ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COUNCIL 385

photographic illustrations of his monograph are a model for all palaeon­tologists. And it is these qualities together with clarity of thought whichmade him also a most effective administrator. His success in this field iswitnessed by the splendidly equipped and run Geology Department atBristol. The University owes him much, too, for the valuable work he didas Dean of the ScienceFaculty and as chairman of the University's GardensCommittee.

It was as an administrator too that Whittard shone when he surprisingly,and as a complete tiro, took over from Professor W. B. R. King theorganisation of sub-marine geology in the English Channel and the WesternApproaches in 1957; though it was his enthusiasm and full participationin the work at sea which enabled him to win the help and co-operation ofall those who were so quickly and effectively involved.

In the last few years, as he approached and passed his sixtieth birthday,Whittard's energy and drive were phenomenal. Still busy completing hisShelve monograph and painstakingly editing a series of volumes of theLexicon of Stratigraphy, still playing his full part in University affairs, hemanaged to continue to lead the sub-marine work and finally to organisethe remarkable international Colston Symposium on sub-marine geologyheld in Bristol in 1965.

Those who knew him well will remember his zest for life, his quickness,his loyalty to his friends and the way in which, in spite of the honourswhich came to him, he always remained cautious, modest and utterlyunpretentious. His early death is a sad loss for British geology, the Univer­sity of Bristol, and for his wife and only son.

S. s.

MR. J. F. JACKSON was born at Mold, Flintshire, in 1894, but early inhis life his mother moved with her only child to Hunstanton. Here as asmall boy he was attracted by the fossils from the cliffs and, encouragedby his mother, who seems to have had some knowledge of such things,started to make a collection-and an outstanding collector of fossils heremained all his life. When only fifteen he wrote a booklet of some sixtypages on The Rocks of Hunstanton and its Neighbourhood, published in1910, with a second edition the following year, which included a list ofbooks suitable for beginners in geology.

In 1914 he had the good fortune to get a post as general assistant toDr. F. J. North, in the newly formed Department of Geology in theNational Museum of Wales at Cardiff, but the post lapsed during thewar, and Jackson, who had lost the sight of one eye (a circumstance thatnever affected his outstanding ability as a collector), supported himselfand his mother, to whom he was devoted, as a jobbing gardener. Each

386 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COUNCIL

year he managed to visit some place of outstanding geological interest,and on one such holiday in Dorset he met S. S. Buckman, who gave himmuch encouragement, the result of which was his election as a Fellow ofthe Geological Society in 1923 and the publication of a paper on 'TheJunction-bed of the Middle and Upper Lias of the Dorset Coast' in theQuarterly Journal of the Geological Society for 1926.

In the meantime he was invited by Mr. F. Morey to be his personalassistant and collector in the Isle of Wight, and soon after he was appointedcurator of the Sandown Museum, a post which he held until 1942, whenMr. Morey's sister died, she having financed the post after her brother'sdeath in 1925.Jackson had succeeded him as Secretary and Editor of theProceedings ofthe Isle of Wight Natural History and Archaeological Society,and published a number of papers in the Proceedings, including cataloguesof the known fossils from the various formations in the island, and in1943 a general account of the island's geology. In 1937 the GeologicalSociety awarded him the Lyell Fund.

On his mother's death he left the island and for six years worked as ajobbing gardener in the Torquay area, but in 1951 he was able, with thehelp of Dr. W. D. Lang, F.R.S., to retire to Charmouth near Lyme Regisand there to spend his time in assiduous and careful collecting of the localfossils. He made large collections of the usual forms-ammonites,belemnites, crinoids and a few fishes-but his best discoveries, now in theBritish Museum (Natural History), were the skeleton, unfortunatelyheadless, of a small specimen of the dinosaur Scelidosaurus, and animportant insect fauna from the Flat-stones, the latter comprising over400 specimens, mostly the elytra of beetles, three new to science, butincluding a new orthopteron, and the wings of six species of dragonflies,three of them new. The fauna was described by the late Professor F. E.Zeuner in 1962.

Continuing his earlier habit, every year, until his health would notpermit it, Mr. Jackson took a holiday to some remote spot such as Mullor the Isle of Eigg, collecting rock specimens or fossils, which usuallyfound their way to the National Museum of Wales, in which he took anabiding interest. Mr. Jackson was most generous with his specimens andof more than 10,000 specimens that went to the National Museum ofWales the bulk were gifts.

Never possessing much he was nevertheless anxious to share the littlehe had, and many a time he would come to our house with flowers orfruit from his own garden.

Mr. Jackson suffered ill-health for several years before he died, in 1966,but was always anxious to be of no trouble to anyone, and was mostgrateful for a generous annuity from the Murdoch Trust. He resentedany idea of going to a home of any sort to be looked after, and died as

ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COUNCIL 387

he would have wished, suddenly, alone in his small bungalow, Charside,Charmouth, at the age of seventy-two, on 19 September 1966. He hadbeen a member of the Association since 1937.

B. L.

DR. WILLIAM DICKSON LANG, F.R.S., was born on 29 December 1878in India, where his father was a civil engineer. He received a largelyclassical education, first at Christ's Hospital and then as a home-boarderat Harrow, and its effects remained in his style of writing and in hisabiding love of Horace and Milton. At heart, however, he was moreattracted by biology, and he read Natural Sciences,specialising in zoology,botany, geology and mineralogy, when in 1898 he entered PembrokeCollege, Cambridge, of which he was Exhibitioner and then Scholar. Hegained a first class in Part I of the Tripos in 1901 and a second class inPart II in 1902, after which he joined the staff of the Geological Depart­ment of the British Museum (Natural History), becoming Deputy Keeperin 1927 and Keeper in 1928. On his retirement in 1938, he went to liveat Charmouth in Dorset, where he died on 7 March 1966. His maininterests lay in two fields: palaeontology, particularly of Polyzoa andcorals, with its problems of evolution, and the stratigraphy and naturalhistory of west Dorset, of which he had an unrivalled knowledge. He waselected a member of the Geologists' Association in 1906 and an HonoraryMember in 1962.

His earliest publication, in 1903, was on the stratigraphy of Dorset,but in his first purely palaeontological paper, in the following year, hewas already considering problems of classification and evolution whichhad arisen in his study of the collections of Polyzoa at the British Museum(Natural History). His first publication on corals was in 1908, and in thefollowing year he began to discuss their evolution also. Thereafter therefollowed a long succession of studies on these two groups, including thetwo volumes (1921 and 1922) of the British Museum catalogue of theCretaceous Cribrimorph Bryozoa (Polyzoa). In 1916 he had propoundedhis theory that 'once calcium carbonate has begun to be deposited thewhole lineage is doomed to a more or less stereotyped sequence of calci­fication until, in the end, it becomes extinguished under its superfluity ofskeleton'. At the same time he became impressed with the parallelism andhomoeomorphy of the lines of evolution in both Polyzoa and corals. Hediscussed homoeomorphy in corals in a report of a demonstration to theGeologists' Association published in the PROCEEDINGS for 1917, and intwo reports of demonstrations published in 1923he discussed programme­evolution and trends in various groups, the trends being internal andrepeatedly expressed in parallel lineages, consequently producing homoeo­morphic forms. Natural selection he considered to be working, meanwhile,