Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
with Jesus College and, appropriately given Lhwyd's Celtic interests,
is known as the 'Welsh aisle'. There, somewhere beneath your feet,
lie the remains of Edward Lhwyd, the chronologist who dated the
Earth by counting the number of boulders at Llanberis.
FRESH AND SALTWATER
Our second inquiring geochronological mind belonged to Edmond
Halley (1656-1742) (Figure
4.4
), the Astronomer Royal, whose name
is associated with the comet whose return every 76 years or so he
predicted. A representation of the 1066 sighting is embroidered onto
the Bayeux Tapestry, and it last passed our skies in 1986 to great
popular excitement and frenzied scientific analysis. He is certainly
well known today, particularly when compared with Lhwyd. Recently
I typed both names into an Internet search engine, and while one
might argue that the returns do not necessarily reflect a true measure,
they do count for something. 'Edward Lhwyd' returned 91 hits and the
variant 'Edward Lhuyd' returned 210 hits for a total of 301; other
variants produced negligible returns. In contrast 'Edmond Halley'
was contained in 15,250 sites, while 'Edmund Halley' returned
20,215 hits for a total of 35,465 sites altogether! Lhwyd's returns
represent only 0.8% of Halley's. However, unlike Halley, Lhwyd is
commemorated in some generic names applied to living organisms.
The starfish Luidia was named for him by the naturalist Edward
Forbes in 1839, and Lloydia, the Snowdon lily, recalls his memory
and his travels in that district.
In 1715, just six years after Lhwyd's death, a short paper
appeared in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society, penned by Edmond Halley, Secretary of this now old and
venerated scientific body. While not perhaps one of his most famous
papers, it was certainly original. However, it suffered the fate of many
papers in that the ideas it was promoting and attempting to propagate
were soon forgotten and sank into obscurity. The paper and its ideas
were only discovered and brought to light approximately 200 years
