Dorothy Rayner was one of the first women to be appointed to a tenured academic post in any English university geology department, joining the Geology Department of the University of Leeds in 1939 and serving for 38 years to her retirement in 1977. She had two very important early influences in her life. The first was her family, with its tradition through several generations of doctors, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, radical politics and social activism. The other was her earlier education, particularly her 7 years at the very influential Bedales School, the first of what were to become known in the twentieth century as 'progressive' schools. After gaining a First at Girton College in the Cambridge Natural Sciences Tripos, she undertook ground-breaking research on the taxonomy and neural systems of Jurassic fishes, for which she was awarded a Cambridge PhD in 1938, soon after which she was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Geology at Leeds. In addition to an always very heavy teaching load, she continued with a broad range of research, including further work on fossil vertebrates, and the stratigraphy of first the north of England and then the whole of the British Isles. She was also an outstanding Editor, and then President, of the Yorkshire Geological Society.

Abstract Under the 1824–1826 presidency of William Buckland, the still young Geological Society negotiated with the Government a very important advance in terms of the official recognition of the Society and the emerging science of geology that the Society represented, by obtaining a prestigious new legal status in the form of a Royal Charter of Incorporation. Then, under William Fitton's presidency, in 1828 the government granted the Society rent-free accommodation for both its meetings and its rapidly growing library and museum in the government offices in Somerset House, London. The objectives behind these two related moves are considered, although it is unfortunate that little of the detailed background documentation to these developments seem to have been preserved within either Society or government records. A brief account of what might have been – the possibility of seeking a Coat of Arms for the newly Chartered Society – concludes the story.

The World Heritage Convention, 1972, which aims to promote and support the conservation of the world's cultural and natural heritage, can be considered one of the world's most successful international treaties as it has been adopted by 184 states. However, for very many states it is primarily a way in which places that they consider to be their most important heritage sites and monuments can gain additional international recognition through inscription on the World Heritage List. Though geological interest is one of the major criteria for inscription on the World Heritage List. in practice relatively few sites have been inscribed wholly or partly because of their geological or geomorphological importance, (just 72 Out of the Current 851 World Heritage sites). Further, the present list of geological inscriptions is very uneven and unrepresentative of geological periods and Earth processes, and localities of key significance in the history of geology are almost absent. One weakness is that, although there is some professional geological advice through the World Conservation Union (one of the two official advisory bodies to the World Heritage Committee) there is no mechanism through which international geological science or history of geology organizations can contribute to the development of world heritage policies and the evaluation of nominations to the World Heritage List. However, the greatest problem is that most Countries are not evaluating and nominating their national geological heritage. The geological community needs to become much more active in promoting geological conservation and nominations to the World Heritage Committee at the national level.

The glacial theory as proposed by Louis Agassiz in 1837 was introduced to the British Isles in the autumn of 1840 by Agassiz and his Oxford mentor, William Buckland. Charles Lyell was quickly converted in the course of a short period of intensive fieldwork with Buckland in and around Forfarshire, Scotland centred on the Lyell family's estate at Kinnordy. Agassiz, Buckland and Lyell presented substantial interrelated papers demonstrating that there had been a recent land-based glaciation of large areas of Scotland, Ireland and northern England-at three successive fortnightly meetings of the Geological Society of London, of which Buckland was then President, in November and December 1840. However, the response of the leading figures of British geology was overwhelmingly hostile. Within six months Lyell had withdrawn his paper and it had become clear that the Council of the Society was unwilling to publish the papers, even though they were by three of the Society's most distinguished figures. Lyell reverted to his earlier interpretation of attributing deposits such as tills, gravels and sands and the transport of erratics to a very recent deep submergence with floating icebergs, maintaining this essentially 'catastrophist' interpretation through to his death a quarter of a century later.