Alfred Harker (petrologist)

Alfred Harker FRS (19 February 1859 – 28 July 1939) was an English geologist who specialised in petrology and interpretive petrography. He worked for the Geological Survey of Scotland and conducted extensive surveying and geological studies of western Scotland and the Isle of Skye. He and other British geologists pioneered the use of thin sections and the petrographic microscope in interpretive petrology.

Harker's father was the Yorkshire corn merchant Portas Hewart Harker, his mother Ellen Mary Harker. He attended Hull and East Riding College, and the private Clewer House School (Windsor) before enrolling as an undergraduate at St. John's College (Cambridge) from where he graduated with an M.A. on 18 January 1882. Whilst at Cambridge he was an early member of the Sedgwick Club. In 1884 he held the post of Demonstrator in the Geology Department under Thomas McKenny Hughes (whom he regarded his mentor), as Lecturer at Newnham College in 1892 at St. Johns College, as University Lecturer in 1904, and as Reader in Petrology in 1918.

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