Osmond Fisher

Reverend Osmond Fisher was an English geologist, geophysicist and clergyman born November 17, 1817, in Osmington, Dorset, England, who died July 12, 1914, and who was among the first to propose that the Earth consists of a solid crust floating above a fluid core, setting out his views in The Physics of the Earth Crust in 1881, which also addressed the non-homogeneous composition of the Earth and observations later associated with continental drift and glacial isostasy; he also proposed an incorrect theory that the Pacific Ocean basin formed when the Moon split away from the Earth. Ordained a deacon in 1844 and a priest in 1845, he served as a tutor at Jesus College, Cambridge, from 1853 and was later made an honorary fellow of King College in 1878 and of Jesus College in 1893; he has been called the author of the first geophysics textbook. He was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1852, won the Murchison Medal in 1893, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1913.