William Smiths Early Life 225 



surveyor. But he had no education beyond that of the 

 village school and what he had been able to acquire 

 through his own reading. This early defect crippled to the 

 end of his life his efforts to make known to the world 

 the scientific results he had obtained. 



Smith's capacity and steady powers of application were 

 soon appreciated in the vocation upon which he had 

 entered. Before long he was entrusted with all the 

 ordinary work of a land surveyor, to which were added 

 many duties that would now devolve upon a civil engineer. 

 From an early part of his professional career, his attention 

 was arrested by the great varieties among the soils with 

 which he had to deal, and the connection between these 

 soils and the strata underlying them. He had continually 

 to traverse the red ground that marks the position of the 

 Triassic marls and sandstones in the south-west and centre 

 of England, and to pass thence across the clays and lime- 

 stones of the Lias, or to and fro among the freestones and 

 shales of the Oolites. The contrasts of these different kinds 

 of rock, the variations in their characteristic scenery, and the 

 persistence of feature which marked each band of strata 

 gave him constant subjects of observation and reflection. 



By degrees his surveying duties took him farther afield, 

 and brought him in contact with yet older formations, par- 

 ticularly with the Coal-measures of Somerset and their 

 dislocations. At the age of four-and-twenty, he was en- 

 gaged in carrying out a series of levellings for a canal, and 

 had the opportunity of confirming a suspicion, which had 

 been gradually taking shape in his mind, that the various 

 strata with which he was familiar, though they seemed 

 quite flat, were really inclined at a gentle angle towards 



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