226 Prof. SiUiman's Address bofore the 



and in some instances in galleries carried out beneath the bottom 

 of the sea, where the chafing of the pebbles could be heard over 

 the heads of the miners as they were pursuing their work. Al- 

 though England was then without accessible means of scientific 

 instruction in geology, and even mineralogy was far from making 

 a considerable figure, many causes were in operation, to prepare 

 the way for the signal development of scientific geology which 

 soon after began to be made. Mining had been carried on for 

 ages in Great Britain ; her mines were numerous and deep, and 

 very various in their productions, both in profitable and curious 

 minerals ; in this natural school of mines, many mining engineers 

 and practical geologists were forming in various parts of the 

 kingdom. — Among these, William Smith* was laying the foun- 

 dations of British scientific geology, by examining and com- 

 paring, quietly and almost in solitude, the secondary strata of 

 England, especially as to their organic remains, which he found 

 to hold a constant connexion with their order of deposition ; and 

 to him, more than to any other man either in Britain or elsewhere, 

 is due the honor of demonstrating that particular fossils are char- 

 acteristic of particular strata — the types by which they may be 

 recognized, in situations the most remote. Mr. Smith has been 

 therefore justly called the father of English geology, and he lived 

 to see the splendor of its present bright meridian sun. His geo- 

 logical map and sections of England were founded upon his own 

 laborious and long continued exertions, unaided by any public 

 body or scientific association. 



GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



But private individuals were no longer compelled to labor alone. 

 In 1807, that noble association, the Geological Society of Lon- 

 don was founded, and organized in 1811, in which year its first 

 volume of Transactions appeared. Immediately, voices of grat- 



* Mr. William Smith, of Scarborough, England, was born in 1769 at Churchill, 

 on the oolite formation in the county of Oxford. His taste for geology was early 

 formed, by collecting terebratulge from the oolitic rocks in the fields of his native 

 village, which he used as a substitute for marbles. He had often expressed a wish 

 to be buried in this formation, on which he was born and educated, and the his- 

 tory of which he had so much elucidated. He died in August, 1839, on his way 

 to the meeting of the British Association at Birmingham, aged 71, and was interred 

 in the churchyard of the beautiful Norman church of St Peter, in Northampton, 

 which stands on the oolite formation. — Dr. BucJcland's Address, 1840 : quoted in 

 this Journal, Vol. xl, p. 219. 



