528 Geological Society : Anniversary Address. 



respecting a supply of water for the Kennet and Avon Canal, and 

 the trade it was likely to derive from carriage of stone and coal, 

 &c., placed him in daily contact with geological phaenomena espe- 

 cially calculated to illustrate the order of superposition of the English 

 strata, and laid the foundation of his future discoveries. 



By carefully noting the characters of the beds which he found 

 in juxtaposition, and making comparative sections in various direc- 

 tions in the vicinity of Bath, he ascertained that an uniform order 

 of succession pervades the groups exposed in the escarpments of the 

 hills in that part of England, arid that this uniformity is attended 

 by a similarity in the organic remains of certain beds, which differ 

 entirely from those of the groups above and below them ; by dili- 

 gently collecting and collating these remains, he drew the inference, 

 that each group of strata contains extraneous fossils peculiar to itself. 



His next step was to infer that the strata thus identified by himself 

 in Somerset and Wiltshire were not of insulated and local occur- 

 rence, but formed parts of the great system of deposits extending 

 over England; and thus, after many years of intense labour and 

 continual travel, he succeeded in extending the principles first 

 caught sight of in the neighbourhood of Bath, into that philoso- 

 phical generalization which became the basis of his geological map 

 of England. 



Before Mr. Smith had quitted his occupations in Somerset and 

 his residence at Bath, he indicated on a coloured map the geologi- 

 cal structure of that neighbourhood. This document, dated 1799, 

 is in the museum of our Society. He had also arranged his col- 

 lections of rocks and their organic remains in the order of succes- 

 sion and continuity of the several strata ; but neglecting to ap- 

 propriate to himself the merit of these discoveries by immediate 

 publication, he liberally imparted a knowledge of each, as it gra- 

 dually arose, to his private friends, through whose oral communi- 

 cations they obtained such general currency, that their real author 

 was frequently lost sight of or unknown. 1 was myself indebted to 

 Mr. Smith, though at that time a stranger to me, for my first know- 

 ledge of the order of succession in the oolitic series. This I derived 

 from information imparted to me by the late Rev. B. Richardson of 

 Farley Castle, who had himself acquired it from Mr. Smith. A ta- 

 bular view of the superposition of the English strata, written by Mr. 

 Richardson, from the dictation of Smith in 1799, at the house of the 

 Rev. Joseph Townsend, in Bath, and since also presented to this So- 

 ciety, forms a documentary proof of the extent of his discoveries be- 

 fore the conclusion of the last century. 



In 1817 he planned the beautiful museum of Scarborough, in 

 which he employed his original and instructive method of repre- 

 senting, by sloping shelves passing one beneath another, the inclined 

 position of the strata ; each shelf bearing the fossils that are re- 

 spectively characteristic of the stratum it is intended to/represent. 



These works of William Smith undoubtedly place him in the 

 position of an original discoverer, who was the - first to establish, 

 on an enlarged basis of evidence, the important facts of constancy 



