Editing Benjamin Neeve Peach - biographical information

== Benjamin Neeve Peach - biographical information ==

==Timeline==

{| class="wikitable"

| 1842 || Born September 6th at Gorran Haven, Cornwall.
|-
| || Son of C.W. Peach of the Coastguard Service, a keen naturalist and fossil collector. In 1849 transferred to Scotland. 1854 proved Durness Limestone – fossilferous. Murchison in appreciation completed education of B.N. Peach at Royal School of Mines (1859 -), studied under Huxley and Ramsay.
|-
| 1862 || Joined Geological Survey as Assistant Geologist.
|-
| || First official duty, determination of fossils in the London office under Salter. Transferred to Scotland. Became associated with James Geikie and John Young in mapping glacial deposits of the Lothians. Noted occurrence of Highland rocks in drifts of the Lammermuirs.
|-
| ||Surveyed Scottish Coalfields, large areas of Old Red Sandstone with associated volcanics and eastern part of Southern Uplands.
|-
| 1868 || Promoted to Geologist.
|-
| 1879 || Appointed Acting Palaeontologist in Scotland in addition to fieldwork.
|-
| 1882 || District Surveyor.
|-
| 1883 || Given charge of survey of North West Highlands.
|-
| 1888 || Re-examination of Southern Uplands began. Peach determined large collection of graptolites (proved Lapworth’s sequence).
|-
| 1892 || Received Murchison’s Centenary Prize. Elected F.R.S.
|-
| 1903 || LL.D. (Edin).
|-
| 1905 || Retired. Worked on monograph on “The Higher Crustacea of Carboniferous rocks of Scotland”.
|-
| 1926 || Died January 29th.
|-
| ||Awards: Wollaston Fund; Murchison Medal; Wollaston Medal; Neill Medal (R.S.E.)
|}

== Biographies and obituaries ==

{| class="wikitable"
| 1926 || Evans, J.W. Obituary - Benjamin Neeve Peach, LL.D., F.R.S. [In Anniversary Address.]. Proceedings of the Geological Society in Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. v. 82 p.xlvi-xlix. 1926
|-
| 1926 || Obituary - Benjamin Neeve Peach. Born 6th September 1842, died 29th January 1926. Geologists Magazine. Whole Series. v. 63 p.187-190. 1926
|-
| 1928 || Greenly, Edward., . Benjamin Neeve Peach: a study. [Obituary.]. Transactions of the Edinburgh Geological Society. v. 12 p.1-11. 1928
|-
| 1926 || Proceedings Royal Society (1926) (B.C.)
|-
| 1926 || “Glasgow Herald” (January 30ty 1926)
|-
| 1926 || “Scotsman” (January 30th 1926)
|-
| 1926 || Geological Magazine (1926) p. 187
|}

== Ben Peach's Scotland, Landscape sketches by a Victorian geologist ==

This text is derived from the booklet written by Angela Anderson and published by the Institute of Geological Sciences, 1970.

=== Early years ===

There can be few names in the history of Scottish geology better known than that of Ben Peach, whose classic work in the Geological Survey of Scotland from 1862 to 1905 laid the foundations for so much of our present understanding of the geological structure of this country.

Ben Peach was not a Scot by birth or ancestry but was born of an East Anglian family living in Gorran Haven, a small fishing village in Cornwall. His father, Charles Peach, served as an officer in the Coastguard Service but was also a distinguished amateur naturalist and geologist, with a wide circle of friends both scientific and literary. Peach senior was the first to discover fossils in the quartzites near Gorran Haven and he wrote to Sir Roderick Murchison, then Director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, suggesting that they were Lower Silurian in age, the first evidence of any rocks older than Devonian to be found in southwest England. Murchison, whose great work was the Silurian System, replied cautiously suggesting a possible misidentification, but Peach senior banished all doubt by sealing his next letter with a cast of the diagnostic species. Young Ben was therefore introduced to geology at an early age and he and his brothers often accompanied their father on his geological excursions. When Charles Peach was promoted to Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, in 1849 the boys’ interests and knowledge were extended greatly, for they learned not only about the local rocks but also about marine life and sea birds.

A further promotion took the family to Wick in Caithness in 1852 and young Ben’s education continued at Wick Academy, where an imaginative rector fostered his natural talents further. Living in Thurso at this time was one Robert Dick, a baker by trade, but a self-taught botanist, geologist and palaeontologist of outstanding merit. It was not long before Peach senior recognized a kindred spirit and the two men became close friends. Their long discussions of their mutual interests stimulated young Ben still further and he began to explore the countryside on his own.

In 1854 Peach senior paid a visit to Durness on the north coast of Sutherland to ‘receive a wreck’, and there he noticed poorly preserved fossils in the local limestone. He duly informed Murchison and the discovery reawoke general interest in the Northwest Highlands, more especially when a subsequent visit in 1857 yielded better specimens of Lower Silurian age. Murchison felt so indebted to his friend that he undertook to send Ben to the Royal School of Mines when the young man reached the age of seventeen. Among Ben’s new teachers were the renowned glaciologist and structural geologist Ramsey and Darwin’s champion Thomas Huxley. Three years later in 1862 Ben, who had distinguished himself as ‘an able student’, graduated and was appointed by Murchison to his newly formed Geological Survey of Scotland, as their fourth member of staff. Although Peach senior’s friendship with Murchison was largely instrumental in securing Ben’s appointment to the Survey, Murchison was clearly impressed by the young man and time proved his faith to have been amply justified.

=== Geological Survey days ===

Ben Peach’s first work for the Survey involved identifying Carboniferous fossils from Fife and the surveying of coalfields. From there he moved to Old Red Sandstone formations and then on to the complex Ordovician and Silurian rocks of the Southern Uplands of Scotland. In the last work he was joined, five years after his first appointment, by John Horne, with whom his name is now inseparably linked as a result of their outstanding work together on the Southern Uplands and the Northwest Highlands of Scotland. A large number of maps and the two huge memoirs of 1899 and 1907 were the result of this collaboration, together with several articles published in the learned journals of the day. This remarkable partnership lasted throughout the whole of their lives: they became known to their colleagues as Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins. As it turned out, the partnership proved to be immensely beneficial to the understanding of Scottish geology. It is a reasonable generality that scientific minds tend to one or other of two extremes, the intuitive and the logical and Peach’s ways of thought were intuitive. He could solve a complex problem very rapidly and would only call upon minutely detailed work to confirm the hypothesis later. But thinking such as this is not always well founded and can even be superficial, with the ideas generated not always worked out in complete detail. Indeed some superficiality is occasionally evident in Peach’s work, and it is on record that with him spells of frenzied activity were sometimes followed by periods of total indolence. Sir Edward Bailey later wrote of him:

‘Peach in matters geological could scarcely read or write; and in all directions found correspondence an anathema. Apart from this use of the picture books on palaeontology, Peach depended for his knowledge of the work of other men upon his supreme power of conversation; and if he had not had companions like Archibald Geikie and John Horne to record his ideas he would today (1952) be little more than a tradition.’

While this is an unnecessarily harsh judgement on Peach and ignores his capacity for meticulous and detailed work (as, for example, his Monograph on Higher Crustacea of 1908) it must be admitted that it was Horne who actually wrote the Memoirs and it is quite possible that Peach, left to himself, would never have written up his work at all! Horne, in fact, was the ideal complement to Peach. He had a logical mind and was a careful, accurate and systematic worker. Though lacking Peach’s imagination he had the capacity to organize the mapping programme and write up the memoirs afterwards.
=
== Northwest Highlands ===

Peach and Horne, who worked together for forty years, first went to the Northwest Highlands, the scene of their most famous work, in 1883. Peach was then forty years old. They were sent by Archibald Geikie to resolve a long standing controversy about the structure of the area. Murchison had believed that the fossiliferous Cambro-Ordovician Durness Limestone passed conformably upwards into the ‘Eastern’ schists of which a large part of the Northern Highlands are formed. Nicol was the main exponent of the opposition and pointed out that the metamorphosed schists must be older than the unmetamorphosed limestones and that the junction was a steep fault. Since it could easily be demonstrated in the field that the junction is almost horizontal, Murchison’s views were held to be correct. In 1883 both Calloway and Lapworth suggested that the junction was a low-angle tectonic thrust, and this idea was now being given serious consideration by Geikie. It was during their first season of field mapping in the region round Durness and Eriboll that Peach recorded the true situation. Instead of the simple conformity which Murchison had suggested, there were gigantic structures of a kind never before encountered in the British Isles. The Eastern (Moine) Schists had been thrust westwards by a series of large-scale low-angled faults over the unmoved foreland rocks of ancient Lewisian gneiss and their cover of Late Precambrian Torridonian sandstone and Cambro-Ordovician limestones. During this process a series of smaller faults (imbricate structures) had been produced en-echelon in the underlying foreland and cover rocks. The thrust zone was eventually traced in the field from Eriboll to Skye. These well exposed structures now seem easily recognizable, but it was perhaps the most spectacular discovery of all time in British geology. By 1884 Murchison’s views on the succession had to be abandoned in view of the rapidly accumulating evidence against them. Peach was somewhat reluctant to overturn Murchison’s theory, for he felt a debt of gratitude to Murchison and greatly respected the old man.

A further discovery during these years was the existence of large numbers of trilobites of the genus Olenellus in the basal Cambrian rocks of the foreland. These fossils not only gave a Lower Cambrian age to the basal sequence, but confirmed the American affinities of the faunal assemblages there. In these days when rifting apart of the former Euro-American continent is readily accepted by most geologists, one wonders what Peach and Horne thought of 'American' trilobites in Scotland. Peach described the trilobites in two papers in 1892 and 1894 and he himself drew the very fine illustrations contained in them.

=== Southern Uplands ===

While the Highland work was still going on, in 1888 Peach and Horne resumed their work on the Southern Uplands. In 1878 and subsequent years, Lapworth had shown that the original survey of the Ordovician and Silurian was unsatisfatory. Peach and Horne began their revision with the Moffat sheet (16) and the Loch Doon sheet (8), which had been surveyed but not published. These sheets were then issued in 1889 and 1893. Thereafter, at odd times during the autumn and spring seasons, when work was impossible on their Highland ground, they gradually extended their search and made exhaustive examination of most of the important field exposures, adding notes and lines to the original six-inch maps. Peach made himself an authority on the palaeontology, in particular the graptolites and identified them with precision and accuracy. He also drew up the cross-sections with which the great Memoir of 1899 is illustrated. Horne, meanwhile, wrote the text and the work on the petrology of the igneous rocks was done by Teall. Though produced under less than ideal conditions the Memoir stood for fifty years before any of its ideas were challenged: surely a great tribute to the men who produced it.

=== Retirement ===

Peach retired from the Geological Survey in September 1905 after serving for forty-three years. His retirement gave him time to pursue at his leisure a line of research that had always fascinated him since his early days with Huxley at the Royal School of Mines – the technical description and illustration of fossils, and in particular the Scottish Carboniferous crustaceans. Peach was a very competent palaeontologist, a fact that tends to be overshadowed by his more famous Highland work. It was he who identified most of the fossils in the Survey Memoirs, the most notable being the Lower Cambrian tribolite fauna of the Northwest Highlands and it was to be eighty years before they were redescribed. His friend and colleague Edward Greenly records how, even in the euphoric days of the Moine Thrust discovery, Peach had growled, ‘but give me something that has once been alive!’

As a man of much sympathy for all living things, he found their dead remains a source of endless fascination, especially those of crustaceans. At various horizons in the Scottish Carboniferous there occur sporadically, isolated but very well preserved faunas of ‘shrimps’, probably of freshwater origin. Throughout the 1880s and 90s collections of these crustaceans had accumulated and Peach, being Acting Palaeontologist for the Survey, became custodian of ‘these treasures’ as he called them. Several detailed papers emerged, culminating in his Monograph of 1908, with page after page of technical description and twenty plates executed with his usual artistic flair. He has been criticized for over-interpretation and for drawing structures which were not really there. But he knew a great deal about modern crustaceans and theory may have led him to draw in structures which were not there in fact. However, comparison of his drawings with the original specimens shows that these lapses were few and in all other respects the drawings are executed with meticulous care and accuracy.

This fine Monograph of 1908 was Peach’s last major work yet he remained as enthusiastic as ever with all aspects of geology until the end of his days. Greenly, who visited him six months before his death in 1926, tells how Peach, then a sick old man, became so excited about the opportunity to discuss geological theories with his visitor that the grim-faced landlady had to eject poor Greenly while Peach’s voice, still declaiming geology, pursued them down the stairs!

=== Peach as artist ===

There was another facet of the genius of Ben Peach implicit in much of what has already been said. He was a very good artist in the romantic Victorian manner. His field notebooks and the backs of his field maps are covered with monochrome paintings in brush and ink, a few watercolour paintings and several sketches in both pen and pencil. His love for mountains and trees is clearly demonstrated in the many scenic views exhibited in the Scottish headquarters of the British Geological Survey. In these, aesthetic sense is combined with geological insight. Comparing the pictures with modern photographs shows that Peach took little artistic licence; and never enough to make the landscapes unrecognizable to those who are familiar with the scenery of the Northwest Highlands. He was a compulsive artist, for his notebooks contain, in addition to the landscapes, many sketches of any other things he saw around him, and cows, sheep, cats, dogs and people are portrayed often with a mischievous sense of humour. His drawings number over two hundred, and this collection depicts a tour of the Northwest Highlands and the Southern Uplands as seen through the eyes of a great man — a well loved man and a well respected geologist. This precious legacy which has come down to us gives a greater insight than all the many eulogies into the real Benjamin Neeve Peach.

== Ben Peach — a fishy ditty ==
(Sung at the 1929 Edinburgh Geologists Annual Dinner)

D’ye ken Ben Peach with his shoulders broad
His dimpled cheeks and his smiling nod
D’ye ken Ben Peach with his reel and his rod
As he starts for the loch in the morning.

Chorus
For the whirr of his reel brought the fishes from their bed
And the swish of his line high over his head
As they hurried up in shoals to be all struck dead
By a wave of his wand in the morning.

Yes, I ken Ben Peach and Jock Scott too
The mallard wing and the black Zulu
You should see Ben Peach on Loch Kylesku
With a shark on his line in the morning.

Chorus..... For etc

He lived at Durness for many a day
By the big cave of Smoo at Sango Bay
And was once nearly slain in a furious fray
With a Frenchman at one in the morning.

Chorus..... For etc

He hunted for old crabs in the Cave of Smoo
And for beasties long hidden from the public view
Though pickled well in lime all too hard to stew
For his breakfast the following morning.

Chorus..... For etc

He tried camp life on wild Ben More
But the skies shed tears in a solid steady pour
So he curled up on the floor, and gave a solemn snore
Till seventeen o'clock in the morning.

Chorus..... For etc

And at last he landed many a degree
Both an F.R.S. and an LL.D.,
So here’s to the memory of B.N.P.,
And the things that he caught in the morning.

Chorus..... For etc
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-{{Pioneers}}
-[[File:P613158.jpg|thumb|B.N.Peach.  Photograph taken c.1912. (A.G. Stenhouse). BGS Photo P613158.]]
-[[File:P575813.jpg|thumb|B.N.Peach. Probably c.1862 when he first joined the Geological Survey,aged 19. BGS photo P575813.]]
 == Benjamin Neeve Peach - biographical information ==
@@ Line 48: / Line 43: @@
 | 1926 || Obituary - Benjamin Neeve Peach. Born 6th September 1842, died 29th January 1926. Geologists Magazine. Whole Series. v. 63 p.187-190. 1926
 |-
-| 1928 || Greenly, Edward, Benjamin Neeve Peach: a study. [Obituary.]. Transactions of the Edinburgh Geological Society. v. 12 p.1-11. 1928
+| 1928 || Greenly, Edward., . Benjamin Neeve Peach: a study. [Obituary.]. Transactions of the Edinburgh Geological Society. v. 12 p.1-11. 1928
 |-
 | 1926 || Proceedings Royal Society (1926) (B.C.)
@@ Line 57: / Line 52: @@
 |-
 | 1926 || Geological Magazine (1926) p. 187
-|-
-| 2015 ||[http://edinburghgeolsoc.org/eg_pdfs/issue57_peach.pdf Benjamin Neeve Peach (1842-1926)]John Mendum and Anne Burgess Edinburgh Geologist No 57
-|}
-== Photographs ==
-A gallery of portraits and group photographs with Ben Peach in can be found on [http://geoscenic.bgs.ac.uk/asset-bank/action/quickSearch?CSRF=LsEzhK6XNQqFhPurfBgQ&newSearch=true&quickSearch=true&includeImplicitCategoryMembers=true&keywords=peach+portrait GeoScenic]
-A gallery of his drawings and paintings can also be found on [http://geoscenic.bgs.ac.uk/asset-bank/action/browseItems?categoryId=1428 GeoScenic].
-[[File:P612884.jpg|600px|Stack of Glencoul - watercolour sketch by Ben Peach]]
-== Archives ==
-A brief listing of Ben Peach related archives held at BGS. Also consult  the [https://www.bgs.ac.uk/services/NGDC/records/archive.html BGS Archives online catalogue]
-{| class="wikitable"
-! ARCHIVE NO !! TEMP SORT TITLE
-|-
-| LSA/236 || Strathpeffer mineral water supply, report by Peach and Horne.
-|-
-| LSA/361.2.059 || Ben Peach - a Fishy Ditty. A song written in recognition of B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.075 || Lesmahagow in the olden time by B.N. Peach. This is a drawing in ink of two crustaceans wearing clothes meeting. The male is doffing his cap while the female curtsies.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.005 || The Merrick, a song composed and performed by B.N. Peach at the Annual Dinner of 16th February 1869.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.047 || A charcoal and colour drawing of a courting couple walking in the country. Caption reads Oh! happy love when love like this is found.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.045 || A drawing of a boat containing three men out at sea during rough weather, one of the men is being very ill over the side of the boat. The caption reads Jas. Craik proceeding to geologize the big and wee scones! Drawn by B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.076 || A pencil drawing of a small dog running away from the butchers shop with sausages in its mouth hotly pursued by the Butcher, a passerby looks on. The drawing was done by B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.057 || A pencil drawing of the profile of a woman entitled His ideal by B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.038 || A watercolour painting of a flock of sheep on a wooded hillside.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.046 || An ink drawing of Loch Doon by B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.052 || An ink drawing of some apes and monkeys. The main character is sitting smoking a pipe while another is preening him. The sketch is named Men and brethren and was drawn by B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.048 || An ink drawing of two mice relaxing unaware that a cat is watching them. Caption read  Where ignorance is blind. Drawn by B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| LSA/151.1 || Arthurs seat geological map by B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| LSA/151.2 || Calton Hill geological map by B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| LSA/328 || Highland and Southern Upland structures and movements, notes on.
-|-
-| LSA/167 || Highland border rocks, Southern Upland structures, ms.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.019 || Ink and colour wash painting of cliffs meeting the sea.
-|-
-| LSA/361.2.005 || Ink caricature of B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| GSM1/320 || Letters from A. Geikie.
-|-
-| GSM1/447 || Letters from A. Strahan.
-|-
-| GSM1/420 || Letters from A.C. Ramsay.
-|-
-| GSM1/382 || Letters from A.I. MacConnochie.
-|-
-| GSM1/520 || Letters from C. Lapworth.
-|-
-| GSM1/335 || Letters from C.E. Hawkins.
-|-
-| GSM1/272 || Letters from C.T. Clough.
-|-
-| GSM1/527 || Letters from C.W. Peach.
-|-
-| GSM1/354 || Letters from D.R. Irvine.
-|-
-| GSM1/246 || Letters from E. Anderson.
-|-
-| GSM1/255 || Letters from E. Best.
-|-
-| GSM1/398 || Letters from E. Newton.
-|-
-| GSM1/251 || Letters from G. Barrow.
-|-
-| GSM1/392 || Letters from H. Miller (Jun).
-|-
-| GSM1/478 || Letters from H.B. Woodward.
-|-
-| GSM1/347 || Letters from H.H. Howell.
-|-
-| GSM1/265 || Letters from H.M. Cadell.
-|-
-| GSM1/441 || Letters from H.M. Skae.
-|-
-| GSM1/254 || Letters from J. Bennie.
-|-
-| GSM1/278 || Letters from J. Croll.
-|-
-| GSM1/321 || Letters from J. Geikie.
-|-
-| GSM1/345 || Letters from J. Horne.
-|-
-| GSM1/377 || Letters from J. Linn.
-|-
-| GSM1/337 || Letters from J.B. Hill.
-|-
-| GSM1/463 || Letters from J.C. Ward.
-|-
-| GSM1/492 || Letters from J.F. Blake.
-|-
-| GSM1/325 || Letters from J.G. Goodchild.
-|-
-| GSM1/452 || Letters from J.J.H. Teall.
-|-
-| GSM1/284 || Letters from J.R. Dakyns.
-|-
-| GSM1/476 || Letters from J.S.G. Wilson.
-|-
-| GSM1/338 || Letters from L.W. Hinxman.
-|-
-| GSM1/384 || Letters from M. MacGregor.
-|-
-| GSM1/495 || Letters from P.B. Brodie.
-|-
-| GSM1/306 || Letters from R. Etheridge.
-|-
-| GSM1/350 || Letters from R. Hunt.
-|-
-| GSM1/519 || Letters from R. Kidston.
-|-
-| GSM1/380 || Letters from R. Lunn.
-|-
-| GSM1/540 || Letters from R.H. Traquair.
-|-
-| GSM1/355 || Letters from R.L. Jack.
-|-
-| GSM1/422 || Letters from T. Reeks.
-|-
-| GSM1/407 || Letters from various friends and colleagues.
-|-
-| GSM1/330 || Letters from W. Gunn.
-|-
-| GSM1/458 || Letters from W. Traill.
-|-
-| GSM1/445 || Letters from W.J. Sollas.
-|-
-| GSM1/248 || Letters from W.T. Aveline.
-|-
-| GSM1/407 || Letters to J. Horne, J.S. Flett, J. Geikie and others.
-|-
-| LSA/327 || Lewisian rocks affected by post-Cambrian movements, ts paper.
-|-
-| IGS1/602 || Manuscript on anthropods, geology and glaciation of Scotland.
-|-
-| GSM1/8 || Minutes on his appointment.
-|-
-| LSA/329 || Moine schists, origin of the: ts paper by B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| IGS1/1221 || Notices of election to learned societies.
-|-
-| LSA/31 || Orkneys field map, holiday work by B.N. Peach and J.Horne.
-|-
-| GSM2/512 || Papers about the Peach and Horne memorial.
-|-
-| LSA/126 || Peach, B.N., field notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
-|-
-| LSA/361.2.013 || Photograph of B.N. Peach and J. Horne on board ship in 1910.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.096 || Photograph of B.N. Peach and J. Horne studying rocks.
-|-
-| LSA/361.2.029 || Photograph of the entire party of the Assynt Excursion, taken outside the Inchnadamph Hotel during September 1912. Excursion of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting held in Dundee.
-|-
-| LSA/361.2.028 || Photograph of the Scottish Survey Officers outside the Inchnadamph Hotel, while taking part in the Assynt Excursion led by B.N.  Peach and J. Horne during September 1912. Excursion of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting held in
-|-
-| LSA/361.2.004 || Photograph taken of B.N. Peach, about 1912 by A.G. Stenhouse and presented to the Survey.
-|-
-| IGS1/639 || Photograph.
-|-
-| IGS1/843 || Poem about him.
-|-
-| LSA/5 || Scotland one-inch sheet 39 explanation by B.N. Peach.
-|-
-| LSA/6 || Scotland one-inch sheets 30, 38, 39, 40 and 47 sections and explanation.
-|-
-| LSA/69.5 || Stirling and Clackmannan vertical sections.
-|-
-| LSA/361.2.025 || The Assynt Excursion conducted by B.N. Peach and J. Horne from 11th to 18th September 1912 for the British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting held in Dundee. This entry in a diary of events and travels over the week while on excursion.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.018 || Water colour painting by B.N. Peach of Quinag.
-|-
-| LSA/361.1.020 || Water colour painting of a landscape showing hills and loch.
 |}
-== B. N. Peach, A.R.S.M., LL.D., F.R.S.,* President 1905-1908. ==
+== Ben Peach's Scotland, Landscape sketches by a Victorian geologist ==
-'''Extract from: History of the Geological Society of Glasgow 1858-1908, with biographical notes of prominent members. Glasgow: Published by the Society, 1908.  (Public domain, copied from the Internet Archive)'''
-I was born on 6th September, 1842, at Gorran Haven, a fishing village about three miles from Mevagissey, on the south coast of Cornwall. It was while stationed at Gorran Haven as an officer in the Coastguard that my father, the late Charles William Peach, discovered Lower Silurian fossils in the quartzites there that fixed the geological horizon of those rocks. My father having been transferred to H.M. Customs at Fowey, at the age of two I went with my parents to live at Fowey, a lovely place situated at the mouth of the Fowey River, a little further east than Gorran, and which has now become quite a fashionable resort. During the five years I lived there I sometimes accompanied my father and brothers while they were collecting fossils from the Devonian rocks, and can well remember two localities one, Punches Cross, at the mouth of Fowey Harbour, which yielded compressed specimens of a trilobite, Phacops, and the casts of pretty little shells, which I now know to belong to the genus BelleropTion. I also remember a cove situated about half-way between Fowey and Looe, where fragments of fish were to be seen in the pebbles of lustrous phyllites that make up the beach. (These fish remains have been determined as belonging to Pteraspis.)
-Being promoted to Peterhead in 1849, my father went there, leaving us (my mother and the family) at Fowey till the spring of 1850, when we joined him. At Peterhead I began the rudiments of my education at the Academy there. Another kind of education I got also, as I soon came to know the contents of nearly every rockpool along the shore for miles. Among other things, I can remember the finding of the nests of the "Horsefish" (local name for the fifteen-spined stickleback), and frequently found the male "Paddle cock" (as the lump sucker, Cyclopterus lumpus, is called there) stuck to the rock beside the lump of spawn deposited by his consort. My father at this time took up the collecting of algae very keenly, so that I became acquainted with the commoner species and some of the rarer ones. Under the guidance of Thomas Hutton, an employee of the Customs, who was a keen and expert boatman, fisherman, and cragsman, I was initiated into the secrets of the nesting places of sea fowl that frequent the rocky coast for some miles south of Buchan Ness, by Slains, Errol, and the Bullers of Buchan, and the Stack of Dunhuy. This is a favourite breeding station of innumerable gulls, guillemots, razorbills, puffins, and cormorants, as well as other birds. Under Hutton's care I soon developed a climbing head, and paid visits to the sitting birds on their ledges and in their burrows, and my fingers made practical acquaintance with the sharpness of the puffins' bills.
-My wonder was powerfully excited by the fact that the granite, which is the prevailing rock at Peterhead, remained hard or only broke up into shingle on the exposed coast, while in the sheltered harbour I saw it being dug out with the spade when the harbour was being deepened, the disposition of the minerals in the soft mass plainly showing that the rock had rotted in place.
-At the age of ten I left Peterhead and proceeded with my father and the rest to Wick, to which place he had been promoted. Here my education was continued at Wick Academy (founded by the "British Fisheries' Society"), and to the rector of the Academy, Patrick Smith, M.A., now deceased, I am indebted for a great deal more than mere book-learning. On the retirement of Mr. Smith I left school and went into a lawyer's office for a year, being too young to matriculate at the School of Mines, where my father, having been induced by Sir R. I. Murchison, resolved to send me with a view to my subsequent joining the Geological Survey.
-Sir Roderick Murchison, at the time of his visits to Caithness on the occasion of my father's discovery of Lower Silurian fossils of American facies in the Durness limestone, had observed the keen interest I took in my father's hunting for material for studying the marine zoology of Caithness, and also the finding of fossil fishes from the Caithness flagstones.
-I had also collected material from the broughs and "Picts' houses" near Wick, and was fortunate enough to find a special type of weaving comb and some stone vessels now in the Antiquarian Museum, Edinburgh.
-In 1859 I joined the Government School of Mines, then housed in the Museum of Practical Geology, 28 Jermyn Street, London, and came under the immediate influence and teaching of that brilliant band of illustrious men who then constituted the staff, viz., Sir R. I. Murchison, A. C. Ramsay, Huxley, Tyndall, Stokes, Hoffman, Warrington Smyth, Percy, and Salter, all now gone over to the majority, and of Sir A. Geikie, who afterwards became my chief while he was Director-General of the Geological Survey, and who, as President of the Royal Society, now holds the highest post to which a man of science can attain in our country.
-My subsequent career is briefly sketched by my old colleague, Dr. John Horne, whose friendship has been one of the greatest acquisitions of my life.
-[The next two paragraphs are taken from an article by Dr. Horne in the Geological Magazine, 1906.]
-"In September last B. N. Peach, F.R.S., retired from the Geological Survey, after a period of forty-three years' service. Joining the staff in 1862 as assistant geologist, after a distinguished career at the Eoyal School of Mines, he was engaged for the first few months in determining Carboniferous fossils from the county of Fife under Salter's supervision in the London office.<ref>28 Jermyn Street. Museum of Practical Geology.</ref> When favourable opportunities presented themselves during his subsequent career, he pursued this branch of research with keen fascination, impelled by the instinct of the naturalist, which he inherited from his gifted father. In the same year he was attached to the field staff in Scotland, then under the direction of Sir Andrew Eamsay, and in 1867 he was appointed geologist when a separate staff was organised for the northern part of the kingdom, under the directorship of Sir Archibald Geikie. Throughout his long career it has fallen to his lot to take a prominent part in mapping all the palaeozoic formations in Scotland, together with large areas of crystalline schists of the Highlands. In particular, the detailed work in the complicated region in the West of Sutherland and Ross was carried out under his immediate supervision. It is within the mark to state that no other geologist has acquired such a thorough mastery of the details of Scottish geology, exclusive of the rocks of Secondary and Tertiary age.
-"In 1879, after Mr. Etheridge, jun., had joined the geological department of the British Museum under Dr. H. Woodward, F.R.S., Dr. Peach, in addition to his field duties, was appointed Acting Palaeontologist on the Scottish staff. He was thus furnished with opportunities which he had long in view. He devoted special attention to the palaeozoic arthropoda, and, in addition to his purely official work, he published papers in the Transactions of the Royal Society, Edinburgh; the Geological Society, London; and the Royal Physical Society, Edinburgh. Among these papers we may particularly mention those dealing with the fossil scorpions of the Carboniferous and Silurian rocks of Scotland, and with the fauna of the Olenellus zone of the North-West Highlands. But the incessant demands of field work prevented him from carrying on his investigations as fully as he had hoped."
-My retirement from the Geological Survey on 6th September, 1905, gave me the desired leisure, and I have been enabled to work at my favourite subject. On the 28th October of this year (1908) there has been published as one of the "Memoirs of the Geological Survey" a monograph on the Higher Crustacea of the Carboniferous Rocks of Scotland, in which I describe forty species and varieties of Schizopods, twenty-three of which are new. The monograph is illustrated by twelve plates of figures reproduced from my own drawings by the collotype process. For the purposes of the memoir, I have examined over 2000 specimens belonging to the Geological Survey, as well as other collections, having made use, among others, of those made by our own fellows, viz., Mr. Dunlop and the late James Coutts, to each of whom I dedicate a species.
-Among the published results of my Survey work may be mentioned my share in the "Monograph on the Silurian Rocks of the South of Scotland" and "General Memoirs, North-West Highlands"
-I may say that I am prouder of my A.R.S.M. (Associate of the Royal School of Mines) than of any other of the distinctions that have been conferred on me.
-B. N. P.
-The contributions of Dr. Peach to our Transactions are as follows:
-"The Cambrian Fauna of the North-West Highlands." (Summary.) Vol. xii., p. 223.
-"Notes on a Specimen of Glyptoscorpius from the Coal Measures of Airdrie." Vol. xiii., pp. 1-3.
-<references />
-== Ben Peach's Scotland, landscape sketches by a Victorian geologist ==
 This text is derived from the booklet written by Angela Anderson and published by the Institute of Geological Sciences, 1970.
@@ Line 309: / Line 75: @@
 While this is an unnecessarily harsh judgement on Peach and ignores his capacity for meticulous and detailed work (as, for example, his Monograph on Higher Crustacea of 1908) it must be admitted that it was Horne who actually wrote the Memoirs and it is quite possible that Peach, left to himself, would never have written up his work at all! Horne, in fact, was the ideal complement to Peach. He had a logical mind and was a careful, accurate and systematic worker. Though lacking Peach’s imagination he had the capacity to organize the mapping programme and write up the memoirs afterwards.
+=
-=== Northwest Highlands ===
+== Northwest Highlands ===
 Peach and Horne, who worked together for forty years, first went to the Northwest Highlands, the scene of their most famous work, in 1883. Peach was then forty years old. They were sent by Archibald Geikie to resolve a long standing controversy about the structure of the area. Murchison had believed that the fossiliferous Cambro-Ordovician Durness Limestone passed conformably upwards into the ‘Eastern’ schists of which a large part of the Northern Highlands are formed. Nicol was the main exponent of the opposition and pointed out that the metamorphosed schists must be older than the unmetamorphosed limestones and that the junction was a steep fault. Since it could easily be demonstrated in the field that the junction is almost horizontal, Murchison’s views were held to be correct. In 1883 both Calloway and Lapworth suggested that the junction was a low-angle tectonic thrust, and this idea was now being given serious consideration by Geikie. It was during their first season of field mapping in the region round Durness and Eriboll that Peach recorded the true situation. Instead of the simple conformity which Murchison had suggested, there were gigantic structures of a kind never before encountered in the British Isles. The Eastern (Moine) Schists had been thrust westwards by a series of large-scale low-angled faults over the unmoved foreland rocks of ancient Lewisian gneiss and their cover of Late Precambrian Torridonian sandstone and Cambro-Ordovician limestones. During this process a series of smaller faults (imbricate structures) had been produced en-echelon in the underlying foreland and cover rocks. The thrust zone was eventually traced in the field from Eriboll to Skye. These well exposed structures now seem easily recognizable, but it was perhaps the most spectacular discovery of all time in British geology. By 1884 Murchison’s views on the succession had to be abandoned in view of the rapidly accumulating evidence against them. Peach was somewhat reluctant to overturn Murchison’s theory, for he felt a debt of gratitude to Murchison and greatly respected the old man.
@@ Line 321: / Line 87: @@
 === Retirement ===
-[[File:P585013.jpg|thumb|Ben Peach. BGS photo P585013.]]
 Peach retired from the Geological Survey in September 1905 after serving for forty-three years. His retirement gave him time to pursue at his leisure a line of research that had always fascinated him since his early days with Huxley at the Royal School of Mines – the technical description and illustration of fossils, and in particular the Scottish Carboniferous crustaceans. Peach was a very competent palaeontologist, a fact that tends to be overshadowed by his more famous Highland work. It was he who identified most of the fossils in the Survey Memoirs, the most notable being the Lower Cambrian tribolite fauna of the Northwest Highlands and it was to be eighty years before they were redescribed. His friend and colleague Edward Greenly records how, even in the euphoric days of the Moine Thrust discovery, Peach had growled, ‘but give me something that has once been alive!’
@@ Line 336: / Line 100: @@
 == Ben Peach — a fishy ditty ==
 (Sung at the 1929 Edinburgh Geologists Annual Dinner)
 D’ye ken Ben Peach with his shoulders broad
 His dimpled cheeks and his smiling nod
 D’ye ken Ben Peach with his reel and his rod
 As he starts for the loch in the morning.
+Chorus
-'''Chorus'''
+For the whirr of his reel brought the fishes from their bed
+And the swish of his line high over his head
-''For the whirr of his reel brought the fishes from their bed''
+As they hurried up in shoals to be all struck dead
+By a wave of his wand in the morning.
-''And the swish of his line high over his head''
-''As they hurried up in shoals to be all struck dead''
-''By a wave of his wand in the morning.''
 Yes, I ken Ben Peach and Jock Scott too
 The mallard wing and the black Zulu
 You should see Ben Peach on Loch Kylesku
 With a shark on his line in the morning.
+Chorus..... For etc
-'''Chorus..... For etc'''
 He lived at Durness for many a day
 By the big cave of Smoo at Sango Bay
 And was once nearly slain in a furious fray
 With a Frenchman at one in the morning.
+Chorus..... For etc
-'''Chorus..... For etc'''
 He hunted for old crabs in the Cave of Smoo
 And for beasties long hidden from the public view
 Though pickled well in lime all too hard to stew
 For his breakfast the following morning.
+Chorus..... For etc
-'''Chorus..... For etc'''
 He tried camp life on wild Ben More
 But the skies shed tears in a solid steady pour
 So he curled up on the floor, and gave a solemn snore
 Till seventeen o'clock in the morning.
+Chorus..... For etc
-'''Chorus..... For etc'''
 And at last he landed many a degree
 Both an F.R.S. and an LL.D.,
 So here’s to the memory of B.N.P.,
 And the things that he caught in the morning.
+Chorus..... For etc
-'''Chorus..... For etc'''
-[[Category:British geoscientists]]
-[[Category:Pioneers of the British Geological Survey]]