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Hugh Edwin Strickland

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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HUGH EDWIN STRICKLAND (1811-1853), English naturalist and geologist, was born at Righton, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, on the 2nd of March 1811, and was grandson of Sir George Strickland, Bart. As a lad he acquired a taste for natural history which dominated his life. He received his early education from private tutors and in 1829 entered Oriel College, Oxford. He attended the anatomical lectures of Dr John Kidd and the geological lectures of Dr W. Buckland and he became greatly interested both in zoology and geology. He graduated B.A. in 1831, and proceeded to M.A. in the following year. Returning to his home at Cracombe House, near Tewkesbury, he began to study the geology of the Vale of Evesham, communicating papers to the Geological Society of London (1833-1834). He also gave much attention to ornithology. Becoming acquainted with Murchison he was introduced to William John Hamilton (1805-1867) and accompanied him in 1835 in a journey through Asia Minor, the Thracian Bosporus and the Island of Zante. Mr Hamilton afterwards published the results of this journey and of a subsequent excursion by himself to Armenia in Researches in Asia Minor, Pontus and Armenia (1842). After his return in 1836 Strickland brought before the Geological Society several papers on the geology of the districts he had visited in southern Europe and Asia. He also described in detail the drift deposits in the counties of Worcester and Warwick, drawing particular attention to the fluviatile deposits of Cropthorne in which remains of hippopotamus, &c., were found. With Murchison he read before the Geological Society an important paper "On the Upper Formations of the New Red Sandstone System in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" ( Trans. Geol. Soc., 1840). In other papers he described the Bristol Bone-bed near Tewkesbury and the Ludlow Bone-bed of Woolhope. He was author likewise of ornithological memoirs communicated to the Zoological Society, the Annals and Magazine of Natural History and the British Association. He also drew up the report, in 1842, of a committee appointed by the British Association to consider the rules of zoological nomenclature. He was one of the founders of the Ray Society suggested in 1843 and established in 1844, the object being the publication of works on natural history which could not be undertaken by scientific societies or by publishers. For this society Strickland corrected, enlarged and edited the MS. of Agassiz for the Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae (1848). In 1845 he edited with J. Buckman a second and enlarged edition of Murchison's Outline of the Geology of the neighbourhood of Cheltenham. In 1846 he settled at Oxford, and two years later he issued in conjunction with Dr A. G. Melville a work on The Dodo and its kindred. In 1850 he was appointed deputy reader in geology at Oxford during the illness of Buckland, and in 1852 he was elected F.R.S. In the following year, after attending the meeting of the British Association at Hull, he went to examine the cuttings on the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire railway near Retford, and he was there knocked down and killed by a train on the 14th of September 1853. He was buried at Deerhurst church near Tewkesbury, where a memorial window was erected.

See Memoirs of H. E. Strickland, by Sir William Jardine, Bart. (1858).

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