Item 9 - Receipt of donation to the coal charity at Elmstead

The geologist and priest Rev. Osmond Fisher was born in Dorset in 1817. He attended King's College, London and Jesus College in 1836, where he read for a degree in mathematics. During his time at Cambridge he struck up a friendship with the geologist Adam Sedgwick, who in 1852, proposed Fisher as a Fellow of the Geological Society. In 1881 he published 'The Physics of the Earth's Crust' in which he speculated that the Earth's crust may sit on top a liquid layer. This theory was ridiculed at the time, only slowly being accepted in the mid-twentieth century.