253 
age in many parts of England ; as well as in stopping out the sea from 
breaches through which it had invaded the marshes of Norfolk, 
| 1806, 1807, &c., and in the draining off the water of Mismer lake 
in Suffolk into the sea. He was the engineer also of the Ouse na- 
vigation in Sussex. In 1809 he was engaged in the restoration of 
the hot springs at Bath. In 1821 he recommended to Col. Braddyl 
to search for coal (beneath the magnesian limestone) on an estate 
in which is now situated the great South Hetton Colliery. No 
colliery in Northumberland had been worked, at that time, under 
the magnesian limestone. 
Mr. Smith’s principles of drainage have been applied with much 
advantage near Bath, Woburn, and in Norfolk. Finding the town 
of Scarborough to be very ill supplied with water, he excavated 
in the interior of the hill of Falsgrave Moor, two or three miles 
distant, a subterranean reservoir, in which he collected, from 
streamlets percolating that hill, sufficient water for the permanent 
supply of the town*. 
From his early days to the latest period of his life he tells us that 
he had the habit of looking on the ground yf. 
Mr. Smith’s last public employment was in conjunction with Mr. 
De la Beche and Mr. Barry, in the Commission for reporting on the 
best building-stone for the new House of Commons{. During the 
later years of his life he resided near Scarborough superintending 
the estates of Sir John Johnson at Hackness ; and dying at North- 
ampton, in August 1839, aged seventy-one, after a few days’ ill- 
ness, at the house of his friend Mr. Baker, the historian of North- 
amptonshire, on his way to the Meeting of the British Association 
* An account of this curious work is published by himself in the Phi- 
losophical Magazine for June 1827. 
+ See a paper by himself on Quartz in Soils, published in Charlesworth’s 
Magazine for July 1837. 
{ For more detailed accounts of the life of Mr. Smith, and of the amount 
and value of the services he rendered to Geology in England, I must 
refer to Dr. Fitton’s masterly and candid investigation of this question in 
the Edinburgh Review, Vol. XXIX, p. 310, &c.; to Mr. Conybeare’s In- 
troduction to his Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales, 1822, 
p- 45; to the Address of Professor Sedgwick to this Society, 1831; and to 
a biographical notice by his nephew Professor John Phillips, in the Maga- 
zine of Natural History, New Series, 1839, p. 213. 
ug 
