William Boyd Dawkins

William Boyd Dawkins

Sir William Boyd Dawkins (born December 26, 1837 in Buttington near Welshpool , † January 15, 1929 in Richmond Lodge, Bowdon , then Cheshire ) was a British geologist and paleontologist .

Live and act

William Boyd Dawkins was the only son of Reverend Richard Dawkins and his wife Mary Ann Youngman. He was initially taught at Rossall School before continuing his education at Jesus College , Oxford in 1854 . There Dawkins made friends with the later historian John Richard Green .

As a student, Dawkins began exploring caves , so in 1859 he began excavating a hyena in the cave at Wookey Hole . This leads to a lifelong interest in extinct mammals . From 1861 to 1869 Dawkins worked for the Geological Survey of Great Britain and became a colleague of Thomas Henry Huxley at the Royal School of Mines . During this time Dawkins mapped parts of the Wealden and other formations in Kent and the " Thames Valley ". During this time the first of his publications appeared, for example about the bit of the woolly rhinoceros and about the origin of the cave lion . In 1866 he married Frances Evans († 1921) and on June 6, 1867 Dawkins was elected as a member of the Royal Society .

The Manchester Natural History Museum, circa 1850

On Huxley's recommendation, Dawkins was appointed curator of natural history at the Manchester Museum in Manchester in 1869 . He began organizing and cataloging the collection there and lectured on geology at Owens College . From 1872 Dawkins held the first lectures there and was finally appointed to the chair of geology in October 1874, which he held until his retirement in 1908.

Together with William Ayshford Sanford he worked on the monograph British Pleistocene Mammalia , which was published in several parts from 1866 to 1872 by the Palaeontographical Society . In 1874 Cave Hunting was published , which was translated into German by Johann Wilhelm Spengel under the title The Caves and the Natives of Europe . In 1880 Dawkins published his book Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period , which was conceived as a companion to Green's A Short History of the English People from 1874. In the Creswell Crags at Worksop , he made further cave digs. During these years Dawkins also made trips to America and Australia.

From the 1880s, Dawkins turned increasingly to " applied geology ". In 1882 he was a consultant for a first attempt to drill a tunnel under the English Channel . Also in the early 1880s, Dawkins was an appraiser for the Humber Tunnel project. He was also consulted as an advisor to various water supply projects. Under Dawkin's leadership, the Kent coal deposits were discovered in 1890 .

The Geological Society of London honored Dawkins with the Lyell Medal in 1889 and the Prestwich Medal in 1918 . In 1919 he was named Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire . Following the death of his wife, Dawkins married Mary Poole, Hubert Congreve's widow, the following year.

After the death of William Boyd Dawkins, his remains were cremated at the Manchester Crematorium. Dawkins left his books and much of his papers to the town of Buxton .

Fonts (selection)

Books

• Cave hunting. Researches on the evidence of caves respecting the early inhabitants of Europe . Macmillan & Co., London 1874 ( archive.org )
  • The caves and the natives of Europe . Translated from the English by Johann Wilhelm Spengel. With a foreword by Oscar Fraas. Winter, Leipzig & Heidelberg 1876
• Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period . Macmillan & Co., London 1880 ( archive.org ).

Magazine articles

• On a hyaena-den at Wookey Hole, near Wells In: The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London . Volume 18, Number 1, 1862, pp. 115-125 ( online ).
• On a hyaena-den at Wookey Hole, near Wells. No. II . In: The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London . Volume 19, Number 1, 1863, pp. 260-274 ( online ).
• The Mammalia found at Windy Knoll . In: The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London . Volume 31, 1875, pp. 246-255 ( online ).
• On the Mammal-fauna of the Caves of Creswell Crags . In: Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society . Volume 33, 1877, pp. 589-612.
• The Exploration of the Ossiferous Deposits at Windy Knoll, Castleton, Derbyshire . In: The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London . Volume 33, 1877, pp. 724-729. - with Rooke Pennington
• Further discoveries in the Creswell Crags . In: The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London . Volume 35, 1879, pp. 724-735 ( online ). - with JM Mello
• The Pleistocene Mammalia .
  • Part I: Introduction . (Pages i-l.); British Pleistocene Felidae. Felis spelaea, Goldfoot . (Pages 1-28; Plates I-V.) In: Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society. Issued for 1864 . Volume 18, Palaeontographical Society, London 1866 ( online ). - with William Ayshford Sanford
  • Part II: British Pleistocene Felidae. Felis spelaea, Goldfoot . (Pages 29-121; Plates VI-XIX.) In: Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society. Issued for 1867 . Volume 21, Palaeontographical Society, London 1869 ( online ). - with William Ayshford Sanford
  • Part III: British Pleistocene Felidae. Felis spelaea, Goldfoot. Felis lynx, Linnaeus . (Pages 125-176; Plates XX-XXII, XXIIa, XXIIb, XXIII.) In: Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society. Issued for 1868 . Volume 22, Palaeontographical Society, London 1868 ( online ). - with William Ayshford Sanford
  • Part IV: British Pleistocene Felidae. Felis pardus, Lin; Felis Caffer, Desm .; Felis catus, Lin .; Machaerodus latidens, Owen . (Pages 177-194; Plates XXIV, XXV.) In: Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society. Issued for 1871 . Volume 25, Palaeontographical Society, London 1872 ( online ). - with William Ayshford Sanford
  • Titlepage: The Pleistocene Mammalia. Vol. I. British Pleistocene Felidae . In: Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society. Issued for 1900 . Volume 54, Palaeontographical Society, London 1900 ( online ). - with William Ayshford Sanford
  • = The Pleistocene Mammalia . Volume 1: British Pleistocene Felidae, Palaeontographical Society, London 1866–1872.
  • Part V: British Pleistocene Ovidae: Ovibos Moschatus, Blainville . (Pages 1-30; Plates I-V.) In: Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society. Issued for 1871 . Volume 25, Palaeontographical Society, London 1872 ( online ).
  • Part A: A preliminary treatise on the relation of the Pleistocene Mammalia to those now living in Europe (Pages I – XXXVIII.) In: Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society. Issued for 1878 . Volume 32, Palaeontographical Society, London 1878 ( online ).
  • Part VI: British Pleistocene Cervidae . (Pages 1-29. Plates I-VII.) In: Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society. Issued for 1885 . Volume 40, Palaeontographical Society, London 1887 ( online ).

literature

• Geoffrey Tweedale: Dawkins, Sir William Boyd (1837-1929). In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Volume 7: Box-Browell. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861357-1 , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), Last updated: 2004, accessed September 15, 2012.
• Geoffrey Tweedale: Geology and industrial consultancy: Sir William Boyd Dawkins, 1837-1929, and the Kent coalfield . In: British Journal for the History of Science . Volume 24, Number 4, 1991, pp. 435-451, ( doi: 10.1017 / S0007087400027631 ).
• Geoffrey Tweedale, Timothy Proctor: Catalog of the papers of Professor Sir William Boyd Dawkins in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester . In: Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library . Volume 74, 1992, pp. 3-36; escholar.manchester.ac.uk (PDF).
• [Anonymous]: Eminent living geologists: William Boyd Dawkins . In: Geological Magazine . 5th Decade, Volume 6, Number 12, 1909, pp. 529-534 ( doi: 10.1017 / S0016756800127992 ).
• [Anonymous]: William Boyd Dawkins . In: The Antiquaries Journal . Volume 9, Number 3, 1929, pp. 302-303 ( doi: 10.1017 / S0003581500013159 ).
• [Anonymous]: Sir William Boyd Dawkins . In: Geological Magazine : Volume 66, Number 3, 1929, p. 142 ( doi: 10.1017 / S001675680010010X ).

Web links

Wikisource: William Boyd Dawkins  - Sources and full texts (English)

• Entry to Dawkins; Sir; William Boyd (1837–1929) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
• Entry at isle-of-man.com