302 
WILLIAMSON: JOHN WILLIAMSON. 
these rainy days. Returning- from one of these excursions with 
saturated garments, he unfortunately paused for a few minutes at 
the door of a wayside inn, became chilled, and only reached home 
to be prostrated by a severe attack of inflammation of the lungs. 
In consequence of this attack, aided, doubtless, by the fearful and 
repeated bleedings which the medical practice of those days author- 
ised, he was for six months a disabled invalid. A remarkably 
vigorous constitution, however, enabled him to surviv^e the dangers 
to which nature and art had combined to expose him. So soon as 
his strength admitted, wet days again found him throwing the fly, 
or wielding the geological hammer. 
The remarks already made respecting the virgin field which the 
Liassic rocks north of Whitby offered for the researches of the geolog- 
ist, were, at that time, yet more applicable to the coast for 20 miles 
north and south of Scarborough. Here the rocks are of a more varied 
character than in the cliffs further north, comprehending as they 
do, a fine series of the Oolitic strata which overlap the more northern 
Liassic beds, and are themselves overlaid by the Cretaceous deposits 
at the southern end of Filey Bay. 
Thomas Henderson, the distinguished historian of the town, had 
collected a few fossils of small importance, but he was in no sense 
of the word, a geologist. In the latter part of the seventeenth 
century, the well-known Lister had noticed some of the fossils found 
in the Speeton cliffs, but no systematic exploration of the coast had 
been attempted until my father and William Bean commenced those 
labours that were destined to extend over half a centurj^ 
Prior to the discoveries of William Smith, no one seems to have 
appreciated the geological importance of the Oolitic rocks. Smith 
had studied them carefully in the district round Bath, and had 
traced their out-crop running in a north-easterly direction, towards 
their termination on the coast between Burlington and Skinningrave. 
He was familiar too, with their more common fossils, but their 
fauna and flora, as a whole, had yet to be studied. Fortunately for 
the Yorkshire geologists, most of those rocks are exposed on their 
coast with a concentration, as well as exact sub-division of their strata, 
that probably has no parallel in any other part of the globe. Nor 
