Place Object Found: Keswick

Department: Earth Sciences

Henry Clifton Sorby, a 19th Century amateur scientist from Sheffield, pioneered the use of microscopy in geology. Among his slide collection are a large number of thin sections of slates. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society at only 31 years of age for his work on slaty cleavage, the phenomenon that slates split in a direction unrelated to the original layers in which the sediments were deposited.