126 Things not generally Known. 



tains, and gradually flowed into vacuities and subterranean cavities pro- 

 duced by the consolidation of the earth's crust. He regarded fossils as 

 the real remains of plants and animals which had been buried in the 

 strata ; and, in speculating on the formation of mineral substances, he 

 speaks of crystals as the geometry of inanimate nature. Breioste^s Life 

 of Newton, vol. ii. p. 100, note. (See also "The Age of the Globe," in 

 Things not generally Known, p. 13.) 



" THE FATHER OF ENGLISH GEOLOGY." 



In 1769 was born, the son of a yeoman of Oxfordshire, Wil- 

 liam Smith. When a boy he delighted to wander in the fields, 

 collecting "pound-stones" (Eckinites), " pundibs" (TerebratulcR), 

 and other stony curiosities; and receiving little education be- 

 yond what he taught himself, he learned nothing of classics but 

 the name. Grown to be a man, he became a land-surveyor and 

 civil engineer, and was much engaged in constructing canals. 

 While thus occupied, he observed that all the rocky masses 

 forming the substrata of the country were gently inclined to 

 the east and south-east, that the red sandstones and marls 

 above the coal-measures passed below the beds provincially 

 termed lias-clay and limestone that these again passed un- 

 derneath the sands, yellow limestone, and clays that form the 

 table-land of the Coteswold Hills ; while they in turn plunged 

 beneath the great escarpment of chalk that runs from the coast 

 of Dorsetshire northward to the Yorkshire shores of the German 

 Ocean. He further observed that each formation of clay, sand, 

 or limestone, held to a very great extent its own peculiar suite 

 of fossils. The "snake-stones" (Ammonites) of the lias were 

 different in form and ornament from those of the inferior oolite ; 

 and the shells of the latter, again, differed from those of the 

 Oxford clay, Cornbrash, and Kimmeridge clay. Pondering 

 much on these things, he came to the then unheard-of con- 

 clusion that each formation had been in its turn a sea-bottom, 

 in the sediments of which lived and died marine animals now 

 extinct, many specially distinctive of their own epochs in time. 



Here indeed was a discovery, made, too, by a man utterly 

 unknown to the scientific world, and having no pretension to 

 scientific lore. " Strata Smith's" find was unheeded for many 

 a long year ; but at length the first geologists of the day 

 learned from the land-surveyor that superposition of strata 

 is inseparably connected with the succession of life in time. 

 Hooke's grand vision was at length realised, and it was indeed 

 possible " to build up a terrestrial chronology from rotten shells" 

 imbedded in the rocks. Meanwhile he had constructed the 

 first geological map of England, which has served as a basis for 

 geological maps of all other parts of the world. William Smith 

 was now presented by the Geological Society with the Wollas- 

 ton Medal, and hailed as "the Father of English Geology." 



