Roderick Murchison

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Roderick Murchison bigraphy, stories - Geologist

Roderick Murchison : biography

22 February 1792 – 22 October 1871

Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, 1st Baronet KCB DCL FRS FRSE FLS PRGS PBA MRIA (22 February 1792 – 22 October 1871) was a Scottish geologist who first described and investigated the Silurian system.

Later life

In 1863, he was made a KCB, and three years later was created a baronet. The learned societies of his own country bestowed their highest rewards upon him: the Royal Society gave him the Copley medal, the Geological Society its Wollaston medal, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh its Brisbane Medal. There was hardly a foreign scientific society of note without his name among its honorary members. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him the prix Cuvier, and elected him one of its eight foreign members in succession to Michael Faraday. In 1855, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

One of the closing public acts of Murchison’s life was the founding of a chair of geology and mineralogy at the University of Edinburgh. Under his will there was established the Murchison Medal and a geological fund (The Murchison Fund) to be awarded annually by the council of the Geological Society in London.

Murchison died in 1871, and is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.

Silurian system

In 1831 he went to the border of England and Wales, to attempt to discover whether the greywacke rocks underlying the Old Red Sandstone could be grouped into a definite order of succession. The result was the establishment of the Silurian system under which were grouped, for the first time, a remarkable series of formations, each replete with distinctive organic remains other than and very different from those of the other rocks of England. These researches, together with descriptions of the coalfields and overlying formations in South Wales and the English border counties, were embodied in The Silurian System (1839).

The establishment of the Silurian system was followed by that of the Devonian system, an investigation in which Murchison assisted, both in the south-west of England and in the Rhineland. Soon afterwards Murchison projected an important geological campaign in Russia with the view of extending to that part of the Continent the classification he had succeeded in elaborating for the older rocks of western Europe. He was accompanied by Edouard de Verneuil (1805–1873) and Count Alexander von Keyserling (1815–1891), in conjunction with whom he produced a work on Russia and the Ural Mountains. The publication of this monograph in 1845 completes the first and most active half of Murchison’s scientific career.

In 1846 he was knighted, and in the same year he presided over the meeting of the British Association at Southampton. During the later years of his life a large part of his time was devoted to the affairs of the Royal Geographical Society, of which he was in 1830 one of the founders, and he was president 1843-1845, 1851–1853, 1856–1859 and 1862-1871. He served on the Royal Commission on the British Museum (1847–49).The Life of Sir Anthony Panizzi, Volume 1, by Louis Alexander Fagan, p257

Legacy

The crater Murchison on the Moon and at least fifteen geographical locations on Earth are named after him.

These include: Mount Murchison in the Mountaineer Range, Antarctica; Mount Murchison, just west of Squamish, British Columbia, Canada; tiny Murchison Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands in the same province; Murchison Falls (Uganda); and the Murchison River in Western Australia. Unusually, Murchison has two other rivers named after him in Western Australia: the Roderick River and the Impey River, both tributaries of the Murchison.

Memorials

A memorial tablet of Murchison was installed on 3 November 2005, in front of School #9 in Perm. It consists of a stone base, irregular in form, about 2 meters long and bearing a dark stone plate with the inscription:

The decision to perpetuate the explorer’s name was accepted by the school administration and pupils in connection with a discussion to establish in Perm a pillar or an arch devoted to Roderick Murchison.