Geology of Norfolk. 
445 
Doctor of Laws ; and to solace the poverty to which he re- 
duced himself, by the individual performance of that which 
ougfht to have been a national work, the Government conferred 
on him, at the request of the British Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science, an annual pension of one hundred pounds. 
The phenomena of the stratified rocks, and of their organic 
contents, have attracted a large share of the attention of natu- 
ralists and philosophers, for the wonderful views which they dis- 
close of the ancient natural history of the earth, the revolutions 
through which it has passed, and the various races of plants and 
animals by which it has successively been peopled. It was for 
their practical utility that his discoveries were chiefly valued by 
Smith : and, as an engineer engaged in planning and executing 
canals, draining land, laying out water-meadows, and superin- 
tending mining operations, he derived no small assistance from 
his acquaintance with the structure of the earth and the laws of 
stratification. His knowledge of the alternation of porous mth 
retentive strata, and of the phenomena of springs dependent on 
this structure, enabled him to select the best lines for his canals, 
so as to economise the supply of water and to save expense in 
the construction of them ; it caused him to be consulted on the 
means of overcoming difficulties by which the first engineers of 
the day had been baffled, simply because they were ignorant of 
those despised facts which he had so successfully observed and 
generalised ; it enabled him to drain the Prisley bog, in which 
Elkington had failed, though he had received from Parliament a 
reward of one thousand pounds for the discovery of a mode .of 
draining adapted to certain descriptions of wet soil, but not of 
general application ; it enabled him to restore the supply of 
water to the hot wells at Bath, when it had escaped into a new 
channel ; and to economise at Scarborough the scanty resources 
which the locality afforded of water fit for domestic purposes, so 
as to secure an adequate supply to its increasing population. 
His habits of observing the action of the sea upon the coast 
taught him, by copying nature, to devise a simple, cheap, and 
efficacious method of stopping the breaches, more than a mile in 
length, in the sand hills, constituting the only barrier by which 
the sea is excluded from the valleys of eastern Norfolk ; and to 
preserve more than forty thousand acres of valuable land, to 
which the ocean was again asserting its claim, after having aban- 
doned it for nearlv a thousand years. 
The valuable South Hetton Colliery was opened inconsequence 
of his urgent and persevering advice to Colonel Braddyll, to sink 
for coal through the magnesian limestone, in opposition to the 
" practical " opinions of the most eminent coal viewers of the 
North, who were guided only by their own limited experience of 
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