James Parkinson (1755-1824) gave his name to Parkinson's disease, but not only was he one of the most forward thinking medical men of his time, he was also at the forefront of radical politics, becoming involved in a plot to kill King George III. Narrowly escaping imprisonment and deportation, he turned his attention to his 'favourite science'. Geology was in its infancy and Parkinson was the first to put palaeontology on the scientific map of Britian with his seminal three-volume work on fossils. 2017 will mark the bicentennary of the publication of his work on the Shaking Palsy, which we now know as Parkinson's disease.

This talk charts the history of Man's attempts to date the age of the Earth. It addresses the opposition posed by religious beliefs and focuses on the work of Arthur Holmes (1890-1965), possibly the 20th century's greatest earth scientist, who pioneered the field of radioactive dating. Holmes spent decades attempting to date the age of the Earth and was the first to propose that it should be measured in billions, not millions, of years.

A serendipitous purchase at auction of a hand-drawn geological cross-section of the Forest of Dean turns out to have been created by David Mushet (1772-1847), famous for his ground-breaking experiments on iron and steel, but little known for his geological expertise. Mushet presented a copy of this section to the Geological Society in 1815, the same year as publication of the world’s first geological map of a nation – ‘the map that changed the world'. This remarkable geological map of England and Wales was created by William Smith (1769-1839), in whose archive a copy of another of Mushet’s sections has recently been discovered. This talk will explore how Smith, the ‘Father’ of English geology, and Mushet, arguably the ‘Father’ of iron and steel, searched together for iron and coal in the Forest of Dean at a time when geology was still in its infancy.