OWEN, GEORGE

(b. Henllys, Pembrokeshire, Wales, 1552; d. 1613), geology.

A member of an old and distinguished South Wales family, Owen became vice admiral of the maritime counties of Pembroke and Cardigan and was twice sheriff of Cardigan. He was eminent as a local historian and topographer. In geology he is important not so much for the few paragraphs he wrote that happen to come within that subject as for the historical context in which he wrote them.

The description of the geology of Britain can hardly be said to have been begun at any definite time. There are, first of all, the casual remarks of the medieval writers and those made by John Leland in his Itinerary (ca. 1538) and by William Camden in his Britannia (1586). But in 1603 Owen included in his manuscript “Description of Pembrokeshire” an account of the occurrence of the (Carboniferous) limestone and coal measures of South Wales. He did so for the practical guidance of those wishing to exploit these materials; but in detailing the course of the limestone, he established the geological fact of bands of outcrop traceable across country. His account is thus the first attempt to “map” a British geological formation, if only verbally. He prepared a topographical map to accompany his description of Pembrokeshire; had he delineated his information on it, he would have provided a true geological map some two centuries before any other was made. Owen described the course of the limestone as being in two separate “veins” these are really both the same limestone, outcropping on the north and south sides of the syncline of the South Wales coalfield. Owen clearly had no idea of geological structure, and his remarks cannot be said to form part of a continuous evolution of geological knowledge. It was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that the scientific spirit really came alive and produced a band of naturalists who, among their wide-ranging scholarly researches, collected, described, and discussed truly geological matters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Owen’s most important work is The Description of Pembrokeshire, written in 1603; the authoritative ed. is that by his descendant, Henry Owen, published as no. 1 in Cymmrodorion Record Series (London, 1892), with geological commentary in the footnotes.

Owen’s biography is given by Henry Owen in the Intro, to his ed. of…. Pembrokeshire (see above). See also D. Lleufer Thomas, in Dictionary of National Biography, XLII (1895), 408–410. Detailed commentaries on Owen’s geological observations are made by A. Ramsay, in Passages in the History of Geology, pt. 2 (London, 1849), 8–11; by F. J. North “From Giraldus Cambrensis to the Geological Map,”in Transcations of the cardiff naturalists Society,64 (1931), 20–97, see 24–19;and by J. Challinor, “the Early Progress of British Geology—I,” in Annals of Science, 9 (1953), 124–153, see 127–129.

John Challinor