Joseph Jukes - Later Life and Death

Later Life and Death

Jukes landed in England again in June 1846, and in August received an appointment on the geological survey of Great Britain. The district to which he was first sent was North Wales. In 1847 he commenced the survey of the South Staffordshire coal-field and continued this work during successive years after the close of field-work in Wales. The results were published in his Geology of the South Staffordshire Coal-field (1853; 2nd ed. 1859), a work remarkable for its accuracy and philosophic treatment. In 1849, Jukes was offered the post of geological surveyor of the mineral surveying of New South Wales, back in Australia. However, because of his marriage and other issues, he declined the offer, and the post was given to Samuel Stutchbury. A year later, in 1850, Jukes became the director of an Irish geological survey. He held this post until his death nineteen years later, after a fall from a horse in Dublin. He was buried on 3 August 1869 in St Mary's churchyard at Selly Oak, Birmingham.

For many years he lectured as professor of geology, first at the Royal Dublin Society's Museum of Irish Industry, and afterwards at the Royal College of Science in Dublin. He was an admirable teacher, and his Student's Manual was the favoured textbook of British students for many years. During his residence in Ireland he wrote an article On the Mode of Formation of some of the River-valleys in the South of Ireland (Quarterly Journ. Geol. Soc. 1862), and in this now classic essay he first clearly sketched the origin and development of rivers. In later years he devoted much attention to the relations between the Devonian system and the Carboniferous rocks and Old Red Sandstone. Jukes wrote many papers that were printed in the London and Dublin geological journals and other periodicals. He edited, and in great measure wrote, forty-two memoirs explanatory of the maps of the south, east and west of Ireland, and prepared a geological map of Ireland on a scale of 8 miles to an inch. He was also the author of: