WILLIAM SMITH : HIS MAPS AND MEMOIRS 
169 
ophical Society. It is fair to assume therefore that Smith might have 
taken some part in the Society's proceedings. 
My earliest copy of the report of the Scarborough Society is the 
fifth, in 1834, and I see from page 25 that Mr. W. Smith presented to the 
Society " Lectures on the Science of Agriculture, by Sir J. Sinclair, 
Bart ; Hints on Vegetation, by the same author ; List of Members of the 
British Association for the advancement of Science ; and View of the 
Castle Hill, Edinburgh," This is doubtless the W. Smith, judging by 
the nature of the gifts, and bearing in mind the other circumstances 
mentioned. 
I therefore wrote to Dr. J. Irving, who some time ago assisted me 
in my quest for a set of the Scarborough Society's reports. He, with 
the librarian, Mr. Cross, has kindly made a search. He states that in 
the Society's first report, it is recorded that the arrival of Smith in the 
district in 1820 " gave a new feature to the study of geology, and an 
impulse to the student, which may be considered to have laid the basis 
of the Scarborough Museum." 
It was also Smith's suggestion that the Museum assumed the 
circular shape as being most suitable for the display of fossils arranged 
on sloping shelves according to stratigraphical order. This fact is 
referred to by Prof. Buckland in his Presidential address to the Geolog- 
ical Society in 1840. In referring to the recent death of Wm. Smith, 
he states* " In 18r7t he planned the beautiful Museum of Scarborough, 
in which he employed his original and instructive method of representing 
by sloping shelves passing one beneath the other, the inclined position 
of the strata ; each shelf bearing the fossils that are respectively charac- 
teristic of the stratum it is intended to represent." 
Originally the museum was circular in plan, as may be judged from 
the sketch given in the Society's earlier reports ; the side wings were 
added in 1861. 
Seeing that Smith had a hand in the designing of the Scarborough 
Museum, I thought that it was more than possible the section of 
the strata of the coast, which was painted round the building on the 
* Proc. Geol. Soc, Vol. III., p. 251. 
•j- Prof. Buckland must have been a little premature here. The 
Scarborough Society was not founded imtil 1827, Smith went to Hack- 
ness in 1828, and the Museum was built in 1829. 
