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panied by the just and eloquent eulogium pronounced on that oc- 
casion by Professor Sedgwick. In the same year also the British 
Association assembled at York made successful application to go- 
vernment for a pension, which was settled upon Mr. Smith for life ; 
and at the meeting of this Association at Dublin, 1835, the Univer- 
sity conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law. 
Mr. Smith was one of those remarkable persons whom strong 
natural sense and acute powers of observation occasionally enable 
to triumph over the disadvantages of a defective education. His 
attention was first called to physical inquiries, by the cbserving, when 
a boy, that a large stone which he was lifting under water in search 
of eels, could be moved with much more ease, than if the same 
stone had been on land. His juvenile curiosity was excited to learn 
the cause of an occurrence so surprising to him; and this first 
step led him, at the age of eighteen, to enter the profession of a 
surveyor and civil engineer. His early professional occupations 
from the year 1791 to 1799, whilst surveying collieries, constructing 
a part of the Somerset coal canal near Bath, and preparing reports 
respecting a supply of water for the Kennet and Avon Canal, and 
the trade it was likely to derive from carriage of stone and coal, 
&e., placed him in daily contact with geological phenomena espe- 
cially calculated to illustrate the order of superposition of the English 
strata, and laid the foundation of his future discoveries. 
By carefully noting the characters of the beds which he found 
in juxtaposition, and making comparative sections in various direc- 
tions in the vicinity of Bath, he ascertained that an uniform order 
of succession pervades the groups exposed in the escarpments of the 
hills in that part of England, and that this uniformity is attended 
by a similarity in the organic remains of certain beds, which differ 
entirely from those of the groups above and below them; by dili- 
gently collecting and collating these remains, he drew the inference, 
‘that each group of strata contains extraneous fossils peculiar to 
itself. 
His next step was to infer that the strata thus identified by himself 
in Somerset and Wiltshire were not of insulated and local occur- 
rence, but formed parts of the great system of deposits extending 
over England; and thus, after many years of intense labour and 
continual travel, he succeeded in extending the principles first 
