v Personal Traits of William Smith 237 



l>urgh Review for February in that year. 1 But though his 

 fame was thus well established, his financial position re- 

 mained precarious. He had gradually formed a consulting 

 practice as a mineral and geological surveyor in the north 

 of England, and he eventually settled at Scarborough. From 

 1828 to 1834 he acted as land-steward on the estate of 

 Hackness in the same district of Yorkshire. In 1831 he 

 received from the Geological Society the first Wollaston 

 Medal, and the President of the Society, Adam Sedgwick, 

 seized the occasion to proclaim, in fervid and eloquent 

 words, the admiration and gratitude of all the geologists of 

 England towards the man whom he named " the father of 

 English geology." Next year a pension of 100 was con- 

 ferred upon him. Honours now came to him in abundance. 

 But his scientific race was run. He continued to increase 

 his piles of manuscript, but without methodically digesting 

 them for publication. He died on 28th August 1839, in 

 the seventy-first year of his age. 



William Smith was tall and broadly built, like the 

 English yeomen from whom he came. His face was that 

 of an honest, sagacious farmer, whose broad brow and firm 

 lips betokened great capacity and decision, but would 

 hardly have suggested the enthusiastic student of science. 

 His work, indeed, bears out the impression conveyed by 

 his portrait. His plain, solid, matter-of-fact intellect never 



1 At the end of 1817 there seems to have been some inquiry as to 

 priority of discovery in regard to Smith's work. In the following March 

 Mr. John Farey contributed to Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine a definite 

 statement of Smith's claims, showing that the fundamental facts and 

 principles he had established had been freely made known by him to many 

 people as far back as 1795, and that Farey himself, on 5th August 1807, 

 had published an explicit notification of Smith's discoveries and con- 

 clusions as to fossil shells in the article on Coal in Rees' Cyclopedia. 



