Andrew Crombie Ramsay

Background

Ramsay was born on January 31, 1814, at Glasgow, Scotland. Ramsay was the third child of William Ramsay, who owned a dye business. The family was well educated and French was spoken at the breakfast table on one morning a week and passages from famous authors read on other mornings. In 1827 Ramsay's father died.

Education

At nine or ten years of age, Ramsay was removed from Glasgow and sent to the Parish School at Saltcoats, a little village on the coast of Ayrshire. Then he attended Glasgow Grammar School but after his father's death, he had to leave it for a job at the cotton broker’s office. He was for a time actually engaged in business, but from spending his holidays in Arran he became interested in the study of the rocks of that island, and was thus led to acquire the rudiments of geology. A geological model of Arran, made by him on the scale of two inches to the mile, was exhibited at the meeting of the British Association at Glasgow in 1840, and attracted the notice of Roderick Murchison, with the result that he received from Henry De la Beche an appointment on the Geological Survey.

Career

In 1840 Ramsay attracted the notice of Roderick Murchison, with the result that he received from Henry De la Beche an appointment on the Geological Survey, on which he served for forty years, from 1841 to 1881. He was first stationed at Tenby, and to that circumstance may be attributed the fact that so much of his geological work dealt with Wales. His first book, The Geology of the Isle of Arran, was published in 1841.

In 1845 he became a local director for Great Britain, but he continued to carry on a certain amount of field-work until 1854. To the first volume of the Memoirs of the Geological Survey (1846) he contributed a now classic essay, On the Denudation of South Wales and the Adjacent Counties of England, in which he advocated the power of the sea to form great plains of denudation, although at the time he underestimated the influence of subaerial agents in sculpturing the scenery.

In 1866 he published The Geology of North Wales (volume iii of the Memoirs), of which a second edition was published in 1881. He was chosen as a professor of geology at University College, London, in 1848, and afterwards as a lecturer in the same subject at the Royal School of Mines in 1851.

Eleven years later he was elected to the presidential chair of the Geological Society of London, and in 1872 he succeeded Murchison as director-general of the Geological Survey.

In 1880 he acted as president of the British Association at Swansea, and in the following year retired from the public service, receiving at the same time the honor of knighthood. In 1860 he published a book entitled The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales. The study of this subject led him to discuss the Glacial Origin of Certain Lakes in Switzerland, the Black Forest, &c.

He dealt also with the origin of The Red Rocks of England (1871) and The River Courses of England and Wales (1872).

He was especially interested in tracing out the causes which have determined the physical configuration of a district, and he devoted much attention to the effects produced by ice, his name is identified with the hypothesis, which, however, has never commanded general assent, that itt some cases lake basins have been scooped out by glaciers.

A master in the broader questions of stratigraphy and physical geology, he was a deal exponent of facts, but rather impatient of details, while his original and often bold theories, expressed both in lectures and in writings, stirred others with enthusiasm and undoubtedly exercised great influence on the progress of geology.

His lectures to working men, given in 1863 in the Museum of Practical Geology, formed the nucleus of his Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain (1894).

Achievements

• Sir Andrew Crombie Ramsay carried out important fieldwork in Wales and also was highly regarded for his teaching work at University College London and the Royal School of Mines.
  
  Another major contribution was his work on the origin of lakes: his controversial 1862 proposal that glaciers could hollow out lake basins even in the absence of earth movements was eventually accepted.
  
  He was appointed Director of the Geological Survey in 1871 and was in post until his retirement in 1881, receiving a knighthood in recognition of his services. He was also awarded a Royal medal in 1880 from the Royal Society, of which he became a fellow in 1862. He was also the recipient of the Neil prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1866, and of the Wollaston medal of the Geological Society of London in 1871.

Works

More photos

• book

  • On some of the glacial phaenomena of Canada and the north-eastern provinces of the United States during the Drift-period 1859
  • On The Erosion Of Valleys And Lakes: A Reply To Sir Roderick Murchison's Anniversary Address To The Geographical Society 1864
  • On The Glacial Origin Of Certain Lakes In Switzerland, The Black Forest, Great Britain, Sweden, North America, And Elsewhere 1862
  • The Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain 1863
  • Upon the Origin of Alpine and Italian Lakes, and upon glacial erosion...with an introduction and notes upon the American lakes 1889

Views

Ramsay postulated that Alpine valleys were created by rivers, then deepened and widened by ice, and finally modified by river action. His most exciting contention was that many large lake basins in the area formerly occupied by land ice had been scooped out by glacial action. This principle of glacial over-deepening did not command general assent until at least sixty years after its announcement. His contemporaries thought it of little significance, and Sir Archibald Geikie considered Ramsay’s elucidation of the Snowdonia region in northern Wales “a masterpiece of geological work and his own fittest and most enduring monument”.

Ramsay’s contributions to the knowledge of the physical development of the Rhine and of certain rivers in England and Wales proved of less importance and at best remain controversial, but they aided the cause of fluvialism. On the other hand, his ideas on glacial action, which caused tremendous contemporary disagreement, have for the most part been vindicated. Although at first skeptical of glaciation, after working in northern Wales he became, by 1850, the leading British advocate of glacial action. He went further and suggested that certain Permian conglomerates in the English Midlands had been transported by glacial action. These today are thought to have been deposited by flash floods in a semiarid environment, but Ramsay’s idea led to the universal acceptance of extensive glaciation in Gondwanaland during Permo-carboniferous times. In 1858 he revisted the Alps with John Tyndall and soon added important suggestions on the power of glacial erosion.

Ramsay was essentially a stratigrapher and geomorphologist, and showed little regard for paleontology and petrology. Apart from detailed local surveys, his main contributions to geology concern general denudation, the development of river systems, and glaciation. In these his bold theories had a great and lasting influence. His early professional studies were summarized in “On the Denudation of South Wales…” (1846), which is of outstanding importance for three reasons.

First, it demonstrated that the Paleozoic sedimentary strata were composed of fragments derived from older rocks, thus proving that the district had experienced immense denudation in early geological periods.

Second, it postulated the power of the sea to cut wide plains (of marine planation) on a stationary or subsiding land mass, as distinct from the theories of Charles Lyell, who applied marine action to a rising landmass and to dissection rather than planation.

Third, it emphasized for the first time the visual reconstruction of former folded surfaces and the statistical assessment of the amount of material removed by denudation.

Membership

Ramsay became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1862. He was also a member of the Geological Society of London and of the British Association at Swansea.

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  Royal Society of London , United Kingdom

  1862 - 1891

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  Geological Society of London , United Kingdom

Personality

Despite a few periods of nervous strain, Sir Ramsay is rightly held up as a delightful geologist, exuberant, a devotee and frequent quoter of the major English poets, eloquent, humorous, musical, and athletic. He traveled in Europe and America and was a keen climber.

Physical Characteristics: Ramsay suffered a few periods of nervous strain, one of which culminated in the removal of his left eye in 1878.

Interests

• music, poetry, English literature

• Sport & Clubs

  mountain climbing

Connections

In 1852 Ramsay married a daughter of the Reverend Chancellor Williams of Llanfairynghornwy, Anglesey; they had four daughters and one son.

Father:

William Ramsay

died 1827

mentor:

Roderick Murchison

colleague:

Archibald Geikie

Ramsay's younger colleague at the Geological Survey, Sir Archibald Geikie (1835–1924), who also wrote a biography of Murchison, published this memoir in 1895.

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 11
  1975
• Memoir of Sir Andrew Crombie Ramsay
  2011
• Encyclopaedia (Encyclopedia) Britannica Volume 22
  1969
• The History of the Study of Landforms
  2009
• The Quarterly Journal Of The Geological Society Of London Volume 48
  2015
• The first hundred years of the Geological survey of Great Britain
  1937
• Sheets of many colours: The mapping of Ireland's rocks, 1750-1890
  1983
• North from the Hook: 150 years of the Geological Survey of Ireland
  1995
• Down to earth: One hundred and fifty years of the British Geological Survey
  1985