Henry De la Beche’s (1796-1855) geological interests began early in his childhood, and in 1816, he joined his stepfather on a geologic tour of northern England and Scotland. De la Beche recorded his observations in personal journals, and more than a dozen diaries, pocket journals and field notebooks chronicle his travels, geological investigations, and Lyellian critiques—before he became head of a newly established geological survey in 1835. A talented artist, De la Beche included drawings and watercolors of landscapes and cultures within an 1815 diary, along with meteorological data and geological sketches. In 1816, he recorded his geological tour through multiple landscape sketches with various levels of detail. The geological content of his journals steadily increased and coincided with his professional society participation; in an 1819 journal, De la Beche drew the earliest known geological section of the South Wales coalfield. Within the 1820s journals, his geological cross sections often contain meticulous information, and De la Beche’s careful attention to ‘recording the facts’ ensured that these journal graphics could provide accurate documentation for his future papers and books. De la Beche’s journals also document how he reflected on societal conditions and geological debates. Some 1830s journal sketches encapsulate the debates between uniformitarians and catastrophists as De la Beche pointedly, and humorously, challenged the presumptiveness of Lyell’s geological theory.

A man of constant movement, trained as surveyor and civil engineer, virtually self-taught geologist, Thomas Sopwith (1803–1879) spent his working life in the field. His career spans the early railway age; he worked (often underground) in mines, surveyed road and rail. From boyhood in Georgian Newcastle upon Tyne (at least 1812), he kept notebooks and diaries, 173 known at his death. Mathematician Henry Atkinson (1781–1829) taught young Thomas observation, measurement, and surveying and ca. 1812, the boy made his first fieldtrip with Atkinson to Elswick Fields using chain, pencil, notebook and staff, drawing ‘competent’ plans. In 1821 he began regular and permanent journals, notebooks and diaries that record his busy days, coach journeys with his own invented ‘laptop’ to work as he went. Good results followed: he took pleasure in the task, it fixed his attention and assisted his memory making correct records on the spot; he gained by expressing himself precisely in descriptive writing, the foundation for later books. Most of his geological projects are detailed and some field views illustrated with pen or watercolour sketches. In 1839 he is planning his large and then small models, which were undoubtedly Sopwith's most important contribution to geological science. Likewise, Sopwith’s small black-backed notebooks; they were passed down by daughter Ursula Chadwick to descendent Robert Sopwith, who allowed 168 to be microfiched by Robinson Library, Newcastle University, finally in 2014 donating the originals. Earlier notebooks were lost but refound in 2009 include two Forest of Dean coalfield notebooks.

Dr Susan Turner

Pietro Maraschini (1774-1825) is mainly recalled in the histories of geology for his essay on the formation of rocks in the Vicentine prealps (1824) in north-eastern Italy, which enriched the lithostratigraphical work undertaken by Giovanni Arduino in 1758-65 in the same mountain region, and attracted the visits of some 19th century distinguished European geologists such as Alexandre Brongniart. In his early works Maraschini had adopted a sort of 'descriptive neutrality', as he considered the controversy between «Neptunism» and «Volcanism» an impediment to the development of geo-mineralogical sciences due to its excessive conflictuality. In 1818 Maraschini seemed to adopt a cautious volcanist position influenced by the "Introduction to Geology" (1811) by Scipione Breislak. In order to evaluate this hypothesis in the field, Maraschini decided to undertake a geological journey in southern Italy. He left Venice in January 1819 and visited the area of the extinct volcanoes of the Agro Romano. In mid-February he arrived in Naples, during an eruption of Mt.Vesuvius, and met other scientists such as Gian Battista Brocchi, Teodoro Monticelli and Matteo Tondi. The journey continued in Sicily between March and May 1819, together with the French scientists Jean André Henri Lucas: here Maraschini made lithological observations in the territories of Messina, Catania, Palermo and Agrigento. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the extent of Maraschini's unpublished notes and notebook related to his journey, a significant case of geological fieldwork in volcanic regions in the first half of the 19th century.

In 1840 Roderick Murchison traveled to Russia to undertake geological fieldwork. His route began in St. Petersburg followed by Archangel before looping back to St. Petersburg via Nijny Novogorod and Moscow. The first part of the campaign crossed nearly horizontal fossiliferous strata of uncertain age. Murchison undertook this campaign in order to see whether Paleozoic systems recently defined in Britain could be mapped in Russia.
A record of Murchison’s Russian campaign exists in field notebooks and correspondence. Those data were later compiled into an autobiographical journal as well as a several publications, notably the two-volume book entitled The Geology of Russia (1845). That large format book contains woodblock prints, lithographs, cross-sections and geologic maps, all based on data recorded in the field notebooks. Together, these sources of information document Murchison’s methodology in extending recently developed Paleozoic stratigraphic nomenclature into Russia.
A key location was near Lake Ladoga where the strata contain freshwater fish fossils of the type found in the Old Red Sandstone which were mixed with marine fossil shells identical to those found in Devon (Rudwick 1985). Thus, Murchison could affirm that the Old Red Sandstone and the marine facies at that site were both part of the Devonian System and that the Devonian conformably overlaid the Silurian System. A second key location was on the shore of Lake Onega where Devonian Old Red Sandstone is overlain by the Carboniferous System. He emphasized the significance of this discovery in his field notebook with the initials “QED” (Quod erat demonstrandum).