1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sharpe, Daniel

SHARPE, DANIEL (1806–1856), English geologist, was born in Marylebone, London, on the 6th of April 1806. His mother was a sister of Samuel Rogers, the poet. At the age of 16 he entered the counting-house of a Portuguese merchant in London. At the age of 25, after spending a year in Portugal, he joined his elder brother as a partner in a Portuguese mercantile business. As a geologist he first became known by his researches (1832–1840) on the geological structure of the neighbourhood of Lisbon. He studied the Silurian rocks of the Lake District and North Wales (1842–1844), and afterwards investigated the structure of the Alps (1854–1855). He was elected F.R.S. in 1850. He published several essays on cleavage (1847–1852), and showed from the evidence of distortion of organic remains that the direction of the pressure producing contortions in the rocks was perpendicular to the planes of cleavage. Most of his papers were published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, but one “ On the Arrangement of the Foliation and Cleavage of the Rocks of the North of Scotland,” was printed in the Phil. Trans. 1852. He was author also of a Monograph on the Cephalopoda of the Chalk, published by the Palaeontographical Society (1853–1857). In 1856 he was elected president of the Geological Society, but he died in London, from the effects of an accident, on the 31st of May that year.