Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1856 and professor in 1860. Concurrently he held the keepership of
both the Ashmolean Museum (from 1854) and the Oxford University
Museum from its inception in 1857.
His death came at Oxford when, following dinner at All Souls
College on the evening of 23 April 1874, he fell headlong down a flight
of stairs, suffered a seizure and died the following day. His body was
carried to York by train where it lay 'in state' in the Yorkshire
Museum for a night, before being laid to rest in the local cemetery,
appropriately beneath a thick slab of Coal Measures sandstone.
As early as 1834 Phillips was thinking about sediment and how
it would be possible to determine its rate of deposition, and in 1839 in
his book Treatise on Geology, he discussed the role rivers played in
moulding the surface of the Earth through denudation. In 1858
Phillips was elected President of the Geological Society and he held
this position until 1860. Like all presidents before and since, it was
part of his duty to present medals to various notable and usually
deserving geological savants at the Annual General Meeting.
Accordingly on 17 February 1860 in front of the assembled Fellows,
he took the chair to preside for the second time over the annual meet-
ing. Searles Valentine Wood Snr (1798-1880), a former Ship's Officer
with the East India Company, received the Wollaston Medal for his
work on the fossils of the Crag (a horizon in the Pliocene), and in
response he apologetically commented that its award should normally
result in renewed enthusiasm for further work, but that on account
of his age he thought that this was unlikely. In a rather sad aside he
noted that he had been born in sight of a Crag pit (quarry), and
would probably be buried within sight of another. From this one sur-
mises that he thought he did not have much time left: in fact Wood
was to live for another twenty years and the final part of his major
work The Crag Mollusca, first begun in the 1840s, was not published
by the Palaeontographical Society until 1882, two years after he had
been lowered into the soil overlying his favourite geological horizon.
Following the civilities Phillips delivered his anniversary
address and read out a list of recently deceased members that
