Dr. Mantell

 

Born at Lewes, he lies in St.Michael's there, but in the forest of Balcombe and Tilgate was the discovery that made him famous. With a happy and generous nature Mantell combined analytical faculties of the highest order. A pioneer in the study of the action of poisons, he saved a woman from the gallows by riddling the professional evidence on which she was in danger of being hanged for poisoning her husband.

Every hour he could spare he gave to the exploration of the buried treasure of the Weald. It was treasures of knowledge, not of gold and silver and precious stones, that he sought; his quest was for the remains of the past lords of creation. He touched the chalk, and lo, Titans, ponderous and terrific, came again to light.

He showed the Sussex Weald to be a vast charnel house of buried life, a cemetery in which huge reptiles which once possessed the land lay down to die, to leave no posterity, to bequeath to future ages their colossal bones. It fell to Mantell to direct the torchlight of knowledge down these long, dark corridors of time, and reveal in the mysterious skeletons his pick and spade laid bare immense reptiles unknown to science.

 

He not only found them but classified them. He was not concerned only with the mighty, he brought forth from the chalk many extinct species of molluscs, radiata, and foraminifera. Finally his researches enabled him first to proclaim that the great mass of the Wealden beds had a fresh-water origin.

 

A prodigious worker, while conducting a busy medical practice he wrote nearly 70 scientific books, he lectured repeatedly before the royal societies, and was foremost among the public teachers of his day, without a rival in his own field, in conveying exactly what he had to teach, and imbuing his audiences with a love of science.

His collection, bought for £5000, is one of the treasures of the British Museum. He is still remembered as a heroic worker in the cause of knowledge, tortured by a grievous malady but indomitable so long as he could stand and peer into the secrets of the Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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