Lucas Barrett

Lucas Barrett (14 November 1837 – 19 December 1862) was an English naturalist and geologist.[1]

Barrett was born in London and educated at University College School. He went to Ebersdorf, near Lobenstein, Vogtland, Germany in 1853, studying botany and chemistry for a year.[2] In 1855, he accompanied Robert MacAndrew on a dredging excursion from the Shetland Islands to Norway and beyond the Arctic Circle; he subsequently made other cruises, to Greenland and to the coast of Spain. These expeditions laid the foundations of an extensive knowledge of the distribution of marine life.

James Scott Bowerbank named in 1858 a new species of deep-sea sponge after him: Geodia barretti. It had been collected by R. MacAndrew and L. Barrett on the Norwegian coast.

In 1855, he was engaged by Adam Sedgwick to assist in the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge. During the following three years, he aided the professor by delivering lectures. He discovered bones of birds in the Cambridge Greensand, and he prepared a geological map of Cambridge on the one-inch Ordnance map. In 1859, when he was twenty-two, he was appointed director of the Geological Survey of Jamaica. There, he determined the Cretaceous age of certain rocks that contained Hippurites. S. P. Woodward named the new genus Barrettia after him. Barrett also collected many fossils from the Miocene and newer strata.

He drowned, at the age of twenty-five, while investigating the sea-bottom off Kingston, Jamaica. His posthumous son Arthur Barrett and grandson Lucas Barrett were electrical engineers and ran the firm of Baily, Grundy and Barrett in Cambridge.[3]

References
  1. "Barrett, Lucas – 1837–1862: geologist and naturalist". Archived from the original on 30 September 2003. Retrieved 18 February 2012.
    - Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Barrett, Lucas" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. which in turn cites the obituary by S. P. Woodward in Geologist (February 1863), p. 60.
    - Death given as 19 December in The Reader, Volume 1, p. 124
  2. Mitchell, Simon. "Lucas Barrett, F.G.S., F.L.S." The geologists who studied Jamaica. University of the West Indies. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  3. "1922 Who's Who In Engineering: Company B". Grace's Guide to British Industrial History. Retrieved 17 May 2019.
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