Sydney Barber Josiah Skertchly

Sydney Barber Josiah Skertchly (14 December 1850 – 2 February 1926) was an English and later Australian botanist and geologist. He described and mapped the geology of East Anglia and The Fens, travelled the world exploring geology and other aspects of science, and became influential in scientific societies in Queensland.

Biography

Early life Born in Anstey, Leicestershire, Skertchly was the son of an English engineer, Joseph Skertchly, and Sarah Moseley, née Barber. He was educated at King Edward's School, Ashby-de-la-Zouch where he won the Queen's gold medal for science. He studied geology at the Royal School of Mines (later Imperial College, London) under Sir Ralph Tate and Thomas H. Huxley.

Career

He then worked as assistant curator to the Geological Society, London, with Sir Charles Lyell. In 1869 he began to travel, becoming assistant geologist to Ismail Pasha, khedive of Egypt. He worked in East Anglia for the British Geological Survey, studying and making maps of the geologically young strata there, as well as writing on the gun-flint industry which exploited the local flints. He described and named the Brandon Beds which lie under the Boulder clay.

Skertchly sent Charles Darwin a copy of his Geology of the Fenland in 1878. Darwin replied with a gift of his Origin of Species. He also corresponded with Darwin's rival and co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace.

In around 1880, while working as an assistant geologist with the British Geological Survey, he was involved in an accident while at work, in which his seven-year old son Cyril Edwin Kemp Skertchly was killed, and which left him "unable to do any work for some years to come". He wrote to Darwin requesting a testimonial, in order to obtain secure an improved Treasury pension. and Professor Skertchly died on 2 February 1926 in Molendinar, Queensland. Both are buried in Nerang cemetery.

Works

(1877). The Geology of the Fenland with Whitaker, William (1878?). The Geology of South-Western Norfolk and of Northern Cambridgeshire: (Explanation of Sheet 65). (1878). The Physical System of the Universe. An outline of physiography. with Miller, S.H. (1878). The Fenland past and present ... With engravings, maps and diagrams. (1879). On the manufacture of Gun-Flints, the methods of excavating for flint, the age of palæolithic man, and the connection between neolithic art and the gun-flint trade. completing work of Tylor, Alfred (1886). Colouration in Animals and Plants. (1894) The future of the Port of Shanghai : a geological study. (1898). On the geology of the country round Stanthorpe and Warwick, South Queensland,: With especial reference to the tin and gold fields and the silver deposits. Queensland: Geological survey.