NEWTON, EDWIN TULLEY

(b. Islington, London, England, May 1840; d. Canonbury, London, 28 January 1930)

paleontology.

Newton began his scientific career as a student at the Royal School of Mines. In 1865 he became assistant naturalist under T. H. Huxley at the Geological Survey Museum. He was appointed paleontologist and curator of fossils in 1882; he retired in 1905. Newton took an active part in the work of the Geological Society: he was vice-president from 1903 to 1905 and again from 916 to 1918, and was awarded the LYell Medal in 1893. In the same year (1893) he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He was president of the Paleontographical Society from 1921 to 1928 and president of the Geologist’s Association in 1896–1898. He also served on committees of the Zoological Society.

Newton’s work was always thorough, and he showed remarkable patience and skill in performing delicate manipulations. His beautiful model of the brain of a cockroach, constructed by means of serial sections, is displayed in the museum of the Royal college of Surgeons (London). He began his research by inventing a new method for making micro sections of coal. A number of these sections, as well as many skeletons prepared by him, are in the British Museum. In his official work Newton studied a wide variety of fossils, but he is noted for his original investigations in vertebrate paleontology. He first studied the Cretaceous fishes, and later made observations on the bones of birds and the remains of man, but he devoted his chief energies to studying the vertebrate fragments from the Pleistocene and Pliocene deposits in England. His most important monographs are probably those on the brain of the Jurassic flying reptile, the pterodactyl (1888), and on the rreptilian remains from the Permotriassic rocks at Elgin, Scotland (1893 and 1894). In the latter research Newton lacked the actual bones to work with; he had only their cavities in sandstone, from which, after great labor, he obtained and fitted together casts of gutta-percha. He discovered dicynodonts and pareiasaurs for the first time in Europe, showing how closely they resembled the descriptions of those found in the Karroo Formation of South Africa.

All of Newton’s published work was descriptive. He was a realist and thought that although the search back in evolutionary forms might end in so-called fish forms, such retrospection should not lead away “from scientific facts to a slough of unscientific imagination”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Among Newton’s important works are The Chimaeroid Fishes of the British Cretaceous Rocks (London, 1878); The Vertebrata of the Forest-Bed Series of Norfolk and Suffolk (London, 1882); “On the Skull, Brain, and Auditory Organ of a New Species of Pterosaurian From the Upper Lias Near Whitby, Yorkshire,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, ser. B, 179 (1888), 503–537; “Notes on Pterodactyls”, in Proceedings of the Geologists’s Association, 10 (1888), 406–424; The Vertebrata of the Pliocene Deposits of Britain (London,) 1891); “Reptiles From the Elgin Sandstone,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, ser. B, 184 (1893), 431–503, and 185 (1894), 573–607; and “The [Pleistocene] Vertebrate Fauna Collected by Mr. Lewis Abbott From the Fissure Near Ightham, Kent,” in Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 50 (1894), 188–211.

II. Secondary Literature. For an article on Newton’s work, see Journal of Microscopical Science (1879), p. 340. Obituary notices include Geological Magazine, 67 (1930), 286–287; A. S. Woodward, in Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 86 (1930), lix-lxii; and A. S. W[oodward], in Obituary Notices of the Fellows of the Royal Society, 1 (1932), 5–7.

John Challinor