THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PALEONTOLOGY 



It was not that the rudiments of this story are so very 

 hard to decipher though in truth they are hard enough 

 but rather that the men who made the attempt had all 

 along viewed the subject through an atmosphere of pre- 

 conception, which gave a distorted image. Before this 

 image could be corrected it was necessary that a man 

 should appear Avho could see without prejudice, and 

 apply sound common-sense to what he saw. And such 

 a man did appear towards the close of the century in the 

 person of William Smith, the English surveyor. He 

 was a self-taught man, and perhaps the more indepen- 

 dent for that, and he had the gift, besides his sharp eyes 

 and receptive mind, of a most tenacious memory. By 

 exercising these faculties, rare as they are homely, he 

 led the way to a science which was destined, in its 

 later developments, to shake the structure of established 

 thought to its foundations. 



Little enough did William Smith suspect, however, 

 that any such dire consequences were to come of his act 

 when he first began noticing the fossil shells that here 

 and there are to be found in the stratified rocks and soils 

 of the regions over which his surveyor's duties led him. 

 Nor, indeed, was there anything of such apparent revo- 

 lutionary character in the facts which he unearthed; 

 yet in their implications these facts were the most dis- 

 concerting of any that had been revealed since the day 

 of Copernicus and Galileo. In its bald essence Smith's 

 discovery was simply this: that the fossils in the rocks, 

 instead of being scattered haphazard, are arranged in 

 regular systems, so that any given stratum of rock is 

 labelled by its fossil population ; and that the order of 

 succession of such groups of fossils is always the same in 

 any vertical series of strata in which they occur. That 



