What could be more fitting than to start this new blog with a portrait of Trenham Reeks. His duties in the very early Survey covered the full scope of this blog, the material and documentary collections. He was born in 1823, appointed Assistant Curator of the Museum of Economic Geology in 1839 and Curator and Librarian in 1851. He died on 5 May 1879. An obituary in Nature described,
'the little, rather dingy room in which for well nigh thirty years, he has sat amidst blue-books, calendars, mineralogical specimens, and a rather orderly chaos of miscellaneous objects.'
This sounds at odds with the magnificently ordered Museum of Practical Geology, a picture of which will follow in a later post.
Bob McIntosh
