Notices respecting Nc*w Booh. 34-3 



ganic remains. The thousands of extinct animals and plants, which 

 fill the dark mansions of the earth, yield to the geologist as sure a 

 record of the revolutions by which our planet, after it had become a 

 mass of mere mineral matter, was prepared for the habitation of man, 

 as the mummy and the pyramid, the coin and the urn, the inscription 

 and the column, declare the subsequent vicissitudes of human society. 

 By announcing, forty years since, the important fact that each suite 

 of analogous strata, the result of a peculiar set of natural operations, 

 contains a peculiar suite of organic reliquiae, derived from the beings 

 then living in the waters, or transported thither from the land, and 

 consequently that the different fossil species of plants, corals, shells, 

 and vertebrated remains, belong to different epochs, and mark the 

 successive periods of the earth's formation, Mr. W. Smith changed 

 entirely the whole face of geological science. His principles, success- 

 fully applied to determine the stratification of England, received a 

 splendid confirmation from the researches of Cuvier and Brongniart 

 in France, and are at this moment universally admitted as the basis 

 of the laborious researches by which Buckland, Sedgwick, Murchison, 

 Lyell, De Beaumont, Von Buch, Voltz,Dufresnoy, Deshayes, Necker, 

 Brocchi, and others, have established the general accordance with 

 each other of the stratified deposits of Europe, and the existence of 

 more or less perfectly analogous deposits over all the world. 



Mr. Smith's map of the strata of England and Wales, published in 

 1815, but prepared as early as 1800, will long remain a venerable 

 monument of the then state of knowledge on that subject. And if 

 the amiable and excellent author, oppressed less by age than by 

 heavy afflictions, has been so regardless of his reputation as to neg- 

 lect the corrections of his noble work which his own unwearied in- 

 vestigations have furnished, is there one among the more eager and 

 more fortunate aspirants after such fame, so ungrateful for the light 

 which guides his steps as to reproach the modest self-oblivion of the 

 father of English geology ? 



Townsend, in his character of Moses, published, with a slight ac- 

 knowledgement, what he had learned from his friend "Stratum Smith." 

 Farcy's Derbyshire contains a similar abstract j and Mr. Smith's own 

 publications have partially exposed in print those views which were 

 the theme of all his conversations. 



The author of the present publication, the nephew and pupil of Mr. 

 Smith, has dedicated to him a performance calculated in a remarkable 

 degree to develope and confirm his opinions. We have long intended 

 to give this work a degree of attention in our pages in some respect 

 corresponding to its merits, although they have been repeatedly re- 

 corded in them by Mr. De la Beche, Professor Sedgwick, and other 

 geologists. The present time, when the Geological Society has 

 awarded to Mr. Smith the first Wollaston medal, for his discovery of 

 the means of identifying strata by organic remains ; and when the late 

 President of the Society has exposed in so luminous a manner the 

 benefits which Geology has derived from his researches, in an address 

 officially delivered from the Chair, cannot but be appropriate for re- 

 calling Mr. Phillips's work to the attention of the public. 



The 



