NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY 



very hard to decipher though in truth they are hard 

 enough but rather that the men who made the at- 

 tempt had all along viewed the subject through an at- 

 mosphere of preconception, which gave a distorted 

 image. Before this image could be corrected it was 

 necessary that a man should appear who 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 per- 

 haps the more independent for that, and he had the 

 gift, besides his sharp eyes and receptive mind, of a 

 most tenacious memory. By exercising these facul- 

 ties, 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 ap- 

 parent revolutionary character in the facts which he 

 unearthed; yet in their implications these facts were 

 the most disconcerting of any that had been revealed 

 since the days of Copernicus and Galileo. In its bald 

 essence, Smith's discovery was simply this: that the 

 fossils in the rocks, instead of being scattered hap- 

 hazard, are arranged in regular systems, so that any 

 given stratum of rock is labelled by its fossil popula- 

 tion ; and that the order of succession of such groups of 



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