Gerard Jacob De Geer 1858-1943

Abstract

The geologist, Baron Gerard Jacob De Geer, whose death occurred on 24 July, was born in Stockholm on 2 October 1858. The earliest records of his family are connected with Brabant, a province now incorporated in Belgium. The first member to settle in Sweden was Louis De Geer, who in 1627 accepted an invitation from Gustavus Adolphus and was given charge of the gun factories of the crown, an appointment of a kind only too familiar at the present day. Louis De Geer, assisted by engineers and skilled workmen from Liege and Namur, founded a large iron and steel industry, and was ennobled in 1641. Several of his descendants played a leading part in Swedish industry, science and politics. Louis Gerard De Geer, father of the geologist, was Prime Minister from 1858 to 1870. The geologist himself was Member of Parliament from 1900 to 1905, during part of his tenure of the chair of geology at the University of Stockholm, which he occupied from 1897 until 1924. In the latter year he became Director of the University’s newly established Geochronological Institute. Recognition in Britain of his scientific eminence has been shown by award of the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society in 1920, and by election to the foreign membership of the Royal Society in 1930. De Geer figures as one of several distinguished Swedes who, in the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, found in Spitzbergen a happy hunting ground for geological investigation. He was fortunate in being able to supply a particularly wide audience with a personal introduction to the results obtained by himself and others in this field. In 1910 he conducted a numerously attended excursion to this delectable archipelago, in connexion with the ever memorable Stockholm meeting of the International Geological Congress, over which he had been called to preside