Peter Martin Duncan

Peter Martin Duncan was an English palaeontologist born April 20, 1821, in Twickenham, England, who died May 28, 1891, and who studied medicine at King College, London, earning his M.B. in 1846 and practicing as a physician in Rochester and Colchester before turning to geology and natural history. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1868, served as secretary of the Geological Society of London from 1864 to 1870 and as its president from 1876 to 1878, held the professorship of geology at King College, London, from 1870 and at Cooper Hill College, and served as president of the Microscopical Society from 1881 to 1883, making a special study of corals and echinids and taking further interest in ophiurids, sponges and protozoa across fossil fauna from Malta, Java, India, Australia and the West Indies. He published more than one hundred scientific papers, edited the six-volume Cassell Natural History between 1876 and 1882, wrote Primer of Physical Geography and Heroes of Science in 1882, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1881.