166 
WILLIAM SMITH : HIS MAPS AND MEMOIRS 
answer itself (see below), the record it contains as to the writer's 
statement that " nearly forty years since, I lived amongst coal pits, 
commonly sunken through the lias and the red marl,"* and the inde- 
pendent statement made by Smith that he had agreed to a request to 
supply some notes on Coal to The Whitby Repository, all point to the 
notes being by Smith. The following are the extracts quoted from 
Smith's ' elaborate and luminous communication ' : — 
" I perceive, by your letter, that your views of the probability 
of finding coal are not, like those of too many others, founded on 
the hope of finding it in shale or lias clay ; but the question where 
to prick upon that intermediate range of the coal seams which may 
connect the coal-fields of Yorkshire and Durham, involves a great 
deal of deep geological consideration- My thoughts have often 
been turned to that important object ; which, in a well chosen spot, 
is worthy of a national experiment. We know that all the beds 
of coal and their accompaniments, in the West Riding, sink under 
the Magnesian limestone in the vicinity of Abberford, much in the 
same manner as they rise from beneath the same kind of limestone 
at Ferry-Hill, in Durham ; but the limestone being, in both cases, 
an uncomformable covering, we have no clue from the Upper strata 
to the range of the coal seams between those two very distant parts. 
From the east and west range in the northernmost coals in York- 
shire, and a similar range in the southernmost coals in Durham, 
and from intermediate borings which I am acquainted with, I am 
satisfied that the coals do not range under an uncomformable 
cover, through the low ground, in a straight line between those 
two places ; and if they range in a curving line under the high land 
of the eastern moors, it is there impossible to get down to them. 
It seems unlikely, from various circumstances I can enumerate, 
both in Yorkshire and Durham, that a line curving eastward less 
than a semicircle, will never unite the coal-fields in question ; and, 
as the greater part of this line passes under enormously thick piles 
of strata, mostly in very high ground, the only chances there are 
of finding coal at any great distance from those two coal-fields, are 
on the sea shore ; and the best of all these, as I have long thought, 
is in Robin Hood's Bay. The magnesian limestone, if it could be 
* i.e. in Somersetshire. 
