Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
were seen as martyrs. Today most of the major railway stations in
Ireland are named after one of the leaders of the 1916 rebellion. For
their efforts in preserving the college from damage and potential
destruction, a number of academics were awarded silver cups by the
local business community. Joly's assistant, the shy palaeontologist
Louis Bouvier Smyth (1883-1952), who succeeded him in the Chair of
Geology in 1934, was given a ceremonial sword! He promptly lodged it
in the Geological Museum but unfortunately, along with Samuel
Haughton's slippers, it is now lost. It was to be another six years before
Ireland gained independence, and Joly unlike many others chose to
remain in Dublin and to throw his hat in with the new government. In
fact Trinity College retained much of its ethos and continued at
ceremonial dinners to toast the health of the King of England for at
least a decade afterwards.
Joly had a high international reputation. He served as President
of Section C (Geology) when the British Association for the Advance-
ment of Science visited Dublin in 1908 - this body continues to meet
annually to discuss topical scientific matters, and in 2005 returned to
Dublin. Joly received the Boyle Medal of the Royal Dublin Society in
1911, the Murchison Medal (of the Geological Society of London) in
1923, and a Royal Medal from the Royal Society of London in 1910 -
probably the most eminent scientific society in the world. He became
a Fellow of Trinity College in 1919, and was President of the Royal
Dublin Society between 1929 and 1932. Honorary degrees were con-
ferred on him from the National University of Ireland, the University
of Cambridge and the University of Michigan, which he visited as part
of an British educational delegation sent to observe and report on the
American higher educational system.
Joly was by all accounts a very popular man, loved and respected
by many. On his death, friends contributed over £1,700, which was a
considerable sum in 1934, to a memorial fund that is still used to
promote an annual lecture in the University of Dublin. In addition
his name and memory are perpetuated by the Joly Geological Society,
the student geological association founded in 1960, in the same
