John Phillips

John Phillips (1800-1874), English geologist, was born on the 25th of December 1800 at Marden in Wiltshire. His father belonged to an old Welsh family, but settled in England as an officer of excise and married the sister of William Smith, the "Father of English Geology." Both parents dying when he was a child, Phillips came under the charge of his uncle; and after being educated at various schools, he accompanied Smith on his wanderings in connexion with his geological maps. In the spring of 1824 Smith went to York to deliver a course of lectures on geology, and his nephew accompanied him. Phillips accepted engagements in the principal Yorkshire towns to arrange their museums and give courses of lectures on the collections contained therein. York became his residence, where he obtained, in 1825, the situation of keeper of the Yorkshire museum and secretary of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. From that centre he extended his operations to towns beyond the county; and in 1831 he included University College, London, in the sphere of his activity. In that year the British Association for the Advancement of Science was founded at York, and Phillips was one of the active minds who organized its machinery. He became in 1832 the first assistant secretary, a post which he held until 1859. In 1834 he accepted the professorship of geology at King's College, London, but retained his post at York. In 1834 he was elected F.R.S.; in later years he received hon. degrees of LL.D. from Dublin and Cambridge, and D.C.L. from Oxford; while in 1845 he was awarded the Wollaston Medal by the Geological Society of London. In 1840 he resigned his charge of the York museum and was appointed on the staff of the geological survey of Great Britain under De la Beche. He spent some time in studying the Palaeozoic fossils of Devon, Cornwall and West Somerset, of which he published a descriptive memoir (1841); and he made a detailed survey of the region of the Malvern Hills, of which' he prepared the elaborate account that appears in vol. ii. of the Memoirs of the Survey (1848). In 1844 he became professor of geology in the university of Dublin. Nine years later, on the death of H. E. Strickland, who had acted as substitute for Dean Buckland in the readership of geology in the university of Oxford, Phillips succeeded to the post of deputy, and at the dean's death in 1856 became himself reader, a post which he held to the time of his death. During his residence in Oxford he took a leading part in the foundation and arrangement of the new museum erected in 1859 (see his Notices of Rocks and Fossils in the University Museum, 1863; and The Oxford Museum, by H. W. Acland and J. Ruskin, 1859; reprinted with additions 1893). Phillips was also keeper of the Ashmolean museum from 1854-1870. In1859-1860he was president of the Geological Society of London, and in 1865 president of the British Association. He dined at All Souls College on the 23rd of April 1874, but on leaving he slipped and fell down a flight of stone stairs, and died on the following day.

From the time he wrote his first paper "On the Direction of the Diluvial Currents in Yorkshire" (1827), down to the last days of his life, Phillips continued a constant contributor to the literature of science. The pages of the Philosophical Magazine, the Journal of the Geological Society, the Geological Magazine and other publications contain valuable essays by him. He was also the author of numerous separate works, which were of great benefit in extending a sound knowledge of geology. Among these may be specially mentioned: Illustrations of the Geology of Yorkshire (in two parts, 1829 and 1836; 2nd ed. of pt. I in 1835, 3rd ed., edited by R. Etheridge, in 1875); A Treatise on Geology (1837-1839); Memoirs of William Smith (1844); The Rivers, Mountains and Sea-Coast of Yorkshire (1853); Manual of Geology, Practical and Theoretical (1855); Life on the Earth: its Origin and Succession (1860); Vesuvius (1869); Geology of Oxford and the Valley of the Thames (1871). To these should be added his Monograph of British Belemnitidae (1865), for the Palaeontographical Society, and his geological map of the British Isles (1847).

See Biographical Memoir, with portrait, in Geol. Mag. (July 1870).