John Lycett

by Roger F.Vaughan B.A., B.Sc.

Dr.John Lycett (1804-12 April 1882) was born at Worcester. He was elected a member of the Cotteswold Club on the 18th May 1847. He had a medical practice at Minchinhampton, near Stroud, Gloucestershire. In 1857 he published a small handbook on the "Cotteswold Hills" and did useful work on the fossils of the Inferior Oolite in the area around Stroud. He did a vast amount of detailed work, including monographs on the "Mollusca from the Great Oolite" 1851-55, written with John Morris (1810-1886) and the "Supplementary Monograph on the Mollusca from the Stonesfield Slate, Great Oolite, Forest Marble and Cornbrash" in 1863. In that paper he was the first to set down in a systematic way the molluscs of the British Jurassic. His paper on "Fossil Conchology..." had the honour of being the second paper published by the Cotteswold Club in Volume One in 1853. In the same volume are his papers on bivalves, "molluscks", Gryphaea, Tancredia (Lycett), (named after Sir Thomas Tancred) and Trigonia. In Volume Two he writes on Perna Quadrata, Limea, Quenstedtia and Isodonta, also on the sands intermediate between the Inferior Oolite and the Lias, and on some sections of the Upper Lias recently exposed at Nailsworth.

In Volume Three his last paper for the Club was "Notes on the Ammonites of the Sands intermediate the Upper Lias and Inferior Oolite" in this he showed the "vertical range of the Ammonites of the sands, excluding those which are special to the Lias beneath them". His Handbook "The Cotteswold Hills" published in 1857 was described by Edwin Witchell in 1882 as "a work which has since served as a valuable guide to the study of the rocks of the lower Oolites" and who's own book "The Geology of Stroud" somewhat replaced. Lycett exhibits the typical regard for religion and geology at that time, by writing in his Introduction of 1857 "to investigate with becoming diffidence and humility the works of the One Great Being whose thoughts we recognise in the varied operations of nature and in the records of the long past not less than in the present scheme of creation".

Lycett kept his own geological collection at his home at Minchinhampton. His collection is now thought to be mostly divided between the Geological Survey and the Sedgwick Cambridge though some is with the B.G.S Keyworth, the Natural History Museum and some of the molluscs figured in his Great Oolite Monograph are in the National Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

Lycett retired to Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1860 where he died in 1882. One of his sons was also a Doctor and lived at Leamington.

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Updated 29.10.2000

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