| Activity | Peach was in the coast guard service from 1824, and was first send to Southrepps in Norfolk and then Weybourn and in Cromer where he began his geological studies having met a Rev J Layton at Catford where he collected teeth and bones of elephants. He was then posted to Lyme Regis and Charmouth in Dorset and then to the south coast of Cornwall. He was one of the earliest discovers of fossils, including fish remains, in the Devonian rocks of that county, his first collection is in the Penzance. He read his first (of seventy one) paper on fossils of at the British Association meeting in Plymouth in 1841. His work came to the attention of Darwin who quoted him in his work of Balindae in 1854.
Peach was also sometimes employed by wealthy scientists such as Joshua Alder to collect for him.
Peach moved to Peterhead in Scotland in 1849 and then to Wick, Caithness in 1853. He began here to discover fossils, notably fishes, in the Old Red Flagstones of Durness, Sutherland. His Scottish collections were purchased by the Natural History Museum (BMNH) in 1870 and include 41 silurian fossils from Durness, 130 Old Red Sandstone Fishes and Crustaceans remains, 185 Jurassic fossils from Brora and some Old Red SandStone and Carboniferous plants. Many of the fishes bear small descriptive labels or notes in Peach's own handwriting.
Maclurea Peachii is named after him.
There is a portrait of Peach in the National Gallery of Scotland. |