James Croll is one of those remarkable Victorian characters who made a fundamental contribution to our current understanding of science, but who is now all but forgotten except in specialist circles.

Coming from a modest rural background near Perth, Croll was largely self-taught through reading, his enthusiasm for learning sparked by The Penny Magazine of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.

For much of his life he struggled with illness, and he held a succession of different jobs, from millwright to shopkeeper to insurance salesman. It was in 1859, when he became a janitor at the Anderson College in Glasgow and gained access to its extensive library, that he became actively involved in pushing the boundaries of glaciology.

His first paper on glacial epochs was published in 1864, and in 1875 he published the landmark Climate and Time, the distillation of his theory of ice ages and Earth’s orbit. In all, he wrote dozens of scientific papers, amongst other things explaining global oceanic circulation, calculating the age of the sun, developing a theory of evolution, and remarkably presciently predicting the thickness of the unexplored Antarctic Ice Sheet.