There are not many pictures of Leonard Horner around- he was famous but not particularly famous. He was one of the few people mentioned by name by Karl Marx in 'Das Kapital'- for his work trying to improve conditions of working children in Victorian Britain. His great love was geology, and his best moments were the few years he spent in and around Bonn, in 1831-1833. While the Horner family were in Bonn they were visited by Charles Lyell, who came to see the remarkable geology- and to marry the oldest Horner daughter Mary. Horner & Lyell explored the crater of the Rodderberg, and examined the loess that it contained.
Horner presented a paper on 'The Geology of Bonn' to the Geological Society in London in 1833- it was published in 1836. One of the first papers on loess in English; a useful complement to Lyell's 1834 Edinburgh paper. For more about Horner and loess read Smalley (2020) and/or Smalley & Markovic (2018).
Smalley, I.J. 2020. Leonard Horner in Bonn 1831-1833, finding loess and being incorporated into Lyell's Loess Legion. GeoLogos 26, 163-170.
Smalley, I.J., Markovic, S.B. 2018. An enthusiasm for loess: Leonard Horner in Bonn and Liu Tung-sheng in Beijing. Open Geosciences 10, 925-931.
Loess200*2024
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