ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COUNCIL

OBITUARY NOTICES

157

ARTHUR JOSEPH AIERS died suddenly on 14 July 1965. He was a modest, gayand friendly man, overflowing with energy and pursuing a wide range ofinterests.

Born in Coventry in 1896, he spent most of his working life in the motorand aircraft industries in the Midlands, first at Riley's, and then withH. M. Hobson Ltd. During the war he was general manager of the latterfirm's group of Oldham factories, returning in 1946 to the parent companyas general manager of the Wolverhampton Group with a seat on the board.He retired in 1952. Mr. Aiers also served his profession in a wider sphere.A founder member of the Institution of Production Engineers, he was formany years a very active member of its national Council. He presided alsoover several local professional bodies.

This is a bare outline of a successful career in industry. Equallyremarkable was Mr. Aiers' mastery of a variety of 'leisure' pursuits. Fromboyhood he not only enjoyed his hobbies but also took them seriously.The first was photography, to be refined in time into a valuable tool. Hisdeepest interest was perhaps in geology and especially in mineralogy. Hejoined the Association in 1927 and from 1952 to 1954 was President of theMidlands Group of the Association. He frequently lectured to the Groupon crystals and microscopy and in 1951 gave a talk on 'PhotographicRecords of Fossil Plants Collected on G.A. Excursions'. He led a FieldMeeting to Clent, Worcester, in 1950. He developed also a lively interest inhorticulture. As an aid to these and other studies Mr. Aiers mastered manyof the techniques of microscopy, using them and his photographic skill tomake hundreds of slides for the instruction and delight of lecture audiences.He had assembled a fine collection of geological specimens which includedrough precious stones, and others of shells, coins and stamps; had builthimself an observatory in his Walsall garden; and played the piano and theorgan.

Mr. and Mrs. Aiers moved to Femdown, Dorset, in 1958 and soonjoined the Boumemouth Natural Science Society. Since 1961 Mr. Aiers hadbeen Chairman of the Microscopy Section.

(This notice is published in conjunction with the Boumemouth NaturalScience Society.) D. T. A.

The death of SIR EDWARD BATTERSBY BAJLEY on 19 March of this year(1965), at the age of eighty-three, robbed Europe of one of its outstandingtectonicians. Recognition ofhis work was world-wide: he was an HonoraryFellow or Member of some fifteen Geological Societies or ScientificAcademies, including those of the U.S.A., Belgium, Switzerland, Norway

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and India, and he had received five Honorary Doctorates from BritishUniversities as well as an Honorary D.Sc. from Harvard. In 1930 he waselected Fellow of the Royal Society, of which he was also a Vice-President,and in 1943 he was presented with a Royal Medal; he also received theBigsby Medal, the Murchison Medal, and, in 1948, the Wollaston Medalfrom the Geological Society of London. He was a Life Member of theGeologists' Association, which he joined in 1911. He served with theR.G.A. from 1915 to 1919, was twice wounded, losing one eye, and wasawarded the M.e., the Croix de Guerre with palm, and was made Chevalierde la Legion d'Honneur. He was Director of the Geological Survey andMuseum of Great Britain from 1937 to 1945, and was knighted on hisretirement.

Sir Edward was born in Kent in 1881, and educated at Kendal GrammarSchool and Clare College, Cambridge. He served as an Officer of theGeological Survey from 1902 to 1929, when he was appointed Professor ofGeology in the University of Glasgow, from which post he retired in 1937and returned to the Survey as Director.

Bailey's publications cover a remarkably wide field, though mainlyconcerned with igneous petrology and tectonics, and it is for his contribu­tions in this latter subject that he is best known. He first recognised thering-fault and dyke intrusion of Glen Coe in 1905, and in 1909, in collabor­ation with e. T. Clough and H. B. Maufe, introduced the concept ofcauldron-subsidence into geology (Q. JI geol. Soc. Lond., 65, 611). By 1910he had recognised the presence of recumbent folds in the South-WestHighlands of Scotland (Q. JI geol. Soc. Lond., 66, 586); and in 1912 heassisted in taking a Geologists' Association Excursion over this-nowclassical-ground (Proc. Geol. Ass., 23, 157).

His work with the Geological Survey kept Bailey largely in the region ofthe Western Highlands and Islands, and nearly every year saw the publica­tion of the results of some new piece of research in addition to thoseappearing in the official Memoirs or Summaries of Progress. In 1922 hemade his first general synthesis of the tectonics of the South-WesternHighlands (Q. JI geol. Soc. Lond., 78, 82) in which, though he recognisedthe recumbent folds and fold-fault or slide structures, he admitted that hewas unable to decide what was the order of succession of the beds involved.This problem was solved in 1930 when he appreciated the importance anduse of current bedding and other sedimentary structures in elucidatingnon-fossiliferous stratigraphy (Geol. Mag. 67, 77), and a revised tectonicsynthesis appeared in 1934 (Q. JI geol. Soc. Lond., 90, 462). Not only wasBailey displaying an unflagging interest in Highland tectonics, but he wasalso supervising the mapping, and was a major contributor to the descrip­tion of the Tertiary Volcanic Centre of Mull and the rocks of its founda­tions (Mem. geol. Surv. U.K., 1924, 1925). During this work he recognised

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the purity of the Cretaceous sands of Loch Aline, and this led directly totheir being used during the Second World War as a valuable source of rawmaterial for optical glass. The geological interest of these sands was dis­cussed in his paper on 'The Desert Shores of the Chalk Seas' (Geol. Mag.,1924,61, 102).

It is impossible in a notice such as this to comment fully on the greatrange of Bailey's geological activities and publications. We find him alone,or as a co-author dealing with such topics as Palaeozoic submarine land­slips at Quebec (J. Geol., 1928, 36, 577); The Sgurr of Eigg (Geol. Mag.,1914,61296); Eddies in Mountain Structure (Q. Jl geol. Soc. Lond., 1935,94, 607); Sedimentation in Relation to Tectonics (Bull. geol. Soc. Am.,1936, 46, 1713); or Mountains that had travelled over volcanoes [in theHimalayas] (Nature, Lond., 1944,154,752). Mention should also be madeof his Tectonic Essays: Mainly Alpine (Oxford, 1935) in which he gives aseries of the clearest accounts of the structure of the Swiss Alps; and in thelatter part of the book goes on to discuss Marcel Bertrand's work inProvence and elsewhere. In that same year he contributed (with O.Holtedahl) the section on 'Northwestern Europe: Caledonides' to RegionaleGeologie der Erde (2, ii, 1-76. Leipzig, 1935). While at the University ofGlasgow he, together with J. Weir and W. J. McCallien, produced theirvery readable and well-illustrated, though somewhat unorthodox, Intro­duction to Geology (London, 1939). After his retirement from the Director­ship of the Survey he published a history of the Geological Survey, TheGeological Survey of Great Britain (London, 1952), and subsequentlyprepared the 2nd Edition of the Ben Nevis and Glen Coe Survey Memoir,Sheet 53 (1960). This was followed by his biography CharlesLyell (London,1962).

It has often been said of Sir Edward Bailey, by men who had workedwith him, that he was a genius. I have been told by an eminent foreigngeologist how, on a field excursion, Bailey would comprehend the struc­tural evidence and grasp the tectonic significance of what he saw whilst theremainder of the party were still trying to locate themselves on the map­but he was also an individualist who lived for his work, and sometimesfailed to understand others, just as he also was misunderstood. He wasessentially a field geologist, and those who had accompanied him in thefield bear testimony not only of his enthusiasm but also of his great powersof endurance. Few men are great enough to become a tradition duringtheir life-times, but Sir Edward Bailey was one of them. G. w.

With the death of Miss GRACE M. BAUER in March 1965, at the age ofeighty-six, one of the few remaining links with the heroic days of geologyhas been broken. She was born on 29 June 1878 and was educated at