300 prof. Williamson's autobiography. 



It would be difficult to discover a spot more suitable to the 

 breeding of a naturalist than the neighbourhood of Scarborough. 

 The sea, daily laying bare its treasures and strewing them on the 

 sand ; the earth, disclosing itself in vertical sections of its strata, 

 300 feet to 500 feet in height, crowded with remains of ancient 

 tmchronicled life ; the marshes of the vale famed for rare insects ; 

 the woods, where the May Lily grows, and the moors where the 

 Dwarf Cornel still lingers, sole remnant of an Arctic flora; the 

 distant wolds, where cultivation had just destroyed the last home of 

 the Great Bustard : such surroundings, such sights and scenes, could 

 not fail to be stimulating to young Williamson as they had already 

 been to his father. 



John Williamson, the father of our author, was a very remarkable 

 man. He was brought up as a gardener, and though he had, as his 

 son says, enjoyed no educational advantages, he must have acquired 

 great skill in his occupation, since he had for a time the charge of 

 the gardens of Mulgrave Castle. It is likely that the extraordinary 

 profusion of fossils in the Lias cliffs of this neighbourhood would 

 first turn his attention to geology. However this may be, on returning 

 to Scarborough and establishing himself as a nurseryman, he gave all 

 his leisure to this and the kindred studies of entomology, conchology 

 and ornithology, forming considerable collections, which afterwards 

 became the nucleus of the Scarborough Museum, of which he was 

 the first curator. 



Guided by a parent whose tastes he inherited, no wonder that 

 the youth soon grew proficient in natural science and became known 

 beyond the limits of his township and county. He had also the 

 good fortune in very early life to meet in familiar intercourse at his 



lish geology, who, 

 to use the words of his nephew and great expositor, John Phillips 

 'spent his life in establishing the philosophical principles of geology, 

 and in applying them when established to practical use. 7 Williamson 

 thus from the outset was led on the right track, and w T as thus spared 

 a mortification often to be experienced by men of great ability and 

 industry, that of retracing painful footsteps and yielding up cherished 

 theories. He learnt to know the fossils, and by them to distinguish 

 the strata, and so from the first pursued his studies on the true 

 inductive method. This was a vast advantage, and Dr. Williamson's 

 veneration for his great teachers, Smith and Phillips, is unbounded ; 

 but this should not have led him to speak contemptuously, as he does, 

 of another great Yorkshire geologist, who was not so far in advance 

 of his time, the Rev. George Young. The f Geological Survey of 

 the Yorkshire Coast 1 is a book which, published 74 years ago, may 



Naturafistf 



