ABSTRACT
Miscellany Amongst the collection of papers in this Part is at least one classic-namely that by Murchison, ‘On the Silurian System of Rocks’. Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, following a military career, was inspired to science by a chance meeting in 1823 with Sir Humphry Davy, whose lectures on geology at the Royal Institution in 1805 and role in founding the Geological Society of London in 1807 (of which Murchison later became President) had great influence on the development of the subject. Murchison is widely regarded as one of the outstanding geologists of the nineteenth century and the ideas in his Philosophical Magazine paper of 1835 were subsequently developed in a three-part volume, ‘The Silurian System’, published in 1939. His findings were the combination of fieldwork on the so-called ‘transition rocks’ of Wales and the Welsh Borderland-the home of the ancient Silures people. Stratigraphy (the succession of layered rocks on the earth) and palaeontology (the study of fossilized organic remains) were the fundamental tools by which Murchison characterized the Silurian-one of the major periods of the geological time-scale. The lasting effects of Murchison’s work were seen when, in the mid-1980s, following consideration by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the Silurian became the first system in the stratigraphical record to have its upper and lower boundaries and internal subdivisions formally agreed internationally.
