The industrial chemist and academic geologist Professor Sir Frederick Henry Stewart was born on 16 January 1916. He was educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh, and he studied at Aberdeen University and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1941 he joined the Research Dept. of ICI (Billingham Division) as a mineralogist, and in 1943 he became a Lecturer in Geology at Durham University. In 1956, Stewart was appointed to the Regius Chair of Geology and Mineralogy at Edinburgh University where he set about building up the Grant Institute of Geology. Under his tenure the Institute tripled in size and by the mid-1960s was receiving funding sufficient to build and equip an experimental laboratory unit which was later chosen by NASA for the analysis of lunar samples under vacuum to simulate the conditions of the lunar surface. He became Dean of the Faculty of Science in 1965 and a member of the Council for Scientific Policy in 1967. Professor Stewart was knighted in 1974. He served as a Trustee of the British Museum (Natural History) from 1983-1987. In addition to papers on igneous and metamorphic petrology and salt deposits, his published works includeThe British caledonides, edited with R. W. Johnson (1963), andMarine evaporates(1963). After his retiral, he founded the Mull Expeditionary Sapphire Society (MESS) in 1982, and he discovered the largest sapphire ever found in Scotland. Professor Sir Frederick Henry Stewart died in Oban on 9 December 2001. His widow is the accomplished writer, Mary Stewart (b. 1916).