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Palace Green Library
Palace Green
DURHAM
DH1 3RN
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)191 334 2972
Email: pg.library@durham.ac.uk
Resources for some specific areas are highlighted below, but resources for many more specific topics can be discovered by searching for the appropriate topic (such as Physics or Astronomy or Natural Philosophy) in Discover and by restricting the search to ‘Durham Archives’ or by searching the printed catalogue by selecting the topic as a subject or keyword and restricting the search to ‘Special Collections’ or ‘Ushaw College’.
Earth Sciences as an Academic Discipline
Durham University had been teaching Pure Science, including Geology, since the establishment of the College of Physical Science in Newcastle in 1871. It was however not until the establishment of the Science Site in 1922 with laboratories developed there that Pure Science was taught in Durham, with a reader (Arthur Holmes) being appointed in 1924. Geology became a department in Durham in 1939, being renamed as Geological Sciences in 1973 and then Earth Sciences in 2003. All this is reflected in the university’s own archive, in central, faculty and departmental files, in the records of the meetings of its various committees from Senate and Council down, in the exam papers, pass lists and mark sheets for the subject, and the university’s publications of such as the Gazette, Calendar, Journal, and Vice-Chancellor’s Reports, and newsletters and the like.
ASC’s collections also include the papers of the eminent Geologist and Geophysicist Arthur Holmes (1890-1965), who started the discipline in Durham and wrote almost the book on the subject, Principles of Physical Geology, first published in 1944, which soon became known simply as ‘Holmes’. It was reprinted in English eighteen times, becoming the geological bible for generations of geologists and doing much to revive failing interest in the geological sciences; it went through 3 further editions until 1993. His papers have lots on his correspondence, along with diaries, lecture notes and some photographs.
The collections also include the former departmental teaching collection of lantern slides, built up by Holmes, along with Prof Lawrence Wager and Sir Kingsley Dunham. There are also amber specimens slides, with creatures entombed in amber, in the Paneth lantern slides collection and the University Observatory collection has some seismograph readings. Some memoirs of Dunham (1910-2001) are to be found in Add.MS. 1427.
Geology in the North East
Correspondence of Robert Chambers (1802-1871, publisher, geologist) and his brother William Chambers (1800-1883, publisher), with Thomas Sopwith (mining engineer, 1803-1879) on mining, their writings, geology, the controversy over the Vestiges of the natural history of creation, stratigraphy and raised beaches, and contact with Brunel is in Add.MS. 1486. Charles Whitley’s correspondents, 1832-1850 included Charles Darwin, William Whewell, William Hopkins (geologist and mathematician), J.S. Henslow (Prof. of Mineralogy and Botany at Cambridge), Sopwith again, and A.D. Bache (educationalist and physicist) (Add Ms 834). The maps of Arthur Hedley (1872-1957), (folded 6" Ordnance Survey maps), mostly for Co. Durham, and Northumberland, with others for Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Rutland, Oxfordshire and Cornwall, have been annotated by Hedley relating to mining, being geological information on depths, mineral rights etc., and also giving owners and tenants of the surface property. There is further a book compiled by Hedley, containing lists of Ordnance Survey publications and a map drawn by him showing fluorspar mines in Co. Durham.
There are also more recent, later 20th century, papers, involving geological aspects, on local areas such as the Moor House National Nature Reserve on the Pennines, the enquiry into the development of the Cow Green Reservoir (Add.MS. 1596), and the wildlife in the Lower Derwent Valley (Add.MS. 1782).
Geology Beyond the North East
The Sudan Archive includes the papers of J.E. Edmonds (1909-1982), geologist with the Sudan Geological Survey, and the papers of W.N. Allan (1896-1984) with much on Sudan’s hydrology and its Nile waters. The papers of Viscount Ponsonby include correspondence with W.F. Ainsworth (1807-1896), surgeon and geologist to the Euphrates expedition, concerning mines of the Taurus etc.
Printed Books
The Local Collection has a variety of printed books and pamphlets on the geology of the North East, and some geological maps of the area, a number related to former mining activities, and also some periodicals such as The Proceedings of the Cumberland Geological Society. The SC+ collection includes the Geology Department’s undergraduate BSc dissertations from the 1960s to 1990s, many of them on the geology of the North East. The main SC collection incorporates the library of the university’s former professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, David Knight (1936-2018), which is rich in printed geological works of the 19th century, including by eminent geologists such as William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick and Charles Lyell, and covering the subject in the North East, the rest of Great Britain and the world beyond, ranging from Australia to Arabia, and from Persia to Greenland. It also includes William Smith’s seminal 1824 geological map of [Co] Durham, editions of the Greek Theophrastus’s History of Stones, and the 1696 William Whiston’s A New Theory of the Earth. All this is supplemented by a range of core 19th century texts on the subject in the at Ushaw College. Big Library at Ushaw College.
