Reverend Tenison Woods is best known as the mentor of Mary MacKillop who in 2010 became Australia's first saint. However, Tenison Woods was also a brilliant scientist who combined his pastoral duties in the South-East of South Australia with his geological and fossil explorations. He took his geological hammer and research notes with him on horseback, and wrote on a wide range of topics for the daily press and in published books. Mary evocatively described him as 'the earnest naturalist, the scientist priest, the lover of the wild and beautiful'. The Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that he made 'original contributions to Australian geology, palaeontology and zoology'.

The frontispiece of Geological Observations featured here shows Tenison Woods above Naracoorte Cave.

His writing has a mystical quality infusing science with imagination. On page 259 he muses on the origins of the Mount Gambier lake: 'There, while the rising tide dashed its sparkling waves through the groves of coral, where the busy polypi were plying their variegated arms in search of matter ... a thousand fishes frisked for a while to die and leave their forms imprinted on the stone, while the cunning saurian slept among the arborescent forms, or wilily watched his prey. Then the earth slowly raised them from the waters ... and stones tell how they lived and died.' This classic work is readable online as an e-book.

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