Herbert Henry Thomas. 1876-1935

Abstract

Herbert Henry Thomas, born March 13, 1876, was the son of Mr. Frederick Thomas of Exeter and Harrow. He received his early education at Exeter School, and in 1894 entered at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he was first Exhibitioner and afterwards Scholar. At Cambridge he laid the foundation of not a few life-long friendships. His natural bent towards Geology soon became apparent, and he was an active member of the Sedgwick Club, in which he continued to take an interest in later years. He took the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1897-8, being placed in the first class in both parts, and he was awarded the Harkness Scholarship "for proficiency in Geology, including Palaeontology.” After graduating he acted for three years as assistant to Professor W. J. Sollas at Oxford, where he joined Balliol College, and took the Oxford degrees of B.A. and B.Sc. During this time, too, he carried out his first important original research, a study of the Trias of Devon and Somerset on somewhat new lines. The results were embodied in a paper presented to the Geological Society in 1902 on “The Mineralogical Constitution of the Fine Material of the Bunter Pebble-Bed in the West of England.” Divergent views had been held concerning the source of the pebbles in this formation, and Thomas accordingly turned his attention to the materials of their matrix. His method, since widely practised, was to trace the various mineral constituents of the sand to their probable parent-rocks, and so to throw light on the distribution of land-areas and the direction of currents in Triassic times. In a later paper (1909) he extended the investigation to the whole of the New Red Sandstone of the West. His interest in the mineralogy of detrital deposits was shown also in his essay which gained the Sedgwick Prize (1904), the prescribed subject being “The Petrology of some group of British Sedimentary Rocks.”