FITTON, WILLIAM HENRY British geologist, was born in Dublin in Jan. 1780. Educated at Trinity college, in that city, and at Edinburgh university, he took a medical practice at Northampton in 1812, and for some years the duties of his profession engrossed his time. In 182o he settled in London and devoted himself to the science of geology. His "Observations on some of the Strata between the Chalk and the Oxford Oolite, in the South-east of England" (Trans. Geol. Soc. ser. 2, vol. iv.) embodied a series of researches extending from 1824 to 1836, and form the classic memoir familiarly known as Fitton's "Strata below the Chalk." In this great work he estab lished the true succession and relations of the Upper and Lower Greensand, and of the Wealden and Purbeck formations, and elaborated their detailed structure. He had been elected F.R.S. in was president of the Geological Society of London 1827 29, and was awarded the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society in 1852. He died in London on May 13, 1861.
See the obituary notice by R. I. Murchison in Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xviii., 1862, p. xxx.