[Obituaries]

Abstract

GEOLOGISTS will regret to learn that DR. WHEELTON HIND died on June 21. Dr. Hind was born at Roxeth, near Harrow, in 1860, and graduated in medicine and surgery in the University of London, also gaining the fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons. He began practice at Stoke-on-Trent more than thirty years ago, and soon occupied a prominent place among the surgeons of North Staffordshire. His recreation from the first was field-geology, which suited both his athletic activity and his eagerness for purely scientific work. His early studies coincided with the movement initiated by Lapworth and others for the more exact correlation of stratified rocks by a very detailed study of their contained fossils; and Dr. Hind proceeded to apply this new method of “zoning,” as it was termed, to the Carboniferous rocks of the neighbourhood in which he resided. His success in discovering the regular order in which the different assemblages of fossils occurred in Staffordshire and Derbyshire gradually led him further afield. He co-operated with members of the Geological Survey, and after extended researches in Lancashire and Yorkshire he joined Mr. J. Allen Howe in 1901 in contributing to the Geological Society of London a fundamentally important memoir on the classification of the Lower Carboniferous rocks of north-central England. Dr. Hind also recognised that, for the purposes of the stratigraphical geologist, the species of Carboniferous Mollusca needed more exact definition than had previously been attempted, and he devoted much labour to adding two finely illustrated monographs on the subject to the series published by the Palæontographical Society. Some of the molluscs proved to be of value for recognising the various seams of coal in the Staffordshire coalfield, and in 1903 Dr. Hind and Mr. J. T. Stobbs prepared an illustrated wall-chart of them for the use of the practical miner. On the outbreak of war in 1914 Dr. Hind joined the Army as a gunner, and took part in some engagements in France; but he was afterwards employed as surgeon, and attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He received the Lyell medal from the Geological Society of London in 1917.