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Geological Society, London, Memoirs; 2002; v. 25; p. 27-38;
DOI: 10.1144/GSL.MEM.2002.025.01.04
© 2002 Geological Society of London

Chapter 3 Robert Harkness, Henry Alleyne Nicholson and Charles Lapworth

For some forty years after Adam Sedgwick took to the field in the Lakes in 1822, he was virtually the only major geologist to make the region one of his main objects of study. We have seen how he made considerable efforts to sort out the stratigraphy of the southern Lakes, relating his work there to his investigations in Wales, but to a large extent he left the central volcanic region alone; likewise the Skiddaw Slates - apart from claiming them for his Cambrian System on the basis of their apparently meagre fossil contents, as collected by Ruthven.

The man who took up from where Sedgwick left off was Robert Harkness (1816-1878) (see Fig. 3.1).l His family came from Ormskirk, near Liverpool, but he attended school in Dumfries in SW Scotland, his father's home town. From there he went to Edinburgh University, where he studied under the geologists Robert Jameson and James David Forbes, and the chemist Thomas Charles Hope. In his early twenties Harkness was making geological investigations in Lancashire, particularly among the coalfields and the rocks of the New Red Sandstone.

In 1848, the family moved to Dumfries, from which centre Harkness, being of independent means, began geological investigations among the rocks of the Southern Uplands, including the region near Moffat, which, rich in graptolites, later became a classic site through the work of Charles Lapworth (1842-1920) (Hamilton 2001). Thus early in his career, Harkness became familiar with these Lower Palaeozoic fossils. In fact, his interest in them

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