Surveying
The government then appointed him in connection with the Ordnance Survey. This formed the starting point of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, which was officially recognized in 1835, when De la Beche was appointed director. As the first director of the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street he donated many of his own books to furnish the library in 1843.
Increasing stores of valuable specimens began to arrive in London; and the building at Craigs Court, where the young Museum of Economic Geology was placed, became too small. De la Beche appealed to the authorities to provide a larger structure and to widen the whole scope of the scientific establishment of which he was the head. Parliament sanctioned the erection of a museum in Jermyn Street, London, and the organization of a staff of professors with laboratories and other appliances. The establishment, in which were combined the offices of the Geological Survey, the Museum of Practical Geology, The Royal School of Mines and the Mining Record Office, was opened in 1851.
Conditions of scientific testing were rudimentary; as part of his colleague Dr. Lyon Playfair's investigations into "overflowing privies" Sir Henry once took the role of test-vomiter to judge sewage flow.
In 1830, de la Beche published Sections and views, illustrative of geological phaenomena, a series of line drawings to encourage more accurate depictions of geological formations. De la Beche published numerous memoirs on English geology in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London, as well as in the Memoirs of the Geological Survey, notably the Report on the Geology of Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset (1839). He likewise wrote A Geological Manual (1831; 3rd ed., 1833); and Researches in Theoretical Geology (1834), in which he enunciated a philosophical treatment of geological questions much in advance of his time. An early volume, How to Observe Geology (1835 and 1836), was rewritten and enlarged by him late in life, and published under the title of The Geological Observer (1851; 2nd ed., 1853).
De la Beche was the principal antagonist of Roderick Murchison and Adam Sedgwick in what has been labeled The Great Devonian Controversy. He frequently used cartoons as a tactful way to express his frustrations on this and other issues.
He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1819. He was knighted in 1848 and, near the close of his life he was awarded the Wollaston medal. In 1852, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
After his death students at the Royal College of Mines and other institutions competed for the bursary of the De la Beche medal. The medal was in fact the second imprint, of a medal De la Beche had originally had engraved and struck for the slaves he inherited from his father on the plantation in Jamaica on his return to Lyme Regis in 1825. The second version of the medal, in silver and bronze, was engraved by W. Wyon of the Royal Mint - with De la Bache's portrait on one side, and the plantation on the other - the plantation being replaced with crossed hammers for the School of Mines.
He is buried in the Kensal Green Cemetery, London.
Read more about this topic: Henry De La Beche
Famous quotes containing the word surveying:
“Upon looking back from the end of the last chapter and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without which a book would not hold together a single year.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)