William Smith. 281 



To the Jess precise generalisations of Fuchsel, 

 William Smith added the complete proof of the suc- 

 cession of life in time, proving, as he did, in England, 

 a clear succession of strata, each more or less char- 

 acterised by its own suite of fossils ; and this gave, to a 

 great extent, a perfect clue to the reading of that 

 chronology on which Hook so vaguely speculated. To 

 effect his object, Smith traced the English formations 

 from end to end of the country with unwearied devo- 

 tion, and at length, in 1815, produced his great 

 geological map of England. He struggled long, almost 

 unrecognised in his labours, but when they were well 

 nigh at an end, men began by degrees to recognise that 

 a master was among them, and in 1831, the first 

 Wollaston medal was awarded to him by the council 

 of the Geological Society, while in his annual address, 

 Professor Sedgwick hailed William Smith as 'the 

 father of English geology.' He died in 1839, and 

 surely his name will last as that of a great original 

 observer, even though it may be surmised that the time 

 was ripe for that discovery, which, unknown to Smith, 

 had been partly forestalled by Fuchsel. 



The doctrines of Hutton and Smith combined gave 

 the key to great part of the modern system of geology, 

 and later works have carried out and improved upon 

 their conclusions, in a series of masterly investigations 



so great an idea, and the length of time which the change thus 

 imagined (I may say demonstrated) must have required.' I am in- 

 debted to Professor Young of Glasgow for this extract from a 

 manuscript volume of Dr. Black's letters preserved in the Hunterian 

 Museum. Dr. Black was born in France in 1728. In 1756 he was 

 appointed Professor of Chemistry in Glasgow, and in 1766 he was 

 transferred to fill the Chair of Chemistry in the University of Edin- 

 burgh. He died, at the age of 71, in 1799. He was therefore the con - 

 temporaryof Hutton, who died in 1796, and they were intimate friends. 



