STRATIGRAPHIC GEOLOGY.’ 
(By CHARLES S. PROSSER. ) 
The science of Stratigraphic Geology was founded by William 
Smith, an English surveyor and civil engineer, who was born in 
1769 in Oxfordshire, a county in which the rocks contain abun- 
dant fossils which as a boy he observed and collected. Later 
as an assistant to a land surveyor he became intimately acquainted 
with a considerable portion of southern England. For twenty-five 
years he continued his investigations in that country, making 
colored geological maps, determining the stratigraphy and arrang- 
ing a collection of fossils in the chronological order of the sue- 
cession of the strata. In the course of this long investigation he 
was able to trace certain strata across England, and he discovered 
that each horizon could be identified by its characteristic fossils. 
His famous geological map of England and Wales on which the 
various divisions were represented by different colors was published 
in 1815 and this was the first representation on a large scale of the 
geological formations of any considerable part of Europe. Ac- 
companying the map was an explanatory text of some fifty pages in 
which the stratigraphic divisions received names adopted from 
local ones in use where the rocks had been studied. In 1816 he 
published what is usually considered his greatest work, entitled 
“Strata identified by organized fossils, containing prints of the 
most characteristic specimens in each stratum.” Thus was strati- 
graphic geology founded through the unceasing efforts of an in- 
vestigator of his own country who, for a long time without even the 
encouragement of other students of the subject still remained true 
to his ideal. In considering his rank among other pioneers of the 
science the eminent German geologist, von Zittel has written that 
“His greatness is based upon this wise restraint and the steady 
adherence to his definite purpose; to these qualities, the modest, 
self-sacrificing, and open-hearted student of nature owes his well- 
deserved reputation as the ‘Father of English Geology’. 
In this connection it is specially important to note the prom- 
inence of the study of fossils in the organization and development 
of stratigraphic geology. 
Apparently one of the first geological reports relating to any 
* The following addross on Stratigraphic Geology was prepared at 
the request of Professors Edward Orton, Jr., and Herbert Osborn and read at 
the meeting of the Ohio Academy of Science. December 28. 1905. 
1 History of Geology and Palaeontology to the end of the Nineteenth 
Century. Ogilvie-Gordon translation, 1901, p. 112. 
