William Smith 309 



England's place on the globe and consequent geographical 

 features have made her a Geological microcosm in which 

 almost every known formation is represented in some part 

 of the surface, and that the secrets of her structure and history 

 are best disclosed in the mountainous regions of Scotland, 

 the Lake District, and Wales, rather than in the less disturbed 

 and more regularly disposed strata of the eastern and southern 

 counties. It has thus been in the more complicated regions 

 of the north and west that most of her prominent geologists 

 have been born or have found the sphere and stimulus of their 

 investigations. 



Many a surveyor had observed the obvious fact that as 

 we proceed across the country various kinds of rock appear 

 at the surface one after another, and these have been laid 

 down on plans and maps for economic purposes; but the 

 careful work and shrewd intelligence of William Smith 

 (1769-1839), in the beginning of the nineteenth century, 

 led him to infer that these did not lie side by side like the 

 pieces in a Chinese puzzle, but rested on one another like 

 the tiles on a roof in regular succession, and that older rocks 

 crept out below the newer layers in a constant order. Here 

 we had the principle and mode of succession of rocks once 

 and for all established. 



This, however, was not all that we owe to William Smith, 

 for though fossils had been previously collected he now 

 discovered that different plants and animals which lived and 

 died and were buried in the rocks were characteristic of 

 different beds and were followed by different forms of life, 

 and that the difference in these fossil remains enabled him 

 to detect to which formation of the adjoining district an 

 isolated patch of rock was most related. 



Here we find the recognition of a chronological sequence 

 of the stratified rocks and of the possibility of identification 

 by means of the organic remains contained in them. The 

 first account of this discovery that every bed contained 

 characteristic and peculiar fossils by which it could be 

 identified was issued in 1799 by William Smith, and in 

 1815 he embodied the results of his twenty years of obser- 

 vation in the field in the first Geological Map of England 

 and Wales and part of Scotland. His work appeared to 



