Abstract
DR. BERNARD SMITH, who has been appointed to succeed Sir John Flett as director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, joined the Survey as a geologist in 1906, became district geologist of the Cumberland Division in 1920, and was appointed assistant to the director in 1931. In 1902 he had entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where his uncle, Charles Smith, author of many well-known books on mathematical subjects, was master. Taking a first class in both parts of the Natural Sciences Tripos and gaining the Harkness Scholarship for geology in 1906, he maintained his College's fine record for producing first class geologists. The Harkness Scholarship has been won by Sidney men six times since 1893. Bernard Smith's work on the Geological Survey and his researches pursued during vacations earned him a Geological Society award in 1913 and the Bigsby Medal of that Society in 1927. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1933. He is the author of many papers on stratigraphy and on the glaciology of Cumberland and North Wales, of many contributions to the memoirs of the Geological Survey, and of a well-known textbook of physical geography. His work on the Survey, particularly on the coal and iron-ore deposits of Cumberland, has brought him into contact with practical problems in which the Geological Survey and its Museum are so closely concerned. We may congratulate him on being selected to direct the progress of the Geological Survey in the first year of the second centenary of its work, and it may augur well that the new director, chosen at this historic moment in the life of the Survey, bears the name of the “father of English Geology”, William Smith.
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Dr. Bernard Smith and the Geological Survey. Nature 136, 96 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136096a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136096a0