Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement/Green, Alexander Henry

​GREEN, ALEXANDER HENRY (1832–1896), geologist, born at Maidstone on 10 Oct. 1832, was the eldest son of Thomas Sheldon Green, head-master of the grammar school at Ashby-de-la-Zouche, who had married Miss Derington of Hinckley in Leicestershire. After passing through his father's school he went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was admitted pensioner on 25 June 1851, and graduated as sixth wrangler in 1855. Elected a fellow of his college in the same year, he proceeded M.A. in 1858, and resided until he obtained an appointment on the Geological Survey in 1861. Here he worked at first on the Jurassic and cretaceous rocks of the midland counties, passing on from them to the carboniferous deposits of Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and the northern counties. In 1874 he left the survey to become professor of geology in the Yorkshire College at Leeds, undertaking also, in 1885, the duties of the chair of mathematics. He was for a time lecturer on geology at the school of military engineering, Chatham. In 1888 he was appointed to the professorship of geology at Oxford in succession to Sir Joseph Prestwich [q. v.], and received from that university the honorary degree of M.A.

Green became F.G.S. in 1862, and received the Murchison medal in 1892. In the last year he was elected honorary fellow of Gonville and Caius College. In 1886 he was elected F.R.S., and in 1890 was president of the section of geology at the Leeds meeting of the British Association. His strength in this science lay in field work and in certain departments of physical geology where his mathematical knowledge was especially helpful. As a teacher and writer he was remarkably clear. In addition to the duties of his chair he undertook much examining and consulting work; perhaps, indeed, excessive labour shortened his life, for he was most indefatigable and thorough in whatever he took in hand.

In the summer of 1896 he had a paralytic stroke, and died on 19 Aug. at his residence, Boars Hill, near Oxford. He was twice married: in 1866 to Miss Mary Marsden, from the neighbourhood of Sheffield, who died in 1882; and in 1883 to Miss W. M. Armstrong, a native of Clifton, who survived him. One son and two daughters were the issue of the first marriage, and a son and a daughter of the second, all of whom survived their father.

Green's contributions to scientific periodicals were not numerous, but many survey memoirs were written wholly or in part by him, such as those dealing with Banbury (1864), Stockport (1866), Tadcaster (1870), Dewsbury (1871), Barnsley (1878), and Wakefield (1879). He also wrote the major part of the memoir on North Derbyshire (1869, with a second edition in 1887), and the geology of the Yorkshire coalfield (1878), which is considered to be the most important memoir from his pen. He contributed to 'Coal, its History,' &c., written by professors of the Yorkshire College (1878), and in 1876 published a 'Manual of Physical Geology,' in which certain branches of the subject were exceptionally well handled (it reached a third edition in 1883), and in 1890 wrote a remarkably lucid little book on 'The Birth and Growth of Worlds.'

T. G. B.