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Sir William Edmond Logan

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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SIR WILLIAM EDMOND LOGAN (1798-1875), British geologist, was born in Montreal on the 10th of April 1798, of Scottish parents. He was educated partly in Montreal, and subsequently at the High School and university of Edinburgh, where Robert Jameson did much to excite his interest in geology. He was in a business house in London from 1817 to 1830. In 1831 he settled in Swansea to take charge of a colliery and some copper-smelting works, and here his interest in geology found abundant scope. He collected a great amount of information respecting the South Wales coal-field; and his data, which he had depicted on the 1-in. ordnance survey map, were generously placed at the disposal of the geological survey under Sir H. T. de la Beche and fully utilized. In 1840 Logan brought before the Geological Society of London his celebrated paper "On the character of the beds of clay lying immediately below the coal-seams of South Wales, and on the occurrence of coalboulders in the Pennant Grit of that district." He then pointed out that each coal-seam rests on an under-clay with rootlets of Stigmaria, and he expressed his opinion that the under-clay was the old soil in which grew the plants from which the coal was formed. To confirm this observation he visited America in 1841 and examined the coal-fields of Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, where he found the under-clay almost invariably present beneath the seams of coal. In 1842 he was appointed to take charge of the newly established geological survey in Canada, and he continued as director until 1869. During the earlier years of the survey he had many difficulties to surmount and privations to undergo, but the work was carried on with great tact and energy, and he spared no pains to make his reports trustworthy. He described the Laurentian rocks of the Laurentian mountains in Canada and of the Adirondacks in the state of New York, pointing out that they comprised an immense series of crystalline rocks, gneiss, mica-schist, quartzite and limestone, more than 30,000 ft. in thickness. The series was rightly recognized as representing the oldest type of rocks on the globe, but it is now known to be a complex of highly altered sedimentary and intrusive rocks; and the supposed oldest known fossil, the Eozoon described by Sir J. W. Dawson, is now regarded as a mineral structure. Logan was elected F.R.S. in 1851, and in 1856 was knighted. In the same year he was awarded the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society of London for his researches on the coal-strata, and for his excellent geological map of Canada. After his retirement in 1869, he returned to England, and eventually settled in South Wales. He died at Castle Malgwyn in Pembrokeshire, on the 22nd of June 1875.

See the Life, by B. J. Harrington (1883). (H. B. Wo.)