'The Bull's Head,' He also wrote English versions of the operas of 'Robert the Devil,' 'The Queen of Cyprus,' and 'La Sonnambula,' which last is said to have been adapted by him to the pronunciation of Malibran, by being written in morning interviews with her at her bedside. He also wrote two novels, 'The Roué,' 1828, and 'The Oxonians,' 1830. These are cleverly constructed, but to modern taste they seem tedious and formal.
In private life Beazley was a pleasant companion, a good and witty causeur, some of his bonsmots being remembered and repeated to this day, such as his reply to a lady's inquiry why the rooks near her house made so much noise, that they had caws for conversation. He died suddenly of an apoplectic seizure in the sixty-sixth year of his age.
[Builder, 1851; Gent. Mag. 1829, 1851.]
BECHE, Sir HENRY THOMAS DE LA (1796–1865), geologist, the last of an ancient family, was born in a London suburb in 1796. Losing his father, a military officer, at a very early age, young De la Beche was sent to the grammar school at Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, but his mother soon removed thence, first to Charmouth and afterwards to Lyme Regis, so famous for its liassic fossils, in collecting which the young student showed the first evidence of his taste for natural history. Intending to follow the profession of his father, Henry Be la Beche entered the military school at Great Marlowe in 1810; where the artistic powers of sketching, afterwards so useful to him in his geological work, were sedulously cultivated. But his military career was short. The general peace of 1815 led De la Beche, in company with Murchison and many other active and restless spirits, to quit the army.
De la Beche settled in Dorset, where the geological structure of the district engaged his attention; but he soon found the need of wider culture and information, and when in 1817, at the age of twenty-one, he became a member of the Geological Society of London, it became clear to him that he must seek abroad for deeper tuition. For the four or five succeeding years the young geologist was an ardent student of the natural phenomena of the Alps, and spending his time chiefly in Switzerland and France, he gained a sound knowledge of mineralogy and petrography. In 1819 De la Beche's observations on the temperature and depth of the Lake of Geneva were printed in the 'Bibliothèque Universelle' (reprinted in the 'Edinburgh Jovanal,' 1820), and in the same year his first geological paper, 'On the Secondary Formations of the Southern Coast of England,' appeared in the 'Transactions of the Geological Society' (vol. i. 1819).
In 1824 De la Beche visited his paternal estate in Jamaica, and among the fruits of his stay there was the publication (Trans. Geol. Soc.) of a paper in which, for the first time, the rocks of the island were described, On his return to England from Jamaica, De la Beche's pen was very busy in the preparation of other papers on the rocks of the south and west of England; the first distinct volume which he issued (in 1829) appears to be a translation of a number of geological memoirs from the 'Annales des Mines.' The list of books which may be said to have been written by De la Beche in his private capacity include 'Manual of Geology,' 1831; ' Researches in Theoretical Geology,' 1834; and the 'Geological Observer,' 1853. It is not too much to say that the publication of these works would alone have placed De la Beche in the first rank of geologists. In them he exhibits the most varied acquirements, applying almost every branch of science to the elucidation of geological facts. Notwithstanding the rapid advancement of geological knowledge, these books will long continue to be well worthy of the earnest study of every geologist.
But the great epoch of De la Beche's life was now approaching. In 1815 William Smith — the father of English geology — had published the first geological map of England, in which the position of each of the main beds of rock, or formations, is shown as they run across our island from south-west to north-east. This was necessarily a map on a small scale, not sufficiently detailed, for example, to indicate to any landowner the nature of the rocks composing his estate. But a great map of England was now in process of construction by the government department, entitled the Ordnance Survey, on the scale of one inch to a mile. De la Beche's idea was to make this 'ordnance map' the groundwork of a geological survey of each county, representing upon it, by different colours, the exact surface-area occupied by the different beds of rock, and further illustrating the relations of the strata to one another by means of horizontal and vertical sections. This great task was commenced by De la Beche at his own expense in the mining district of Devon and Cornwall. But the work was so clearly one deserving the name of 'national' that the government of the day quickly acceded to De la Beche's request for aid. In 1832 he was appointed to conduct the proposed geological survey under
