George Bellas Greenough

George Bellas Greenough FRS (January 18, 1778 - April 2, 1855), an English geologist, was born in London.

He was educated at Eton, and afterwards (1795) entered Pembroke College, Oxford, but never graduated. In 1798 he proceeded to Göttingen to prosecute legal studies, but having attended the lectures of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach he was attracted to the study of natural history, and, coming into the possession of a fortune, he abandoned law and devoted his attention to science.

He studied mineralogy at Freiburg under Abraham Gottlob Werner, travelled in various parts of Europe and the British Isles, and worked at chemistry at the Royal Institution. A visit to Ireland aroused deep interest in political questions, and he was in 1807 elected member of parliament for the borough of Gatton, continuing to hold his seat until 1812.

Meanwhile his interest in geology increased, he was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1807, and he was the chief founder with others of the Geological Society of London in 1807, initially as a dining-club for gentlemen. He was the first chairman of that Society, and in 1811, when it was more regularly constituted, he was the first president. In this capacity he served on two subsequent occasions, and did much to promote the advancement of geologyFact|article|date=October 2007, whilst demonstrating his elitism by black-balling the membership of the professional geologist William Smith, who was later recognised in 1831 by the Geological Society as the "Father of English Geology".

In 1819 he published "A Critical Examination of the First Principles of Geology", a work which was useful mainly in refuting erroneous theories. In the same year was published his famous "Geological Map of England and Wales", in six sheets; of which a second edition was issued in 1839. This map was to a large extent plagiarized from the original map of William Smith (the original source remaining unacknowledged until the Geological Society remedied this in 1865); but much new information was embodiedFact|article|date=October 2007. In 1843 he commenced to prepare a geological map of India, which was published in 1854. He died at Naples on 2 April 1855.

Selected writings

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Further reading

* Simon Winchester, "", (2001), New York: Harper Collins, ISBN 0-14-028039-1