De la Beche, Henry Thomas (born Beach) (1796-1855)

English geologist who secured the founding of the Geological Survey 1835, a government-sponsored geological study of Britain, region by region. His main work is The Geological Observer 1851. Beach was born in London, went to military school and served in the Napoleonic Wars. Gentrifying his name, he joined the Geological Society of London 1817 and travelled extensively during the 1820s through Great Britain and Europe. He persuaded the government of the need for a geological survey, and became its first director. De la Beche wrote books of descriptive stratigraphy, above all on the Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks of the Devon and Dorset area. He also conducted important fieldwork on the Pembrokeshire coast and in Jamaica. He prided himself upon being a scrupulous fieldworker and a meticulous artist. Such works as Sections and Views Illustrative of Geological Phenomena 1830 and How to Observe 1835 insisted upon the primacy of facts and sowed distrust of theories.