Ralph Tate

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In 1882
In 1882

Ralph Tate (11 March 1840–20 September 1901) was a British botanist and geologist.

Tate was born at Alnwick in Northumberland, son of Thomas Turner Tate (1807-1888), a teacher of mathematics and science, and his wife Frances, née Hunter. Tate was also nephew of George Tate (1805-1871), naturalist and archaeologist, an active member of the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club. He was educated at the Cheltenham Training College and at the Royal School of Mines, and in 1861 he was appointed teacher of natural science at the Philosophical Institution in Belfast. He there studied botany, and published his Flora Belfastinesis (1863); and he also investigated the Cretaceous and Triassic rocks of Antrim, bringing his results before the Geological Society of London. In 1864 he was appointed assistant in the museum of that society. He also wrote three botanical papers in 1866. In this year he published his volume, A Plain and Easy Account of the Land and Freshwater Mollusks of Great Britain.

In 1867 he went on an exploring expedition to Nicaragua and Venezuela. In 1871 he was appointed to the mining school established by the Cleveland ironmasters first at Darlington and then at Redcar. Here he made a special study of the Lies and its fossils, in conjunction with the Rev. J. F. Blake, and the results were published in an important work, The Yorkshire Lies (1876), in which the life-history of the strata was first worked out in detail. In 1875 Tate was appointed Elder professor of natural science at the University of Adelaide.

In Australia Tate energetically worked at his task of teaching botany, zoology and geology. He found at Adelaide a Philosophical Society which as vice-president and then as president he encouraged in every way. Well-established under the new title of the Royal Society of South Australia, he encouraged the members to send in original papers, and himself contributed nearly 100 to its Transactions and Proceedings. In 1882 he went to the Northern Territory and made a valuable report on its geological and mineralogical characteristics. In 1883 he became a fellow of the Linnean Society, and in 1888 was president of the biological section at the meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. He gave special attention to the recent and tertiary mollusca of Australia, and discovered evidence of Permian glaciation of southern Australia at Hallett Cove.

Five years later he was president of the meeting of this association held at Adelaide. He had published his valuable Handbook of the Flora of Extratropical South Australia in 1890. In 1893 he was awarded the Clarke Medal by the Royal Society of New South Wales. In 1894 he was a member of the Horn expedition to Central Australia and wrote the palaeontology report, in collaboration with J. A. Watt, that in general geology, and with Joseph Maiden, the botany report. He paid a visit to England at the end of 1896 partly for the good of his health, but early in 1901 it began to fail again and he died on 20 September of that year. He was married twice. His second wife survived him with one son and two daughters of the first marriage, and two sons and a daughter of the second.

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