Alfred Richard Cecil Selwyn

Townshend Selwyn (Canon of Gloucester Cathedral) and his wife, Charlotte Sophia, daughter of Lord George Murray, bishop of St Davids, Wales,[1] and granddaughter of the fourth Duke of Athol.

Selwyn was engaged in the survey of North Wales and bordering portions of Shropshire, and a series of splendid geological maps resulted from his joint work with Ramsay and J.

[1] In 1852 the Colonial Office appointed Selwyn director of the Geological Survey of the recently founded colony of Victoria, where he built up an excellent staff including Richard Daintree, C. D. H. Aplin, Charles Smith Wilkinson, Reginald Murray, Edward John Dunn, Henry Yorke Lyell Brown and Robert Etheridge, Junior, with Sir Frederick McCoy as palaeontologist.

Selwyn discovered the Caledonian goldfield near Melbourne in 1854 and in the following year reported on coal seams in Tasmania, until in 1869 the Colonial Legislature brought the Survey to an abrupt termination on economic grounds.

Selwyn was his choice and took up his duties on 1 December 1869, but he faced a huge challenge: the geological mapping of the country as a task had grown tenfold due to the expanded size of Canada, stemming from Confederation in 1867, with more territories (Manitoba, British Columbia, and Prince Edward Island) added within the following decade.

As a student in Switzerland, he had become an accomplished mountain climber – a skill that proved invaluable to his extensive work in Canada's rugged new "Alpine province", British Columbia.

Fieldwork in remote uncharted wildernesses required superb frontier survival skills coupled with the eclectic scientific background necessary to record the geology, topography, the flora and fauna of the new lands being explored.