Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
On his retirement Holmes immediately set out to revise
'Holmes', his
Principles of Physical Geology
, which he considered
was long overdue. In 1957 he records that
'I am now getting on
with it as quickly as possible'
, but a year later is complaining
that
'Every page seems to need a considerable literature
search, so much has been done since the war.'
With his
failing health, it was indeed a mammoth task, taking him
the rest of his life. Almost three times its original length, he
finished the second edition just a few months before he died. It
was as if he felt he could let go, now his contribution to
posterity was finished, his obligation to his students finally
discharged.
Arthur Holmes died of bronchial pneumonia at Bolingbroke
hospital in London, on the 20th of September, 1965. The small
gathering at his cremation a few days later did not even include
his son Geo¬rey, who at that time was living with his family in
Ankara and was told by Doris 'not to bother'. Although only
nine years younger than Arthur, Doris lived for another twenty
years, until she was eighty-six. In her seventies she bought a car,
learnt to drive and wrote yet a third edition of 'Holmes'. She was
a remarkable woman. A student of hers, Donald Du¬, wrote the
fourth edition of 'Holmes', still in use today.
Of Holmes' other great achievements, I have said little, but
finally they too are being recognised. Naomi Oreskes, writing
on why Americans in particular had such di~culty in accepting
continental drift, at last gives Holmes the full credit he deserves
for his visionary work on convection currents in the mantle as
a mechanism for driving continental plates. She writes:
The pieces of the puzzle
[of continental drift]
, as geologists under-
stand it today, were assembled by the end of the 1920s. Geologists had
a phenomenon, they had evidence, and they had a mechanism. What was
hailed as breakthrough knowledge in the 1960s . . . was proposed in the
