Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Martin, Peter John
MARTIN, PETER JOHN (1786–1860), geologist, was born in 1786 at Pulborough, Sussex, where his father, Peter Patrick Martin, a native of Scotland, was a practitioner of medicine. He was chiefly educated by his father and an elder brother, and studied medicine, first at the United Hospital, as it then was, of Guy's and St. Thomas's, and afterwards at Edinburgh. Father and sons alike had literary tastes, and the former ultimately retired from practice and resided in Paris, where he died at the age of ninety. Martin as a boy had written in a periodical called 'The Preceptor.' As he became older his love for literature suffered no check by the growth of an enthusiasm for science. At Edinburgh his mind had been directed to geology. On settling down at Pulborough as M.R.C.S. to join his father in practice he devoted himself more especially to the study of the neighbouring district, and contributed several papers to the publications of the Geological Society, of which he was elected a fellow in 1833, and to the 'Philosophical Magazine.' He was hardly less interested in the archæology of Sussex. An account of a British settlement and walled tumulus near Pulborough was contributed by him to the 'Sussex Archæological Collections' (ix. 109), and a paper on 'The Stane Street Causeway' (ib. xi. 127). In 1833-4 he delivered three lectures, afterwards published, to the Philosophical and Literary Society of Chichester, on 'A Parallel between Shakespeare and Scott, and the Kindred Nature of their Genius.' He was also a musician and an enthusiastic gardener, writing often under the signature of 'P. P.' in the 'Gardener's Chronicle,' chiefly between 1841 and 1845. He was very successful in his profession, and was generally respected and trusted as a friend and adviser in matters other than medical. In 1821 he married Mary, daughter of Adam and Eliza Watson of Dunbar, and died on 13 May 1860, after an illness of some duration, leaving a family of three daughters and one son, who was an M.D. of Cambridge and physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital.
Martin's geological writings consist of a series of papers 'On the Anticlinal Line of the London and Hampshire Basins,' published in the Philosophical Magazine for 1829, 1851, 1856, and 1857, the longest, that of 1851, being mainly a paper read before the Geological Society in 1840, and unaccountably mislaid by its officials till 1848. Three communications on Sussex geology were also published by that society in 1834, 1842, and 1856. But Martin's most important work was a separately published 'Geological Memoir on a part of Western Sussex, with some Observations upon Chalk Basins, the Weald Denudation and Outliers by Protrusion,' a thin quarto volume, with a map and four plates, 1828.
As a geologist Martin belonged to the school whose motto was 'catastrophe and cataclysm,' and these ideas so far pervade his writings that they are now rarely consulted. He was, however, right, though he went a little too far in insisting that the tertiary 'basins' of London and Hampshire were not originally separated, but that the severance was the result of subsequent earth-movements. To these movements he attributed, in common with W. Hopkins, the valleys of the Weald, That these are fractures in any proper sense of the word few would now venture to assert with Martin, but the course of the streams may have been directed to some extent, and their action facilitated, by lines of weakness due to the upheaval of the district. Judicious remarks are often scattered through his writings, but his strength as a geologist seems to have lain in the direction of accurate observation rather than of inductive reasoning.
[Obituary notices in Gent. Mag. 1860, ii. 198, in the British Medical Journal, 1860, p. 402. and in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 1861, Proc. p. xxxii.]
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.195
N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
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| 290 | ii | 7 | Martin, Peter J.: after one son insert Robert Martin (d. 1891) |