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ALFRED BELL, BORN 1835, DIED 1925.
THE late Alfred Bell, who died at Ipswich, on Dec. 7th, 1925,
at the great age of 901/2 years, was well known to the past
and to many of the present generations of palaeontologists. He
used smilingly to declare that he was practically the last of the
old race of all-round geologists, and that now-a-days there were
only specialists.
Born in the parish of St. Marylebone, London, in 1835, he
was the son of Robert Bell who carried on the old fashioned
business of cordwainer, and came of an old family of that name
long resident in Cheshire and Worcestershire. His mother was
a daughter of Robert Alger, of the Folly Farm, St. Margarets,
Ipswich. His interests in natural science appear to have been
awakened at an early age, largely through the publication
of those pioneers of illustrated popular literature, Wright's
Penny Illustrated Magazine, and the Pictorial Museum of Natural
History. Encouraged by their parents, Alfred Bell and his
brother Robert, a year or two the elder, commenced the
formation of a collection when about 11 years of age.
The lads appear to have accumulated a really considerable
series of shells, minerals, fossils, antiquities and "curios."
Robert from the first specialized almost entirely in Conchology
and in later life became a well-known and expert follower of
that science, and a F.G.S. Alfred was, in his younger years,
a more general collector. It was still the age of sailing ships,
and seamen, with their longer spells in foreign ports, were in.
the habit of bringing home more souvenirs of distant lands
than is now the case. Alfred Bell acquired many of these,,
and as a boy "who wanted to know" he became familiar to
most of the departmental officers of the old British Museum,
who encouraged his youthful studies. He collected fossils
from the cuttings of the Great Northern Railway then in process
of construction out of London, and at a time when railway
excursions must have been in their infancy went with his brother
on a geological collecting expedition to Folkestone. Later on, as
young men, they joined a Workingmen's Institute and attended
a course of lectures on Geology. These, followed by a visit
to the well-known Pliocene deposits at Walton-on-the-Naze,
led to their concentration upon the invertebrate palaeontology