Abstract
BY the death of this well-known writer geological literature loses one of its most voluminous and able contributors. Though not in the proper sense of the word a geologist, he had made himself well acquainted with many geological problems, and first attracted notice more than five-and-twenty years ago by the brilliance and suggestiveness of his attempts to solve them. He was born in 1821 at Little Whitefield, in Perthshire, and after the usual brief schooling of a peasant's son he was apprenticed as a millwright in his native village. The employment allowed him leisure for reading, and he devoted himself with ardour to the study of philosophy and of physical science. At the age of twenty-four, however, the effects of an accident which he had met with in boyhood compelled him to seek a less laborious vocation, and eventually he became agent for an insurance company. These early years gave but little promise of the particular bent of his genius by which he would attain distinction. Eventually his general acquirements and the zeal with which he was known to devote his spare time to philosophical reading attracted the interest of the governing body of the Andersonian University and Museum in Glasgow, and in 1859 he was appointed keeper at that establishment. He had already found his way into print by publishing anonymously a volume on the “Philosophy of Theism.” But his new position in an institution devoted largely to the teaching of science led him to throw himself more fully into the study of physics. In 1861 he published, in the Philosophical Magazine, his first contribution to scientific literature—a paper on an electrical experiment of Ampère's.
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G., A. James Croll, F.R.S. Nature 43, 180–181 (1890). https://doi.org/10.1038/043180b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/043180b0