Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Prestwich. Written and edited
by his Wife. (William Blackwood and Sons. 21s.)—Sir Joseph Prestwich was known long before his death as one of the most successful and accomplished of geologists ; this volume proves him to have been also one of the most modest and lovable of men. Nothing could have been more ideally uneventful than his life, which began in Clapham in 1812, and ended at Darent Hulme, in Shoreham, in 1896; . all the leading incidents in it, indeed, could have been embraced in a few pages instead of being spread over four hundred. His father was a London wine merchant ; and he himself spent forty years in the City before he made a business of what had previously been his recreation, and settled down as Professor of Geology in Oxford. After this his life, spent in easy work, and in correspondence with and visits to men of enthusiasms similar to his own, passed gently away till death came literally in the fullness of time. The bulk of this book, consisting as it does of geological details, is necessarily interesting only to Prestwich's professional brethren ; of course. his more important contributions to geology are tolerably well known to the general public. To this limited public, also, Sir Archibald Geikie's excellent and concise summary of Prestwich's work will of necessity specially appeal, although laymen outside its charmed circle will readily believe Sir Archibald when he says that "it was not his scientific achievements alone which gave Joseph Prestwich his pre-eminence among his contem- poraries," but that "he owed this position in large measure to the integrity and charm of his character."
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