Ansted was born in London on 5 February 1814 to William Ansted. He was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, and inspired by Adam Sedgwick took an interest in geology. After taking an MA degree in 1839, he was elected to fellow of the college. He was appointed professor of geology at King's College London in 1840, holding the post until 1853. From 1845, he was also a lecturer at the East India Company'sMilitary Seminary at Addiscombe, and professor of geology at the College for Civil Engineers at Putney. His Elementary Course of Geology textbook was awarded as a prize to cadets at Addiscombe. The cadets themselves were posted to India and other colonies where some pursued geology. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1844, and from that date until 1847 he was vice-secretary of the Geological Society. The practical side of geology now came to occupy his attention and he visited various parts of Europe as a consulting geologist and mining engineer. In 1868, Ansted became an Examiner in Physical Geography to the Science and Art Department of King's College. In 1870 he was awarded a Telford Medal by the Institution of Civil Engineers for his paper "On the Lagoons and Marshes of certain parts of the Shores of the Mediterranean".
Travel and writing
Ansted's Gold-Seekers Manual attempted to improve the prospects of emigrants to the California gold rush. His other published works include Geology, Introductory, Descriptive, & Practical, The Geologist's Text-Book, Syllabus of Lectures on Mineralogy, Geology, and Practical Geology, An Elementary Course of Geology, Mineralogy, and Physical Geography, The Great Stone Book of Nature, The Applications of Geology to the Arts and Manufactures. He was the co-author with Robert Gordon Latham of The Channel Islands. By 1853, Ansted's reputation was sufficient that he was hired by potential investors to survey promising coal fields along the New River in southern Virginia in the United States, and he was one of the earlier geologists to identify the rich bituminous coal seams which lay there. His work set the stage for a mining boom in the area, where he invested in land along the Midland Trail in Fayette County in what became the new state of West Virginia in 1863 during the American Civil War. A protégé of Ansted, William Nelson Page, became a leading industrialist and developer of iron furnaces, coal mines and railroads in the area, leading and managing such enterprises as the Victoria Furnace in Goshen, Virginia and the Gauley Mountain Coal Company for absentee investors, many of whom were based overseas in the United Kingdom. Ansted collaborated with numerous scientists of the period and like many others he entered into a correspondence with Charles Darwin in about 1860.
