Mantell, GIDEON ALGERNON, an eminent British paleontologist and geologist, was born at Lewes, in Sussex, in 1790; studied medicine, and practised successively at Lewes, Brighton, and
Clapham, London, where he died in 1852. Though long suffering from a distressing spinal disease, the result of an accident, he pursued his studies with unabated zeal. He bequeathed his geological drawings to Yale College. His collections he sold to the British Museum in 1839 for £5000. Mantell's principal works are Fossils of the South Downs (1822); The Fossils of Tilgate Forest (1826); Wonders of Geology (1833), perhaps the most popular geological work ever written by an Englishman; and Medals of Creation, or First Lessons in Geology (1844). He was a very voluminous writer, no less than sixty-seven works and memoirs of his being enumerated in Agassiz and Strickland's Bibliotheca Zoologica et Geologica. His claims to a permanent place in the history of science rest mainly on his laborious investigations into the fossils of the Wealden beds. To him we owe the discovery and description of the four great Dinosaurian reptiles, the Iguanodon, Hylcosaurus, Pelorosaurus, and Regnosaurus.