Charles Alexander McMahon

After training at the Addiscombe Military Seminary, McMahon was commissioned into the Madras Army and served for eight years in the 39th Regiment, Madras Native Infantry, and for thirty years was a member of the Punjab Commission. He was appointed as Commissioner of Lahore and Hissar in the Punjab Province.^[1]

While at Hissar in 1871, McMahon began to work on geology, and in 1877 published his first important paper, in Volume X of the Records of the Geological Survey of India, dealing with a group of crystalline rocks. In 1879, while on leave in England, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, he enrolled as a student at the Royal School of Mines. Back in India he continued to investigate its geology, contributing twenty-one papers to the Records.^[2]

In 1885 he retired with the rank of colonel, but received further promotions, to major-general in 1888 and to Lieutenant-General in 1892. Settling in London, he took up petrology, publishing papers which took the total number of his contributions to geology to nearly fifty.^[2]

He was president of the Geologists' Association from 1894 to 1896.^[6][2] In 1899 he was awarded the Lyell Medal by the Geological Society of London.^[1]

McMahon died in February 1904, aged 73, and an obituary in the Geological Magazine described him as an excellent geologist and petrologist and a prominent member of the Geological Society of London, noting that he had had no early scientific training.^[1]

He was the father of Henry McMahon (born 1862), who followed his father into a career in India.^[7]

McMahon was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, a Fellow of the Geological Society of London, and a Fellow of the University of Lahore.^[1]