478 On the Agricultural Geology of England and Wales. 



mineral characters of the substrata on which they rest. This 

 evidence will be derived from the Reports to the Board of Agri- 

 culture, and from other agricultural writers of the period, and 

 also from the essays on the farming of certain counties which 

 have from time to time appeared in the Journal of the Royal 

 Agricultural Society. 



The earlier writings of Young and other reporters to the 

 Board of Agriculture, made before * Smith's views respecting 

 strata and soils became know^n, are the most valuable as a contri- 

 bution — slight as it is — to a knowledge of the distribution of soils, 

 because in the districts described they give a general outline 

 of the areas occupied by certain kinds of soil, founded on observa- 

 tions of the soil itself, without reference to the distribution of the 

 rock formations ; whereas in the later writers a disposition may 

 sometimes be observed to make the soils accommodate themselves 

 to the Procrustean bed of the geological maps. Among those 

 reporters, however, whose maps agree most with geological 

 maps, there are some who assert that the substrata only mark 

 the general outlines of agricultural districts, and that within 

 these areas there are numerous variations of soil independent of 

 the substrata. 



The earlier writers, in describing the counties of which they 

 treat, first carve out certain districts of clay, sand, and loam, of 

 which they observe that, in each of them, clay, sand, or loam, 

 respectively, prevails, not v/ithout many exceptions ; and they 

 throw the remainder, not unfrequently the larger portion of the 

 county, into a district " of various soils," which are described as 

 intermixed with so much irregularity, and in such small portions, 

 that no separation can be made. 



Young says of the variations of soil in the strong land district 

 of his map of Suffolk, that a rule, to which he knows few excep- 



* *• Ten years afterwards he (Smith) circulated proposals for publishing a treatise 

 on the Geology of England, to be accompanied by a coloured map and sections : and 

 in the interval he had freely communicated the information he possessed in many 

 quarters, till it became by oral diffusion the common property of English geologists, 

 and thus contributed to the progress of the science in many quarters where the author 

 was little known. In the same interval, between 1790 and 1800, several volumes of 

 reports were published by the Board of Agriculture, many of them containing much 

 local geological information, and to this Board must iindouhtedly he ascribed the 

 Jionour of having produced the earliest geological maps of any part of Englaiid, for 

 its first series of reports, published in 1794, contains very adequate geological maps 

 of the North Riding of Yorkshire, of Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire, and a less 

 perfect one of Devonshire. That of Kent, published 1796, has a regular geological 

 map of that county, which indeed, after the treatise of Packe in the beginning of the 

 century, it was easy to construct. Between this date and 1813 the same Board has 

 also given useful maps of Sussex, Surrey, Berks, Bedford, Gloucester, Wilts, Lincoln, 

 Durham, and Cheshire, besides publishing a second report on Derbyshire, by Fare^^ 

 dedicated exclusively to its mineralogy.'" — Introduction to Outlines of Geology of 

 England and Wales, by Conybeare and Phillips. 



