4 LIAS OF ENGLAND AND WALES : 
Edward Lhwyd (1699), the Rev. John Morton (1712), John 
Hill (1748), and John Walcott (1779). Lister compared the 
fossil with the recent species, and Dr. John Woodward (1729) 
clearly recognized that there are " digg'd up, out of the earth, 
great numbers of shells that differ not in any respect, from those 
that the Land, salt and fresh Water doth yield us."* The true 
nature of Fossils, and the general use of that term, is largely 
owing to the work of James Parkinson of Hoxton (1804). f 
That certain strata occur in a regular order was noticed as 
early as 1719 by John Strachey, and he was evidently aware that 
above the Coal-measures in Somersetshire the following strata 
occurred in upward succession : Red earth, Lyas, Freestoue.J 
Other writer?, like John Hill (1748), and Emanuel Mendes Da 
Costa (1757), gave accounts of the various rocks and of the uses 
to which they were put. Little progress, however, seems to have 
been made with regard to a knowledge of the sequence of strata 
for a number of years, the next important account of the rocks 
being given in 1760 by the Rev. John Michell, who " explains 
most clearly the arrangement of the strata in England." A 
manuscript Table of Strata by Michell, bearing the date 1788, 
was subsequently published, and therein the succession beneath 
the rocks now grouped as Cretaceous, waa stated to comprise the 
" Northampton lime, and Portland lime, lying in several strata," 
and then the "Lyas strata." Below, the divisions of the New 
Red Sandstone and Coal-strata were marked. Nevertheless, as 
observed by Sedgvvick, no part of the Woodwardian Collection at 
Cambridge was stratigraphically arranged by Michell, although 
he was Woodwardian Professor from 1762 to 1770. The signifi- 
cance of the sequence of rocks and fossils was not yet discerned. 
It was William Smith who, after researches extending over 20 
years, first carried out the undertaking to make a geological map 
of England and Wale?. Projected about the year 1794, the work 
was completed before 1812, and published in 1815, the scale 
adopted being 5 miles to an inch. It must not be forgotten that, 
between 1794 and 1813, the Board of Agriculture published a 
number of Reports containing much local geological information ; 
and, as Conybeare remarked, to this Board " must undoubtedly be 
ascribed the honour of having produced the earliest geological 
maps of any part of England." 
When the strata came to be traced on the ground and depicted 
on a irap, the necessity for more precise terms aroso. Various 
freestones that had come into the market under different local 
names such as the Bath stone, the Minchinhampton stone, and the 
Taynton stone, proved t-j be on the same horizon, and the term 
Great or Bath Oolite was applied to them ; so also the Cheltenham 
freestone, the Doulting stone, and the Ham Hill stone proved to 
* An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Fossils of England. Tome I., 
part ii., p. 6. 
f Organic Remains of a former World, vol. i. p. 34. 
Phil. Trans., vol. xxx. p. 968 ; xxxi., 395. (Papers reprinted in 1727.) 
Phil. Trans., vol. li , p. 566 ; Fitton, op. cit., p. 14 ; and J. Farey, Phil. Mag. 
vol. Ttxxvi. 1810, p. 103. 
