Arkell, William Joscelyn

(b. Highworth, Wiltshire, England, 9 June 1904; d. Cambridge, England, 18 April 1958)

geology, paleontology

Arkell was the youngest of seven children of James Arkell, a partner in the family brewery at Kingsdown, Wiltshire, and of Laura Jane Rixon, daughter of a London solicitor. He married Ruby Lilian Percival of Boscombe, Hampshire, in 1929; they had three sons.

After a boarding-school education, he entered New College, Oxford, in 1922. He graduated in geology three years later and was awarded the Burdett-Coutts research scholarship. After appointment as a lecturer at New College in 1929, he was elected a senior research fellow of the college from 1933 to 1940.

Arkell became a principal in the Ministry of War Transport in 1941. In 1943 he contracted a serious chest illness, and for several years was unable to undertake strenuous activity. In 1947 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London and became a senior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. With improved health he was once more able to travel abroad, and his studies on the Jurassic ammonites and stratigraphy wer intensified. In August 1956, Arkell suffered a stroke that left him severely paralyzed. Thereafter he was confined to his house, although he eventually managed, with the cooperation of Cambridge friends, to resume his writing.

Arkell received the Mary Clark Thompson Gold Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, in 1944; the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1949; and the von Buch Medal of the German Geological Society in 1953. He was an honorary member or correspondent of the Linnean Society of Normandy; the Geological Societies of France, Germany, and Egypt; and the Paleontological Society of America.

Arkell’s first research culminated in the publication of two works: “The Corallian Rocks of Oxford, Berkshire, and North Wiltshire” (1927) and “A Monograph of British Corallian Lamellibranchia.” He had spent his youth among these rocks and so had come to know them well, but he also felt that these strata merited attention because in England they had been neglected, in comparison with the Middle and Lower Jurassic, where other workers had long been active. During the following years he extended his studies to other parts of the Jurassic, in “The Stratigraphical Distribution of the Cornbrash” (1928, 1932), and to the Continent, in “A Comparison Between the Jurassic Rocks of the Calvados Coast and Those of Southern England” (1930). Field study and museum visits in Europe greatly increased his knowledge of Jurassic rocks and their fossil fauna.

Early in his career Arkell conceived the plan of revising Albert Oppel’s Die Juraformation Englands, Frankreichs und des sudwestlichen Deutschlands (1856-1858) and of extending its coverage throughout Europe and the rest of the world. Seen in this perspective, Arkell’s book The Jurassic System in Great Britain (1933) was the first stage of a larger program. This work, published before he was thirty, is arranged in chapters under the traditional formation names. Arkell stated his difficulties in translating these “haphazard terms” into the systematized stage names that had evolved in Europe, and concluded that the problems involved in extended correlation were beyond solution by any one man.

Nevertheless, Arkell included a searching analysis of the means whereby the Jurassic rocks might be more precisely dated and correlated over wider areas. In particular he discussed the contribution of Alcide d’Orbigny, whose concept of “stages”—a systematic classification based on a combination of paleontology and stratigraphy--Arkell later revived in Great Britain as the basis of Jurassic classification. He then dealt with Oppel’s ideas aimed at providing a more detailed biostratigraphical time scale, with units that could be recognized independently of local lithological considerations. These “zones” were documented by guide fossils, which were characteristic of the beds they defined, and they enabled correlation planes to be established over considerable distances.

In the years following, Arkell made numerous contributions to the corpus of knowledge of Jurassic stratigraphy, and by detailed classification of the ammonites of the Middle and Upper Jurassic he gradually stabilized many stratigraphically significant zonal assemblages that had been in doubt or little known. Over a period of twenty years the Palaeontographical Society published his monographs on the Corallian (Upper Oxfordian) and Bathonian ammonites. In 1946 Arkell published a paper, “Standard of the European Jurassic,” advocating a commission to formulate a code of rules for stratigraphical nomenclature analogous to that which had brought order into zoological terminology.

He himself put forward a draft code and showed how it could be applied to the European, including central Russian, Jurassic. Stages and zones were precisely defined, the latter being characterized by particular ammonite assemblages. Arkell further asserted that since the limits of usefulness of species are circumscribed by the ascertained facts of their distribution, there must be separate were widely accepted as a suitable framework and were applied by investigators into Jurassic stratigraphy in many countries.

In 1956 Arkell published Jurassic Geology of the World, designed as a guide to the Jurassic of particular areas and to each individual stage over the whole world. In it he brought together and reviewed critically the information dispersed throughout the enormous literature on the world’s Jurassic stratigraphy; for the first time, a comprehensive picture began to emerge, forming the framework for further elaboration. By way of introduction, he set down his final judgment on the principles of stratigraphical classification, especially on the basic notion of the zone. Arkell used the concept of a zone as being any bed, stratum, or formation deposited in any part of the world that could be recognized to be of a particular age on the strength of the fossils it contained. For the Jurassic, the ammonites are most frequently used as the significant fauna. He also denied any necessity to construct a parallel terminology to express the time units to which the zones would correspond.

Whatever modifications may subsequently have emerged from theoretical or philosophical refinement of this definition of zone as a unit measure of strata defined by the special fauna as the time factor, and of stage as the grouping of zones capable of recognition over wide areas, Arkell’s synthesis in Jurassic Geology of the world must stand as a unique contribution. By this work he brought about a vigorous revival of interest in the principles of stratigraphical classification, which has led to numerous proposals for a basic set of rules applicable to all geological systems and periods. In 1957 Arkell contributed the section on the Jurassic Ammonoidea to the Treatise on Invertebrate paleontology; this section is to a large extent complementary to his Jurassic Geology and is in itself a major contribution to paleontology.

Other interests included the elucidation of structural and tectonic problems within the Jurassic. In 1936 Arkell published “Analysis of the Mesozoic and Cainozoic Folding in England,” which was an important assesment of knowledge in this field. From 1926 to 1929, he and K.S. Sandford investigated the Pliocene and Pleistocene deposits of the Nile Valley and Red Sea coast of Egypt. The work was organized by the Oreintal Institute of the University of Chicago, and four monographs were published under Sandford and Arkell’s joint authorship.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Original Works. A complete list of Arkell’s publications, amounting to more than 200 items, together with a memoir of his life and a portrait, is given in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 4 (1958), 1-14 Details of those mentioned in the text are “The Corallian Rocks of Oxford. Berkshire, and North Wiltshire,” in philosophical Transactions of the Royal society, B216 (1927), 67-181: “A Monograph of British Corallian Lamellibranchia.” in Palaeontographical Society Monographs (1929-1937); “A Comparison Between the Jurassic Rocks of the Calvados Coast and Those of Southern England.” in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association (London), 41 (1930), 396-411; The Jurassic System in Great Britain (Ox-ford, 1933); “A Monograph on the Ammonites of the English Corallian Beds,” in Palaeontographical Society Monographs (London, 1935-1948); “Analysis of the Mesozoic and Cainozoic Folding in England,” in Report of the 16th International Geological Congress, 2 (Washington, D.C., 1936), 937-952; “Standard of the European Jurassic,” in Bulletin of the Geological society of America, 57 (1946), I-34; “A Monograph of the English Bathonian Ammonites,” in Palaeontographical society Monographs (London, 1951-1958); and Jurassic Geology of the World (Edinburgh London, 1956).

Works written with collaborators include the following; with J.A. Douglas. “The Stratigraphical Distribution of the Cornbrash. I. The South-western Area.” in Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 84 (1928) 117-178: with K.S. Sandford: “Palaeolithic Man and the Nile-Faiyum Divide,” in Oriental Institute Publications (Chicago), 10 (1929); “Palaeolithic Man and the Nile Valley in Nubia and Upper Egypt.” ibid., 17 (1933); “Paleolithic Man and the Nile Valley in Upper and Middle Egypt,” ibid., 18 (1934); “Paleolithic man and the Nile Vally in Lower Egypt, With Some Notes Upon a part of the Red Sea Littoral,” ibid., 46 (1939).

Arkell’s library and manuscripts are deposited in the University Museum, Oxford, and hois fossil collections are divided between Oxford and the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge.

II. Secondary Literature. See Alcide d’Orbigny, Paléontolgie francaise. Terrains jurassiques (1842-1849); and Albert Oppel, Die Juraformation Englands, Frankreichs und des sudwestlichen Deutschlands (1856-1858).

J. M. Edmonds