William Devonshire Saull
Every article bears a descriptive label: and the localisation of the antiquities, some of which were dug up almost on the spot, renders these relics so many medals of our metropolitan civilisation.
[8] This specimen originated in the Isle of Wight, and is now in the Natural History Museum; the significance of the fused vertebrae with it came to Owen after his 1841 BAAS talk in Plymouth.
[13] He was nominated in 1832 to the National Political Union, a reformist group, by Henry Revell;[14] George Jacob Holyoake relates that when Hibbert died, he had charged Baume with getting his head to Saull and his museum, for phrenological purposes.
[17] He addressed Owenites at Bristol in 1833 and put forth the theory of man's evolution from monkeys or apes, an idea he derived from Sir Humphry Davy.
[19] At the end of 1833 Saull was one of a group who employed William James Linton to fit out a room in City Road as a "Hall of Science", in which Rowland Detrosier was to lecture.
[21] When in the 1830s the government successfully prosecuted Henry Hetherington, who had evaded the stamp duty on newspapers, Saull acted as treasurer of a "Victim Fund" for those pursued for selling unstamped papers;[22] the fund was an 1831 initiative of Hibbert and Saull with John Cleave and William Lovett, backed by the National Union of the Working Classes.
[28] Saull died on 26 April 1855,[2] and was buried in Kensal Green cemetery, near the graves of his radical friends Henry Hetherington and Allen Davenport.
[33] His interest in palaeontology was connected to his opposition to religious theories of creation;[1] it has been said that "in Saull's case Deism was a mask for materialism".
[2] Gideon Mantell defined Saull's topic in the 1853 version Essay on the Connexion between Astronomical and Geological Phenomena as "hypothetical causes of conditions and changes of temperature in former periods of the earth's history".
[36] Saull also republished, adding a preface, An Essay on the Astronomical and Physical Causes of Geological Changes, by Sir Richard Phillips, attacking the Newtonian theory of gravitation.
His Notitia Britanniae appeared in 1845, a year in which he examined the London strata to about 20 feet deep, in an excavation in Cheapside, comparing pre-Roman dwellings to some he had seen in Yorkshire.
[38][39] He gave a paper at the Ethnological Society (15 March 1848) about the Roman fort on Wimbledon Common, in terms of a five-stage conjectural history of ancient Britons.
