CURRENT LITERATURE
PROFESSOR DAVID By M. E. David
The late Sir Edgeworth:David, whose career has been described by his daughter, Miss David, in a very readable volume (Arnold, 12s. 6d.), was a good deal more than an eminent geologist. He entered New College' Oxford, as the senior classical scholar of his year and turned to natural science after an illness. In 1882 he went to New South Wales to join the staff of the Geological Survey and very soon discovered a most valuable coalfield. In 1891 he was appointed to the chair at Sydney which he held with distinction till 1924. David became well known in Australia for his tireless enterprise. In 1897 he led an expedition to Funafuti, in the Ellice group, to bore down to the base of a coral atoll and had the satisfaction of proving that Darwin was right in holding that the coral was formed on the surface and gradually sank. In 1908 he accompanied Shaddeton's Antarctic expedition and was one of the small party that first reached the South Mag- netic Pole. When the War came, David, then in his fifty-eighth year, joined the Australian Mining Corps and spent two strenuous years on the Western front. Such a professor might well endear himself to his adopted country, and Miss David, in her pleasant and well-written memoir, does not exaggerate her father's popularity in Australia or the respect in which he was held by scientists elsewhere.
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