192 
AVILLIAM SMITH I HIS MAPS AND MEMOIRS 
CONYBEAKE AND PHILLIPS, 1822. 
In the Introduction to " Outlines of the Geology of England and 
Wales," 1822 (pp. xlv-xlvii), W. D. Conybeare and W. Phillips give 
an excellent tribute to the worth of Smith, which, being contemporary 
with Smith, seems likely to be the more reliable. They say : — 
" In 1790 Mr. William Smith (a name which can never, in tracing 
the history of English Geology, be mentioned without the respect due 
to a great original discoverer) appears to have commenced his re- 
searches in the neighbourhood of Bath, having in that year drawn up 
a tabular view of the strata exhibited in that district, which in fact 
contained the rudiments of his subsequent discoveries. Ten years 
afterwards he circulated proposals for publishing a treatise on the 
Geology of England to be accompanied by a coloured map and sections, 
and in the interval had freely communicated the information he 
possessed in many quarters, till in fact it became by oral diffusion 
the common property of a large body of English Geologists, and thus 
contributed to the progress of the science in many quarters where the 
author was little known. In this same interval, between 1790 and 1800, 
several volumes of reports were published by the Board of Agriculture, 
many of them containing much local geological information ; and to this 
Board must undoubtedly be ascribed the honour of having produced the 
earliest geological maps of any part of England, for its first series 
of reports published in 1794 contains very adequate geological maps 
of the North Riding of Yorkshire, of Derbyshire, and of Nottingham- 
shire, and a less perfect one of Devonshire ; that of Kent, published in 
1796, has a regular geological map of that county (which, indeed after 
the treatise of Packe in the beginning of the century it was easy to 
construct). Between this date and 1813, the same Board has also 
given useful maps of Sussex, Surrey, Berks, Bedford, Gloucester, Wilts, 
Lincoln, Durham, and Cheshire, besides publishing the second report 
of Derbyshire dedicated exclusively to its mineralogy by Mr. Farey. 
Maton's tour through the western counties published in 1796, has alsa 
a regular though of course imperfect geological map of the west of 
England. 
" These are certainly the earliest published geological maps of any 
part of this island ; but it is probable that Mr. Smith had already 
commenced the manuscript of his own, which after many delays at 
