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extended his surveys to the Durham and Northumberland coal- 

 field : while on his way, partly by actual sections and partly by the 

 help of external contours, with which his eye was now familiar, he 

 ascertained the range of the chalk to Flamborough Head, and of 

 the oolitic series, through a regular succession of escarpments, to 

 the Hambleton Hills and the cliffs of Yorkshire. Combining the 

 facts discovered in this excursion with the distribution of the for- 

 mations in the south-western parts of England, he began to record 

 his observations by colouring geological maps. Several documents 

 of this kind are now unfortunately lost : but I have been informed 

 by Mr. Phillips (Curator of the museum of the Yorkshire Philo- 

 sophical Society), that he possesses a valuable geological map, co- 

 loured by Mr. Smith in the year 1800, connecting the structure of 

 the North of England, which at that time he had not again visited, 

 with the structure of the South-western districts; and delineating 

 the whole oolitic series through England, in some places very cor- 

 rectly, and in all with a general approach to accuracy. 



Mr. Smith in 1795 became for the first time a housekeeper; and 

 no sooner had he apartments of his own, than he turned them to 

 account by arranging his large collection of organic fossils (the 

 accumulation of several years) stratigraphically. I am certain, 

 Gentlemen, that this stratigraphical collection, preceded by many 

 years any other similar collection formed in this country : and with- 

 out pretending to any exact knowledge of the history of Continental 

 geology, I greatly doubt whether a stratigraphical collection of or- 

 ganic fossils, derived from a long series of formations, and specially 

 intended to assist in identifying their subordinate strata and deter- 

 mining their relations, was ever made before the year 1795 in any 

 part of Europe. 



Local collections of organic remains were undoubtedly made in 

 this country long before the time of Mr. Smith, and in the works of 

 our older writers we may sometimes find the glimmerings of his dis- 

 coveries. — Woodward formed a magnificent collection of organic re- 

 mains ; and he separated from the rest a series of fossils of the Hamp- 

 shire coast, and was aware that many of the species were the same 

 as those of the London clay : but this fact, and many others of like 

 kind, were with him but sterile truths ; and being led astray by his 

 theory, he knew nothing either of the real structure of the earth, 

 or of any law regulating the distribution of organic forms. — Michell 

 was a man of great talents, and undoubtedly made out the true rela- 

 tions of the secondary deposits in one portion of this island : but he 

 was, 1 believe, ignorant of the importance of organic remains, and did 

 not use them as a means of identifying strata. — Lister is distinguished 

 among the writers of the seventeenth century as the first to propose 

 the construction of mineralogical maps, and he had some limited no- 

 tions of the distribution of organic fossils, though he misunderstood 

 both their nature and importance. 



The works of these authors were, however, entirely unknown to Mr. 

 Smith during his early life, and every step of his progress was made 



B 



