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WILLIAMSON: JOHN WILLIAMSON. 
commenced his investigations in the latter part of the eighteenth 
century, following, in many respects, the steps of Michell, but with 
very different results. Single-handed, he not only worked out, with 
marvellous accuracy, the succession of the strata from the Chalk to 
the Coal-measures, but he made the great discovery that, so far as 
Great Britain was concerned, rocks of contemporary origin contained 
identical fossils ; in other words, that special organic remains were 
limited to particular strata, under conditions proving that varied 
forms of life had successively existed on the earth, each epoch being 
characterised by the prevalence of special types, which replaced one 
another as time rolled on. 
Smith's researches, as is well-known, culminated in 1817, when 
he published his celebrated work, " Strata identified by organised 
Fossils." Those researches, as already indicated, were mainly 
pursued amongst the Carboniferous and Mesozoic strata. No part 
of England, probably no part of the world, displays in so small a 
compass such an unbroken succession of the Cretaceous, Oolitic, and 
Liassic beds, as is revealed in the precipitous cliffs that overhang 
the shore from Flamborough Head to Skinningrave. It was scarcely 
possible that such a coast should fail to call into existence a band 
of local geologists, even in the infancy of geological science ; nor 
did it do so, and John Williamson was one of the earliest to 
enter the field. The names of three other men must be associated 
with his; those of his cousin, William Bean; the Kev. George 
Young, of Whitby ; and Mr. John Bird, the artist who drew the 
figures of the fossils for Young and Bird's work, published at a later 
period. Four men whose united labours in unearthing the relics of 
bygone ages, assisted in giving the study of Yorkshire Geology 
an impetus, and in stamping it with an importance, it had not 
hitherto known. 
I should at any time have had pleasure in recalling memories of 
my father, for the benefit of succeeding geologists ; but the fact 
that this year is the centenary of his birth, makes my doing so 
now more than ordinarily agreeable. 
Peasant families rarely possess historic records of their ancestry; 
my knowledge of our own is limited to a few lines in a letter 
