DAUBENY, Charles Giles Bridle (1795-1867), an English chemist, botanist, and geologist, was the third son of the Rev. James Daubeny, and was born at Stratton, in Gloucestershire, February 11, 1795, and died December 12, 1867. In 1808 he entered Winchester School, and in 1810 he was elected to a demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford. The lectures of Dr Kidd at that university first awakened in him a desire for the cultivation of natural science. In 1814 he graduated with second class honours, and in the next year he obtained the prize for the Latin essay. From 1815 to 1818 he studied medicine in London and Edinburgh; and in the latter city he attended the lectures of Professor Jameson on natural science. At that time the rival theories of the Huttonians and Wernerians were occupying the attention of geologists. In 1819 Daubeny, in the course of a tour through France, made the volcanic district of Auvergne a special study. By subsequent journeys in Hungary, Transylvania, Italy, Sicily, France, and Germany he extended his knowledge of volcanic phenomena; and in 1826 the results of his observations were given in a work entitled A Description of Active and Extinct Volcanoes, a second edition of which was printed in 1848. An earlier treatise was An Essay on the Geology and Chemical Phenomena of Volcanoes, published at Oxford in 1824. Daubeny, in common with Gay-Lussac and Davy, held subterraneous thermic disturbances to be probably due to the contact of water with metals of the alkalies and alkaline earths. In November 1822 Daubeny succeeded Dr Kidd as professor of chemistry at Oxford, and twelve years later he was appointed to the chair of botany there. At the Oxford Botanic Garden he conducted numerous experiments upon the effect of changes in soil, light, and the ...composition of the atmosphere upon vegetation. In 1830 he published in the Philosophical Transactions a paper on the iodine and bromine of mineral waters. In the following year appeared his Introduction to the Atomic-Theory, which was succeeded by a supplement in 1840j and in 1850 by a second edition. In 1831 Daubeny represented the universities of England at the first meeting of the British Association, which at his request held their next session at Oxford. In 1836 he communicated to the Association a report on the subject of mineral and thermal waters. In 1837 he visited the United States, and acquired there the materials for papers on the thermal springs and the geology of North America, read in 1838 before the Ashmolean Society and the British Association. In 1856 he became president of the latter body at its meeting at Cheltenham. In 1841 Daubeny published his Lectures on Agriculture; in 1857 his Lectures on Roman Husbandry; and in 1865 an Essay on the Trees and Shrubs of the Ancients, and a Catalogue of the Trees and Shrubs indigenous to Greece and Italy. His last literary work was the collection of his miscellaneous essays, published in two volumes, in 1867. In all his undertakings Daubeny was actuated by a practical spirit and a desire for the advancement of knowledge; and his personal influence on his contemporaries was in keeping with the high character of his various literary productions.
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