314 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



at work. When you travel between Tunbridge Wells and London, 

 you know that the train on the railway is kept going under the 

 influence of fire and water. But before Hutton men little realized 

 that the everlasting hills and seas with barriers supposed to be 

 impassable were likewise under the influence of fire and water 

 repeatedly exchanging places. When Hutton put forward the 

 truth, there were few at first to believe it. 



Before Hutton died, William Smith was at work. No LinnaBus 

 has yet arisen to regulate the naming of human beings. There- 

 fore this William Smith has to be distinguished from others of 

 the same name in an unscientific and roundabout manner. By 

 one of the singular genealogical expressions which are used 

 to confer honour, he is known as " The Father of English 

 Geology." He became the parent of this giant offspring when 

 he was as yet little more than a boy, by discovering the laws of 

 stratification. He made it clear that the layers of the stratified 

 rocks could not have all been formed at once, that the sequence 

 in position of upper and lower implied a sequence in age of 

 newer and older. If in housebuilding it would be difficult for 

 a man to begin with the attics and the roof, and afterwards to 

 lay the foundation and construct the ground-floor, it would be 

 equally difficult for Nature, after laying down one stratum upon 

 the ocean-bed, to deposit a newer one, not on the top of the older, 

 but underneath it. William Smith showed, moreover, that the 

 relics of life are not distributed hap-hazard through the water- 

 formed rocks, but that over large areas there is a definite relation 

 between the age of a stratum and the character of its fossils, 

 from which it follows that, at least within those areas, at different 

 ages of the rocks there have been differing sets of living organisms. 

 In this respect the strata must not be compared with our houses, 

 for an old Elizabethan mansion may shelter a family of the 

 Victorian age, and the same ancient abbey enshrine the bones of 

 warriors and poets of many successive periods ; but in an old 

 Silurian stratum you will never find Cretaceous or Miocene 

 fossils. 



Born in the very same year with William Smith, but in a 

 different rank of life, was the illustrious Cuvier, Georges Chretien 

 Leopold Frederic Dagobert, Baron Cuvier. Goldsmith some- 

 where speaks of the public as "that miscellaneous being, at 



