Electronic edition published by Cultural Heritage Langauge Technologies (with permission from Charles Scribners and Sons) and funded by the National Science Foundation International Digital Libraries Program. This text has been proofread to a low degree of accuracy. It was converted to electronic form using data entry.
SCROPE, GEORGE JULIUS POULETT (b. London,
England, 10 March 1797; d. Fairlawn [near
Cobham], Surrey, England, 19 January 1876), geology.
Scrope was the son of John Poulett Thomson,
head of a firm engaged in trade with Russia, and
Charlotte Jacob. Scrope's younger brother was
Charles Edward Poulett Thomson, Lord Sydenham.
Scrope was educated at Harrow; at Pembroke
College, Oxford (1815-1816); and at St.
John's College, Cambridge (1816-1821). Upon
his marriage (22 March 1821) to Emma Phipps
Scrope, heiress of William Scrope, of Castle
Combe, Wiltshire, he assumed her name (which is
pronounced Scroop).
Scrope was elected to the Geological Society in
1824 and served as secretary in 1825; he was later
awarded the Society's Wollaston Medal (1867). He
was elected also to the Royal Society (1826) and
was founder and first president of the Wiltshire
Archaeological and Natural History Society
(1853-1855). From 1833 to 1868 he was a Liberal
member of Parliament for Stroud, Gloucestershire.
He was an advocate of free trade and various social
and economic reforms, especially the poor law, but
he took no part in parliamentary debate. He instead
wrote extensively on a variety of political
and economic subjects. He was said to have written
nearly seventy anonymous pamphlets, earning
him the nickname “Pamphlet Scrope.” About
1867, after the death of his wife, who had been an
invalid as the result of a riding accident soon after
their marriage, he sold Castle Combe and moved
to Fairlawn, near Cobham, Surrey. On 14 November
1867 he married Margaret Elizabeth Savage,
who survived him. There were no children from
either marriage.
Scrope's interest in geology was first aroused in
Italy by the sight of Vesuvius in continual eruption
during the winters of 1817-1818 and 1818-1819.
In 1819-1820 he visited Sicily and the Lipari Islands,
studying Mount Etna and Stromboli. On the
advice of Edward Clarke and Adam Sedgwick at
Cambridge, he studied the extinct volcanic region
of Auvergne in central France in the summer and
fall of 1821. He then went to northern Italy and
eventually to Naples, where he arrived in time to
observe the violent eruption of Vesuvius in October
1822. During his return to England in the
summer of 1823, he visited the volcanic regions of
the Eifel in Germany.
On the basis of his geological fieldwork, Scrope
wrote two books. The first book, Considerations
on Volcanos (1825), has been called “the earliest
systematic treatise on vulcanology.”1 It was poorly
received by geologists, since it put forth in a dogmatic
fashion hypotheses about every phase of
volcanic activity and concluded with a “new theory
of the earth.” At this time Scrope was an ardent
advocate of the theory of a cooling earth,
which implied that the frequency and intensity of
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions had declined
over geological time. He believed that the forces of
heat within the earth were still capable of producing,
on rare occasions, cataclysmic upheavals
(perhaps of whole mountain ranges or continents),
causing destructive diluvial waves. At the same
time he argued that
The laws or processes of nature we have every
reason to believe invariable. Their results from time
to time vary, according to the combinations of influential
circumstances [p. 242]. . . . Until, after a long
investigation, and with the most liberal allowances for
all possible variations, and an unlimited series of
ages, [present-day processes] have been found wholly
inadequate to the purpose, it would be the height of
absurdity to have recourse to any gratuitous and
unexampled hypothesis [pp. v-vi].
