WILLIAM

See also:

• THOMAS
• THOMAS (c. 1654-1720)
• THOMAS (d. 110o)
• THOMAS, ARTHUR GORING (1850-1892)
• THOMAS, CHARLES LOUIS AMBROISE (1811-1896)
• THOMAS, GEORGE (c. 1756-1802)
• THOMAS, GEORGE HENRY (1816-187o)
• THOMAS, ISAIAH (1749-1831)
• THOMAS, PIERRE (1634-1698)
• THOMAS, SIDNEY GILCHRIST (1850-1885)
• THOMAS, ST
• THOMAS, THEODORE (1835-1905)
• THOMAS, WILLIAM (d. 1554)

THOMAS

See also:

• WILLIAM THOMAS BLANFORD (1832-1905)

BLANFORD (1832-1905)  , English geologist and naturalist, was born in London on the 7th of October 1832 . He was educated in private schools in Brighton and Paris, and with a view to the adoption of a mercantile career spent two years in a business house at Civita Vecchia . On returning to England in 1851 he was induced to enter the newly established Royal School of Mines, which his younger brother Henry F . Blanford (1834-1893), afterwards head of the Indian Meteorological Department, had already joined; he then spent a year in the mining school at Freiburg, and towards the close of 1854 both he and his brother obtained posts on the Geological Survey of India . In that service he remained for twenty-seven years, retiring in 1882 . He was engaged in various parts of India, in the Raniganj coalfield, in Bombay, and in the coalfield near Talchir, where boulders considered to have been ice-borne were found in the Talchir strata—a remarkable discovery con-firmed by subsequent observations of other geologists in equivalent strata elsewhere . His attention was given not only to geology but to zoology, and especially to the land-mollusca and to the vertebrates . In 1866 he was attached to the Abyssinian expedition, accompanying the army to Magdala and back; and in 1871-1872 he was appointed a member of the Persian Boundary Commission . The best use was made of the exceptional opportunities of studying the natural history of those countries . For his many contributions to geological science Dr Blanford was in 1883 awarded the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society of London; and for his labours on the zoology and geology of British India he received in 1901 a royal medal from the Royal Society . He had been elected F.R.S. in 1874, and was chosen president of the Geological Society in 1888 . He was created C.I.E. in 1904 .

He died in London on the 23rd of

June 1905 . His principal publications were: Observations on the Geology and Zoology of Abyssinia (187o), and Manual of the Geology of India, with H . B . Medlicott (1879) . Biography, with bibliography and portrait, in Geological Magazine, January 1905 .