MARSH, HERBERT (1757-1839), English divine, was born at Faversham, Kent, on the 10th of December 1757, and was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he was elected fellow in 1782, having been second wrangler and second Smith’s prizeman. For some years he studied at Leipzig, and between 1793 and 1801 published in four volumes a translation of J. D. Michaelis’s Introduction to the New Testament, with notes of his own, in which he may be said to have introduced German methods of research into English biblical scholarship. His History of the Politics of Great Britain and France (1799) brought him much notice and a pension from William Pitt. In 1807 he was appointed Lady Margaret professor of divinity at Cambridge, and lectured to large audiences on biblical criticism, substituting English for the traditional Latin. Both here, and afterwards as bishop of Llandaff (1816) and of Peterborough (1819), he stoutly opposed hymn-singing, Calvinism, Roman Catholicism, and the Evangelical movement as represented by Charles Simeon and the Bible Society. Among his writings are Lectures on the Criticism and Interpretation of the Bible (1828), A Comparative View of the Churches of England and Rome (1814), and Horae Pelasgicae (1815). He died at Peterborough on the 1st of May 1839.
MARSH, NARCISSUS (1638-1713), archbishop of Dublin and Armagh, was born at Hannington, Wiltshire, and educated at Oxford. He became a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, in 1658. In 1662 he was ordained, and presented to the living of Swindon, which he resigned in the following year. After acting as chaplain to Seth Ward, bishop of Exeter and Salisbury, and Lord Chancellor Clarendon, he was elected principal of St Alban Hall, Oxford, in 1673. In 1679 he was appointed provost of Trinity College, Dublin, where he did much to encourage the study of the Irish language. He helped to found the Royal Dublin Society, and contributed to it a paper entitled “Introductory Essay to the Doctrine of Sounds” (printed in Philosophical Transactions, No. 156, Oxford, 1684). In 1683 he was consecrated bishop of Ferns and Leighlin, but after the accession of James II. he was compelled by the turbulent soldiery to flee to England (1689), where he became vicar of Gresford, Flint, and canon of St Asaph. Returning to Ireland in 1691 after the battle of the Boyne, he was made archbishop of Cashel, and three years later he became archbishop of Dublin. About this time he founded the Marsh Library in Dublin. He became archbishop of Armagh in 1703. Between 1699 and 1711 he was six times a lord justice of Ireland. He died on the 2nd of November 1713.
MARSH, OTHNIEL CHARLES (1831-1899), American palaeontologist, was born in Lockport, New York, on the 29th of October 1831. He graduated at Yale College in 1860, and studied geology and mineralogy in the Sheffield scientific school, New Haven, and afterwards palaeontology and anatomy in Berlin, Heidelberg and Breslau. Returning to America in 1866 he was appointed professor of vertebrate palaeontology at Yale College, and there began the researches of the fossil vertebrata of the western states, whereby he established his reputation. He was aided by a private fortune from his uncle, George Peabody, whom he induced to establish the Peabody Museum of Natural History (especially devoted to zoology, geology and mineralogy) in the college. In May 1871 he discovered the first pterodactyl remains found in America, and in subsequent years he brought to light from Wyoming and other regions many new genera and families, and some entirely new orders of extinct vertebrata, which he described in monographs or periodical articles. These included remains of the Cretaceous toothed birds Hesperornis and Ichthyornis, the Cretaceous flying-reptiles (Pteranodon), the swimming reptiles or Mosasauria, and the Cretaceous and Jurassic land reptiles (Dinosauria) among which were the Brontosaurus and Atlantosaurus. The remarkable mammals which he termed Brontotheria (now grouped as Titanotheriidae), and the huge Dinocerata, one being the Uintatherium, were also brought to light by him. Among his later discoveries were remains of early ancestors of horses in America. On becoming vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1875 he gave an address on the “Introduction and Succession of Vertebrate Life in America,” summarizing his conclusions to that date. He repeatedly organized and often accompanied scientific exploring expeditions in the Rocky Mountains, and their results tended in an important degree to support the doctrines of natural selection and evolution. He published many papers on these, and found time—besides that necessarily given to the accumulation and care of the most extensive collection of fossils in the world—to write Odontornithes: A Monograph on the Extinct Toothed Birds of North America (1880); Dinocerata: A Monograph on an Extinct Order of Gigantic Mammals (1884); and The Dinosaurs of North America (1896). His work is full of accurately recorded facts of permanent value. He was long in charge of the division of vertebrate palaeontology in the United States Geological Survey, and received many scientific honours, medals and degrees, American and foreign. He died in New Haven on the 18th of March 1899.
See obituary by Dr Henry Woodward (with portrait) in Geol. Mag. (1899), p. 237.
MARSH (O. F. mersc, for merisc, a place full of “meres” or pools; cf. Ger. Meer, sea, Lat. mare), an area of low-lying watery land. The significance of a marsh area is not so much in the manner of its formation as in the peculiar chemical and physical results that accompany it, and its relation to the ecology of plant and animal life. Chemically it is productive of such gases as arise from decomposing vegetation and are transitory in their effects, and in the production of hydrated iron oxide, which may be seen floating as an iridescent scum at the edge of rusty, marshy pools. This sinks into the soil and forms a powerful iron cement to many sandstones, binding them into a hard local mass, while the surrounding sandstones are loose and friable. A curious morphological inversion follows in a later geological period, the marsh area forming the hard cap of a hill (see [Mesa]) while the surrounding sandstones are weathered away. Salt marshes are a feature of many low-lying sea-coasts and areas of inland drainage.