Clark, Edward Daniel

(b. Willingdon, Sussex, England, 5 June 1769; d. London, England, 9 March 1822),

minerlogy, geology.

His father, Edward, was the son of “mild” William Clarke, fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge prebendary of Chichester Cathedral, and a distinguished antiquary. His mother, Anne, was the daughter of Thomas Grenfield of Guildford Surrey. Edward Sr., also a fellow of St. John’s, published a statistical accounts of Spain in 1763 and, after service as chaplain in Madrid and Minorca, settled down to a quiet literary life in his Sussex parish.

Edward Dainel, the second of a family of three sons and one daughter, was at Tonbridge School, Kent, from 1779 until he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1786. Immediately after taking an undistinguished B.A. in 1790 he began the first of several tutorships to sons of the nobility, some of which enabled him to travel extensively. In 1791 the nucleus of his mineralogical collection was formed in the course of a tour of southern England, Wales, and Ireland. A prolonged stay in Naples in 1792–1793 enabled him to make a thorough study, in company with the pioneer volcanologist Sir William Hamilton, of Vesuvius in eruption. In 1794 he was on the Continent again collecting vigorously, and in 1797 he made an extended tour of Scotland and the Western Isles. On his return he became a fellow and bursar of Jesus College.

To Clark’s restless spirit college life was irksome, and in May 1799 he set off on a tour of Scandinavia, Russia, and the Middle East that was to take three years He was accompanied throughout by a pupil who paid the expenses of the journey and in the earlier stages by two fellows of Jesus, William Otter and the economist Robert Malthus. Clarke collected avidly everywhere: 800 mineral specimens from Siberia alone and plants, seeds, antiquities and manuscripts. His frequent letters to friends in Cambridge excited considerable attention, and on his return he was awarded an LL.D. Some of his marbles were presented to the University of Cambridge; others were purchased by the British Museum. Later his medieval manuscripts were sold to the Bodleian and his coins to a private collector. His mineral collection was purchased posthumously by the University of Cambridge for £1,500.

In 1805 he took holy orders. On 25 March 1806 he married Angelica, fifth daughter of Sir William Rush, baronet of Wimbledon, by whom he had five sons and two daughters. Mrs. Clarke was greatly admire by Cambridge society; but she had one foible, extravagance; and, although her husband’s income in his later years was substantial, the family was never well-off.

In March 1807 Clark began the first of his spectacularly successful annual courses of lectures on mineralogy. Although he had then made no notable contribution to mineralogy, he presented his material in modern terms and evinced some depth of understanding; he was, moreover, a stylish lecture, his boundless enthusiasm simply infectious. The professorship of mineralogy was created for him in December 1808.

Clarke’s scientific fieldwork ended with his return to Cambridge in 1802, and he devoted much of the remainder of his life to preparing his topographical observations on geology, botany, and other subjects for publication. The first volume of the Travels appeared in 1810 and subsequent volumes in 1812, 1814, 1816, 1819 and 1923. Four editions were published in England and one in America; volume I, which deals with Russia, had two Scottish editions (Edinburgh, 1839; Abredeen, 1848) and was translated into German (Weimar, 1817) and French (Paris, 1812).

In 1816 Clarke began to study the response of a wide range of refractory substances (The Gas Blowpipe [1819] lists experiments on ninety-six minerals) to high temperatures with the oxyhydrogen blowpipe. Volcanological analogies were drawn and some important improvements were made to the blowpipe, but this work made little lasting impact.

In 1817 Clarke was appointed university librarian, an office he held in plurality with his professorship and his two benefices, Harlton and Yeldham. The following year his health began to fail; nevertheless he continued to lecture and preach, to perform chemical experiments, and to write. He died at the London house of his father-in-law on 9 March 1822 at the age of fifty-two and was buried in the chapel of Jesus College, where a memorial by Chantrey was erected to him. The college possesses a particularly fine portrait by John Opie, R.A.

Clarke never held high office in any scientific society. The Geological Society of London elected him to honorary membership at its second meeting on 4 December 1807. In 1819 he played a leading part in the foundation of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. His correspondents and friends in Europe and England were many; Pallas, Haüy, Faujas de St. Fond, Gadolin, Davy, Wollaston, Pennant, Hamilton, Kidd, Jameson, and Thomas Thomson, to name but a few.

Clarke is essentially a satellite figure in science in that he made no notable discovery, but he did make a significant contemporary impact by his teaching of mineralogy in terms of crystallography and the new chemistry, by the topographical geology and volcanological observations in his Travels, and by his enthusiasm which fired the interest of contemporaries and undergraduates in minerals and in scientific fieldwork generally. His historical position is difficult to assess in that the importance of his influence so far outweighs that of his actual scientific achievement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Clarke’s scientific writings are encompassed in his A Tour Through the South of England, Wales, and Part of Ireland, Made During the Summer of 1791 (London, 1793); A Methodical Distribution of the Mineral Kingdom Into Classes, Orders, Genera, Species, and Varieties (Lewes, 1806); A Syllabus of Lectures in Mineralogy (Cambridge, 1807; 2nd; ed., London, 1818; 3rd ed., 1820); Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, 6 vols. (London, 1810–1823); The Gas Blow-pipe or Art of Fusion by Burning the Gaseous Constituents of Water (London, 1819).

A list of papers in various journal is given in Otter (see below).

II. Secondary Literature. A very full but uncritical biography was written by William Otter shortly after Clarke’s death, The Life and Remains of Edward Daniel Clarke (London, 1823; 2nd. ed., 2 vols., 1825).

Duncan McKie