De la Beche, Henry Thomas (1796–1855)

English geologist. He secured the founding of the Geological Survey in 1835, a government-sponsored geological study of Britain, region by region.

De la Beche wrote books of descriptive stratigraphy, above all on the Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks of the Devon and Dorset area. He also conducted important fieldwork on the Pembrokeshire coast and in Jamaica. He prided himself upon being a scrupulous fieldworker and a meticulous artist. Such works as Sections and Views Illustrative of Geological Phenomena (1830) and How to Observe (1835) insisted upon the primacy of facts and sowed distrust of theories. His main work is The Geological Observer (1851).

Beach was born in London, went to military school and served in the Napoleonic Wars. Gentrifying his name, he joined the Geological Society of London in 1817 and travelled extensively during the 1820s through Great Britain and Europe. He persuaded the government of the need for a geological survey, and became its first director.