Geological Surveys in Great Britain, dtc. 293 



ART. XXV. — Geological Survey in Great Britain and her De- 

 pendencies. 



Extracted from the Saturday Review of 3rd July. 



In 1769 there was born to a yeoman of Oxfordshire, named John 

 Smith, a son, who in due course was christened William. 

 William Smith, as he grew into boy's estate, delighted to wander 

 in the fields collecting " poundstones (JSchintes,) " pundibs" 

 (Terebratulai), and other stoney curiosities ; and, receiving little 

 education beyond 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 by-and-by in the western parts 

 of England 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 underneath the sands, yellow 

 limestones, and clays that form the table land of the Cotteswold- 

 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. Gifted with remarkable 

 powers of observation, he further observed that each formation of 

 clay, sand, or limestone held to a very great extent its own 

 peculiar suite of fossils. The " snakestones" [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 Kinaineridge clay. Pondering 

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

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

 sediments of which lived and died marine animals now extinct, 

 many of them 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. He spoke of it constantly to his friends, and at 

 breakfast used to illustrate the subject with layers of bread and- 

 butter, placed with out-cropping edges to represent the escarp- 

 ments that mark the superposition of the strata. He talked of 

 it wherever he went — at canal boards, county meetings, agricul- 

 tural associations, and Woburn sheep-shearings — and once much 

 astonished a scientific friend and clergyman of Bath by deranging 

 the zoological classification of his cabinet of fossils, and rapidly 



