Obituary.

  • Hooker, Sir Joseph Dalton, (1817-1911)
Date:
[1878?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Obituary. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ©tntuarp. -K>«- By the death of Dr. Thomas Thomson the Society has lost one of the earliest and most energetic of Trans-Himalayan explorers, and the first who put into a connected form a really scientific account of the geography, geology, and botany of the vast and I complicated mountain regions extending from the plains of the Punjab to Turkistan. Dr. Thomson was eldest son of Dr. Thomas Thomson, F.R.S., the eminent Professor of Chemistry in the University of Glasgow; in which city the son was born on the 4th of December, 1817. He was educated at the High School and University of Glasgow, and took his degree there as Doctor of Medicine in 1839. At school he obtained very high honours in classics and mathematics, but throughout his college career he preferred to devote his energies to scientific studies. From early childhood he evinced a remark- able love of, and capacity for, science, both physical and biological, commencing with chemistry and mineralogy before he went to school, and at a later period devoting himself to conchology and entomology, and lastly botany. When only seventeen years of age, he was, when geologising on the Firth of Clyde, the first discoverer and the describer of those beds of fossil mollusca on which so much of the evidence of the glacial era depends. His account of the position and character of the deposits at Dalmuir is written with the acuteness, fulness, and perspicuity of a trained geologist; and the deductions ho draws from a comparison of their contents with those of the neigh- bouring seas, show singular powers of generalisation for so young a person. He states in this paper that though the species are identical with those existing in the Clyde, the proportion of common to scarce is completely inverted : whence he concludes that they cannot have been deposited during a period when the fauna of the Firth of Clyde was in every way the same as at present; B