# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Reade, Thomas Mellard

​READE, THOMAS MELLARD (1832–1909), geologist, born on 27 May 1832 in Mill Street, Toxteth Park, liverpool, where his father William James Reade kept a small private school, was of common descent from Staffordshire yeomen with Joseph Bancroft Reade [q. v.] and Sir Thomas Reade, deputy adjutant-general at St. Helena during Napoleon's captivity. His mother, Mary Mellard, of Newcastle-under-Lyme, was aunt to Dinah Maria Mulock [q. v.]. After private schools he began work at the end of 1844 in the office of Eyes and Son, architects and surveyors, Liverpool. At the beginning of 1853 he entered the engineer's office of the London and North Western railway company at Warrington, where he rose to be principal draughtsman. In 1860 he started on his own account in Liverpool as architect and civil engineer and built up a good business, being architect to the Liverpool school board during its existence from 1870 to 1902, and laying out the Blundellsands estate in 1868, on which he resided from 1868 till death. He died at his house, Park Corner, Blundellsands, on 26 May 1909, and was buried at Sefton, Lancashire.
Always fond of natural history, Reade began serious work in geology when about thirty-five years old, and lost none of the opportunities for that study which his profession offered. In addition to two books, he wrote nearly 200 papers and addresses, of which many were communicated to the Liverpool Geological Society, others to the 'Geological Magazine' and the Geological Society of London. Of these one group deals with the glacial and post-glacial geology of Lancashire and the adjoining counties. They record many important facts disclosed in excavations, which would otherwise have been lost. A very practical result of his studies was that when the tunnel under the Mersey was projected in 1873 he predicted that it would encounter a buried river channel filled with drift; his prophecy was verified in 1885. He also made valuable collections of specimens from boulders and of marine shells from the glacial drifts. In the later years of his life, co-operating with Mr. Philip Holland, Reade studied the mineral structure and changes of sedimentary, and especially slaty, rocks, forming for this purpose a collection of rocks, slices, sands and sediments. These are now in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge, as the gift of his son, Mr. Aleyn Lyell Reade. A third group of his papers dealt with questions of geomorphology, with which also his two books are occupied. In the earlier, on the 'Origin of Mountain Ranges' (1886), he discussed among other hypotheses that which attributes them to a localised crumpling of the earth's crust, caused by a shortening of its radius while cooling. Reade maintained them to be the slow cumulative result of successive variations of temperature in this crust, largely produced by the removal of sediment (like the transference of a blanket) from one part to the other; pointing out the necessary existence in a cooling globe of a 'level of no strain.' His second book, on the 'Evolution of Earth Structure' (1903), further defined and illustrated the above view, arguing that while the relative proportion of sea and land had been fairly constant through geological time, regional changes of level were due to alterations in the bulk of the lithosphere, caused by expansion and contraction. Though the majority of geologists have not as yet accepted his opinions on this question, all must agree that, as was usual with him, they are ably argued and demand careful consideration.
Reade became a Fellow of the London Geological Society in 1872, and was awarded its Murchison medal in 1896. He was three times president of the Liverpool Geological Society, was a past president of the Liverpool Architectural Society, an associate member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and an honorary member of other societies.
He married on 19 May 1886 Emma Eliza, widow of Alfred Taylor, C.E., who predeceased him, and by whom he had three sons and one daughter. Of the former, Mr. Aleyn Lyell Reade is author of 'The Reades of Blackwood Hill' and ’Dr. Johnson's Ancestry ' (privately printed, 1906), and 'Johnsonian Gleanings,' part i. (1909).
[Geolog. Mag. 1909; Quarterly Journal Geolog. Soc. 1910; Liverpool Geolog. Soc. vol. xi. pt. i.; information from Mr. Aleyn Lyell Reade; personal knowledge.]
T. G. B.