Henry Samuel Boase

Henry Samuel Boase FRS (1799 – 1883) was an English geologist.

Life and work

Boase was born in London on the 2 September 1799, the eldest son of Henry Boase (1763 – 1827), banker, of Madron, Cornwall. Henry Boase, the son, was educated partly at Tiverton grammar-school and partly at Dublin, where he studied chemistry. He later proceeded to Edinburgh and took the degree of M.D. in 1821. He then worked for some years as a medical practitioner at Penzance; there geology engaged his particular attention, and he became secretary of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, and a committee member of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. [Denise Crook, ‘Boase, Henry Samuel (1799–1883)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2738 accessed 16 Nov 2007] ]

The results of Boase's geological observations were embodied in his "Treatise on Primary Geology" (1834), a work of considerable merit in regard to the older crystalline and igneous rocks and the subject of mineral veins. In 1837 he moved to London, where he remained for about a year, being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1837. In 1838 he became a partner in a firm of bleachers at Dundee.

Boase retired in 1871, and died on the 5th of May 1883.

Selected writings

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References

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