was geo-poetics and later confirmed his skepticism (attacks on the theory at the special session of the French geological society in 1928 and in Marcel Casteras' dissertation). Some of his last publications (1922/23) concern the dissertation of Pierre Lamare , a student of Léon Bertrand and later a well-known Pyrenees geologist. Stuart-Menteath refuted some of his theses on clues for thrust nappes. This led to his republication in the bulletin of the French Geological Society (with Eugène Fournier as co-author).

From around 1906 he lived in a large house in Ciboure, which became the basis for his excursions to the Pyrenees. He developed a controversial friendship with the speleologist Eugène Fournier, whom he served as a guide in the Pyrenees, and corresponded with him from 1906 to 1925.

114 scientific publications come from him.

Fonts

  • Sur la géologie des Pyrénées de la Navarre, you Guipuzcoa et you Labourd. Bull. Soc. géol. France, (3), Vol. 9, 1881, pp. 304-333.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Maurice Jacqué, see web links
  2. ↑ This was relaxed around 1913 through friendship with Henri Douvillé
  3. ↑ This possibility of publication was also prevented after Stuart-Menteath through the influence of Pierre-Marie Termier
personal data
SURNAME Stuart-Menteath, Patrick William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British geologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1845
PLACE OF BIRTH Douglas (Isle of Man)
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 1925
Place of death Ciboure