JOHN PHILLIPS, F.R.S. 
125 
In the following year lie again visited the mountain limestone 
districts of Derbyshire and North Yorkshire, making sections of strata 
and accumulating materials for his ''Geology of the Mountain Lime- 
stone." In 1826 Professor Phillips became permanently attached to 
the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and made a long pedestrian tour 
in Scotland. 
The following account of a visit to the York Museum, given by 
Sir Roderick Murchison in the year 1826, is interesting : — " Phillips, 
then a youth, was engaged in arranging a small museum at York. 
He recommended me strongly to his uncle, W^m. Smith, who was then 
Uving at Scarbro', and had little intercourse with the Geological 
Society, for he thought that Greenough and others in taking from 
him the main materials of his original geological map of England had 
done him an injustice. The unpretending country land surveyor, 
who had really the highest merit of them all, had been somewhat 
snubbed by such men as Dr. M'Culloch and others, who, having a 
superior acquaintance with the chemical composition of rocks and 
minerals, did not appreciate the broad views of Smith. From the 
moment I had my first walk with Wm. Smith, then about sixty years 
old, I felt that he was just the man after my own heart ; and he, on 
his part, seeing that I had, as he said, an eye for a country, took 
to me and gave me most valuable lessons. Thus he made me 
thoroughly acquainted with all the strata north and south of Scarbro'. 
He afterwards accompanied me in a boat all along the coast, stopping 
and sleeping at Robin Hood's Bay. Not only did I then learn the 
exact position of the beds of poor coal which crop out in that tract 
of the eastern moorlands, but collecting with him the characteristic 
fossils from the calcareous grit down to the lias, I saw how clearly 
strata must alone be identified by their fossils, inasmuch as here, 
instead of oolitic limestones like those of the south, we had sand- 
stones, grits, and shales, which though closely resembling the beds of 
the old coal, were the precise equivalents of the Oolitic series of the 
south. Smith walked stoutly with me all under the cliffs from Robin 
Hood's Bay to Whitby, making me well note the characteristic fossils 
of each formation." 
Prof. Phillips records the visit of Sir Roderick Murchison to 
