1 62 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



Smith (William), the father of BRITISH 

 GEOLOGY, formulated the generalisation already foreshadowed 

 by his predecessors as we have seen, that each stratum 

 has been successively the bed of the sea, and contains the 

 fossilised monuments of the races of organic beings then in 

 existence ; that each stratum contains organised fossils peculiar 

 to itself, and may be recognised by examination of them ; he 

 distinguished between diluvial and stratified deposits, and laid 

 down that the same strata are always in the same order of 

 superposition, and contain the same fossils. He was the first, 

 in fact, to teach the identification of strata and to determine 

 the succession by means of their embedded fossils. He showed 

 that a fixed order of sequence could be traced among the dif- 

 ferent superincumbent strata. Scientific geology took its rise 

 from this striking discovery. The doctrine of geological evo- 

 lution was necessarily implied by his teaching. His geological 

 maps of England and Wales, constructed in 1815, after 

 twenty-five years' personal observations and surveyings, made 

 over every part of Britain,, is a lasting monument of practical 

 scientific industry. 



1769 1859. Humboldt (Alexander Von) gave great im- 

 pulse to the progress of science by his extensive researches in 

 America and Central Asia, in geography, ethnology (human 

 races and -customs), botany, natural history, climatology, 

 mineralogy, and geology ; was one of the founders of 

 METEOROLOGY and the physical geography of the sea. His 

 Cosmos (or Universe), the result of sixty-six years' labour, is a 

 general view of the world, which sums up the knowledge 

 reached in every branch of science up to his time (1859). 

 The want of absolute accuracy in some details which the 

 work exhibits occasionally is compensated for by the enor- 

 mous amount of information accumulated in it, a large 

 portion of which was original and due to direct ob- 

 servation on his part. In a work of such proportions in- 

 accuracy was inevitable at times, but the Cosmos will remain 

 a cyclopaedical monument worthy of its author, who may be 

 called the modern Aristotle. CLIMATOLOGY is the one 

 branch of science most indebted to him. He carried out the 

 immense undertaking of determining, and tracing across the 



