Small and indefatigable with a flowing patriarchal beard in later years, Clarke was a mixture of scholar, churchman, practical geologist and publicist. To his parishioners he was a warm-hearted and devoted friend, but in scientific affairs he was a tenacious and often sharp controversialist. He was a born fighter. 'Considering you are a clergyman', Roderick Murchison wrote, 'you are very bellicose'. Above all he was a pioneer. 'When geology was yet unknown and had its way to make', an obituarist claimed, 'who could estimate the immense gain to our young Colony to have a man like Clarke at our disposal … He excited an interest in the subject; he never ceased to bring the main labour of his life prominently before the public … He was a centre around which all facts and discoveries were sure to group themselves'. Working for the most part unaided and at his own expense, Clarke made a geological survey in New South Wales, amassing and exhibiting his rocks and fossils, conducting a huge correspondence with scientists and prospectors and acting as scientific mentor to newly-recruited geological surveyors in other colonies until the Department of Mines was established in 1873. In addition to his reports and books, Clarke published some eighty scientific papers, while his geological maps formed the basis of the first geological sketch map of New South Wales, issued by the Department of Mines in 1880. His pioneering on the stratigraphy of New South Wales laid the foundations on which much later work has been based. Clarke's valuable collection of Australian fossils and minerals, acquired by the government on his death, were destroyed with his scientific library in the Garden Palace fire in 1882. (http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/clarke-william-branwhite-3228)
Contains: notes, bibliography, index.