WILLIAM SMITH : HIS MAPS AND MEMOIRS 
]29 
order of their appearance on the surface, from east to west." On 
pp. 33-35 is the account of the geology of our own county, which, 
being one of the earliest of such descriptions, and from the pen of the 
master, we may be allowed to quote : — 
YORKSHIRE. 
" Yorkshire is a county of immense extent, which, in its eastern 
part, comprises all the strata of the southern and eastern counties ; 
its interior, those of the Midland counties ; its western, those of Durham, 
Northumberland, and the part of South Wales which contains the coal. 
Though the hills ot the east moors and wolds are high, their altitudes 
are comparati^ ely low to those of the coal-measures in the west and 
north-western parts of the county. 
" Except the moors and wolds before mentioned, nearly all the 
rest of this vast county has one general declination towards the east, 
from the tops of Whernside and Ingleborough to the mouth of the Hum- 
ber. On the shores of this great estuary, and of the river Trent, and 
others connected with the Humber, are large districts of alluvial and 
low marshy land, evidently formed by a sediment of the sea. The 
strip included between a district of this sort, and the easternmost part 
of the coast, called Holderness, is of the Strata incumbent on chalk, 
and much the same kind of soil as the east part of Norfolk. The wolds, 
on chalk, are as dry, arid, and open as Salisbury Plain. The clay and 
limestone of the Vale of Pickering form a much better soil than that 
which succeeds it to the north and north-west. These dreary and most 
extensive surfaces of brown, rusty-looking ling, upon a substratum of 
soft sandstone, are worse than any other district. The blue clay, or 
surface of alum shale, which succeeds it in the deep vales of the North 
York moors, and at the foot of them, is not good, and, in some parts 
of the vale of York, seems covered with alluvial sand, which has not 
improved the surface. 
" A redder and much better soil runs through the middle of the 
county, parallel to the magnesian limestone, along the west side of the 
vale of York into Cleveland, and forms some of the best land in York- 
shire. The dry surface of the yellow or magnesian limestone is parallel 
to the red. Its course through the eastern half of the county is along 
the great north road, and in the northern parallel, and very near to it. 
West of this vast surface of coal-measures, generally producing a poor 
