Robert Alfred Cloynes Godwin-Austen
Robert Alfred Cloyne Godwin-Austen (
March 17,
1808-
November 25,
1884) was an
English geologist.
Godwin-Austen was the eldest son of Sir Henry E. Austen. He was educated at
Oriel College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow in 1830. He afterwards entered
Lincoln's Inn. In 1833 he married the only daughter and heiress of General Sir Henry T. Godwin, K.C.B., and he took the additional name of Godwin by Royal licence in 1834. At Oxford as a pupil of
William Buckland he became deeply interested in geology, and soon afterwards becoming acquainted with
Henry De la Beche, he was inspired by that great master, and assisted him by making a geological map of the neighbourhood of
Newton Abbot, which was embodied in the Geological Survey map. He also published an elaborate memoir
On the Geology of the South-East of Devonshire (Trans. Geol. Soc. ser. 2, vol. viii.).
His attention was next directed to the
Cretaceous rocks of
Surrey, his home county, his estates being situated at
Chilworth and
Shalford near
Guildford. Later he dealt with the superficial accumulations bordering the
English Channel, and with the erratic boulders of
Selsey. In 1855 he brought before the
Geological Society of London his paper
On the possible Extension of the Coal-Measures beneath the South-Eastern part of England, in which he pointed out on well-considered theoretical grounds the likelihood of coal measures being some day reached in that area. In this article he also advocated the freshwater origin of the
Old Red Sandstone, and discussed the relations of that formation, and of the
Devonian, to the
Silurian and
Carboniferous.
He was elected
F.R.S. in 1849, and in 1862 he was awarded the
Wollaston medal by the Geological Society of London, on which occasion he was styled by
Roderick Murchison pre-eminently the physical geographer of bygone periods. He died at Shalford House near Guildford. His son,
Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen was also a geologist.
