A YORKSHIRE NATURALIST 13 



Eastern Yorkshire was William Smith, the dis- 

 tinguished Father of English Geology. My boyish 

 reminiscence of the old engineer, as he sketched a 

 triangle on the flags of our yard, and taught me how 

 to measure it, is very vivid. The drab knee- 

 breeches and grey worsted stockings, the deep waist- 

 coat, with its pockets well furnished with snuff of 

 which ample quantities continually disappeared within 

 the finely chiselled nostril and the dark coat with its 

 rounded outline and somewhat quakerish cut, are all 

 clearly present to my memory. 



Spending the greater portion of his morning in 

 writing, towards noon he would slowly wend his way 

 to the museum, where he always found in my father 

 a friend with whom to gossip about the rocks of the 

 Cotswolds, the clays of Kimmeredge, or the drainage 

 of the Eastern Fens. He would expound in a 

 Coleridgean fashion his ideas of their relation to 

 the strata of Yorkshire and of the other parts of 

 England. His walking pace never varied ; it was slow 

 and dignified ; he was usually followed a few yards 

 in the rear by his rose-cheeked partner in life. We 

 have a thousand times contemplated the fine old man, 

 who, amid his favourite haunts, thus laid the founda- 

 tions of geological science. 



Smith's memory was most remarkable, especially 

 in anything relative to his own life. On the occasion 

 already referred to, when he and my father took Sir 

 Roderick and Lady Murchison along the Yorkshire 

 coast they parted company at Saltburn, the 



