90 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
Yet, after all, this failing has not been without its advantages. The 
joy of such men is in discovery, and they are happy and contented when, 
but only when, they feel perfect confidence in their conclusions. If their 
results then get published it is with an authority and finality denied to 
lesser men. In the progress of their work they are apt, as in fact all of 
them did, to infect their friends and students with the enthusiasm that only 
the spoken word can arouse. And to others they have always been most 
generous, even lavish, in giving ideas and momentum, partly out of sheer 
good-nature, but much more through the desire to watch the germination 
of the good seed that they sow broadcast and to see the harvest reaped, 
not by or for themselves, but for the advantage of the- science whose 
welfare is their chief care. 
During the early growth of the science, as in human families, it was 
the influence of the other parent that was most felt. From the earliest 
thinkers of Greece and Rome we have record of numberless observations 
and discoveries, sometimes in respect of minerals or organic fossils, some- 
times of unusual phenomena in mountains or volcanoes or in the relations 
of sea and land, generally leading to reasoned conclusions, many of them 
perhaps fanciful, some even absurd, but others so sound and far-seeing 
that they have not been upset at the present day. Many other countries, 
joining the favoured ones along the Mediterranean, carried the torch 
forward, and, in spite of the clogging influence of the vested intellectual 
interests of the day, the stock of knowledge gradually grew, until we find 
that Leonardo da Vinci was able to make as great an advance in the know- 
ledge of the earth as he did in his own arts of painting, sculpture, and 
architecture. 
It is true that during this period observers had a tendency to confine 
themselves too exclusively to one or other side of their subject, and were 
in the habit of reproaching one another with neglect of neighbouring 
branches, but even this made for progress by stimulating competition and 
discussion. 
In spite, however, of all that had gone before, in the fields both of fact- 
collecting and of speculation, it will be admitted that no single man made 
so great an individual advance, or placed it upon such an enduring founda- 
tion, or did so much on which the future of his science was to depend, as 
William Smith. And it is noteworthy that the spur to his discoveries was 
not so much his theoretical views or even his scientific zeal, as a plain and 
practical issue—the finding of a short-cut to speedy and accurate land 
valuation. 
The discovery by the ‘ Father of English Geology ’ that fossils are the 
‘ medals of creation ’ and that strata are each characterised by special suites 
of organisms was certainly one of the greatest ever made in the history 
of geology, and upon it have been founded directly or indirectly almost all 
the later advances in the science. But for the fuller utilisation of his 
discoveries there were needed the artistic faculty and a wide knowledge 
of places and people, both of which he fortunately possessed. Thus he was 
able to introduce handy, crisp, easily remembered and pleasantly sounding 
local terms to characterise his ‘ Formations,’ and to represent the outcrop 
of strata on maps which were not merely topographical but, for the first 
time, were tectonic also. So well did he discharge this latter function 
that a comparison of his general map of England with the latest production 
