MURCHISON, RODERICK IMPEY (b. Tarradale, Ross and Cromarty, Scotland, 19 February 1792; d. London, England, 22 October 1871), geology.

    Cambrian but incorporated it too into his Silurian.

In 1846 Murchison was knighted and served as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; and in 1849 his work was recognized by the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal. He later published an updated and more popular version of his work as Siluria (1854), expressly in order to deliver a “knock-down blow” (the aggressive metaphor is characteristic) to those, like Lyell, who still denied the reality of organic progression. The book also contained an assessment of the world's probable resources of gold, designed to reassure those who feared that the recent Australian gold rush presaged a slump in that metal's monetary value. In 1855 he succeeded de la Beche as director general of the Geological Survey of Great Britain (thus becoming a professional scientist for the first time), and in 1856 he was appointed to a royal commission to report on the nation's coal reserves.

From the 1840's Murchison became increasingly rigid and intolerant of scientific innovation. He opposed the glacial theory of Louis Agassiz and continued to assert that icebergs alone had been responsible for the transport of erratic blocks (“drift”) long after most other geologists had accepted at least a modified glacialism: under his influence the Geological Survey's maps long continued to use the term “drift” for glacial and postglacial deposits. Murchison's last major fieldwork, in 1858-1860, was devoted to arguing that the Moine schists of the northwestern Highlands were Silurian sediments, although he had always favored relatively catastrophist interpretations of mountain tectonics and had been convinced a decade earlier of the reality of large-scale thrusting in the Alps. He was totally opposed to Darwin's evolutionary theory.

Murchison retired temporarily from the council of the Geological Society in 1863 and was therefore eligible to be awarded the Wollaston Medal the following year. He was created a baronet in 1866. He had earlier been one of the founders of the Royal Geographical Society and was for many years its president. Indeed, despite his post with the Geological Survey, he was better known as a geographer than as a geologist in his later years, being prominent in the support of David Livingstone's and other expeditions. The Murchison Falls of the Nile in Uganda are named after him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following are the more important of Murchison's published works: “On the Coal-Field of Brora in Sutherlandshire, and on Some Other Stratified Deposits in the North of Scotland,” in Transactions of the Geological Society of London, 2nd ser., 2, pt. 2 (1829), 293-326; “A Sketch of the Structure of the Eastern Alps ...,” ibid., 3, pt. 2 (1832), 301-420, written with Adam Sedgwick; The Silurian System, Founded on Geological Researches in the Counties of Salop, Hereford, Radnor, Montgomery, Caermarthen, Brecon, Pembroke, Monmouth, Gloucester, Worcester, and Stafford; With Descriptions of the Coal-Fields and Overlying Formations (London, 1839); “Classification of the Older Rocks of Devonshire and Cornwall,” in Philosophical Magazine, 14 (1839), 242-260, written with Adam Sedgwick; “On the Classification and Distribution of the Older or Palaeozoic Rocks of the North of Germany and of Belgium, as Compared With Formations of the Same Age in the British Isle,” in Transactions of the Geological Society of London, 2nd ser., 6, pt. 2 (1842), 221-302, written with Adam Sedgwick; and The Geology of Russia in Europe and the Ural Mountains, 2 vols. (London-Paris, 1845), written with Édouard de Verneuil and Alexander von Keyserling--Murchison wrote the stratigraphy in vol. I.

See also “On the Palaeozoic Deposits of Scandinavia and the Baltic Provinces of Russia, and Their Relations to Azoic or More Ancient Crystalline Rocks; With an Account of Some Great Features of Dislocation and Metamorphism Along Their Northern Frontiers,” in Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 1 (1845), 467-494; “On the Meaning Originally Attached to the Term ‘Cambrian System,’ and on the Evidences Since Obtained of Its Being Geologically Synonymous With the Previously Established Term ‘Lower Silurian,’” ibid., 3 (1847), 165-179; “On the Geological Structure of the Alps, Apennines and Carpathians, More Especially to Prove a Transition From Secondary to Tertiary Rocks, and the Development of Eocene Deposits in Southern Europe,” ibid., 5 (1849), 157-312; Siluria. The History of the Oldest Known Rocks Containing Organic Remains, With a Brief Sketch of the Distribution of Gold Over the Earth (London, 1854); and “On the Succession of the Older Rocks in the Northernmost Counties of Scotland; With Some Observations on the Orkney and Shetland Islands,” in Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 15 (1859), 353-418.

Murchison's field notebooks and a collection of his scientific correspondence are in the library of the Geological Society of London. Material in the Institute of Geological Sciences, London (formerly Geological Survey), is described by John C. Thackray, “Essential Source-Material of Roderick Murchison,” in Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, 6, pt. 3 (1972), 162-170.

Some excerpts from Murchison's journals and letters are published in the only full-length biography, Archibald Geikie, Life of Sir Roderick Murchison ... Based on His Journals and Letters With Notices of His Scientific Contemporaries and a Sketch of the Rise and Growth of Palaeozoic Geology in Britain, 2 vols. (London, 1875), which also includes a fairly full list of Murchison's publications.

M. J. S. RUDWICK