Description
Charles Lapworth was born on 20th September 1842.

After training in Oxfordshire, he became a schoolmaster in Galashiels in 1864. It was shortly after this move to Scotland that he became interested in geology and he used his holidays and spare time to amble around the Border region. Although he was largely self-taught, the contributions he made to understanding the geology of the Southern Uplands were significant and his field work reached the stage of first publication in 1870. He observed the presence of fossils in strata that was previously thought to be uninhabitable. He recognised the importance of these graptolite fossils and used them to zone and correlate the rock sequences across the area. Realising that the maps he had were unsuitable, he constructed his own maps on a scale that would be large enough to depict the topographical terrain in small enough detail. As a direct result of his work, the entire area had to be remapped and reinterpreted.

In 1875 he was appointed to one of the assistant masterships in the Madras College, St Andrews, and in 1972 he was elected Fellow of the Geological Society. In 1897 he proposed the occurence of three distinct and separate faunas in the rocks. The lowest division was named ‘Cambrian’, the highest ‘Silurian’ and he named the middle division ‘Ordovician’.

In 1881 he became Professor of Geology and Physiography at the Mason College, Birmingham, and played a crucial part in the development of the College which resulted in the establishment of the University of Birmingham in 1900. Aberdeen University created him LL.D. in 1884 and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1888. In 1891 he was presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Society. He became part of the Council of the Geological Society in 1894 and received the Wollaston Medal in 1899 while in 1902 he became the society’s president. In 1905 he was awarded the Wilde Medal of the Manchester Philosophical Society and in 1912 he was made honoraray LL.D. of the University of Glasgow.

After an illness lasting several months, Charles Lapworth died on 13th March 1920.
17/06/2003
Created by: Tudor. Rebecca on 17/06/2003