Prof. P. G. H. Boswell, O.B.E., F.R.S

Abstract

PROF. P. G. H. BOSWELL, who has resigned from the professorship of geology at the Imperial College, is followed by Prof. H. H. Read, who succeeded him as George Herdman professor at the University of Liverpool. After some early work on the glacial deposits of eastern England, Prof. BoswelFs researches on the Tertiary rocks of the London Basin extended thestudy of detrital minerals originated by H. H. Thomas to the elucidationof problems of genesis, provenance and age. He thus gave a new life and meaning to the old “test by included fragments,” inaugurated a method ofresearch which has been widely followed, threw new light upon processes of sedimentation, and laid the foundation for his work on sands and other mineral substances of vital importance to the metallurgical, glass andbrick-making industries during the War. He also devoted much attention to the Chalk, its movements and its sub-Tertiary surface, to the history of the Suffolk rivers, to the Pliocene ‘Crags,’ and to the classification of the Glacial Drifts especially in their relation to early man, on which he gave his presidential address to Section C of the British Association at York. As an authority on East Anglia, his services were called upon by the Geological Survey for three of its memoirs, while he contributed a series of articles to the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” and to “Regionale Geologie” and its successor the “Handbook of the Geology of Great Britain”