INTRODUCTION. 
I n laying before the Public the fruits of my own researches into the 
Geology of the Eastern part of Yorkshire, I think myself called upon 
to notice the light which has been already thrown upon the subject, by 
the labours of those who have preceded me in this investigation. 
The first person in England who studied, and who taught others 
to study, the structure of the earth upon the strict principles of the 
inductive philosophy, was Mr. Smith. Having provided himself with 
methods of identifying the strata by an attentive examination of all the 
circumstances which distinguish the one from the other, and especially 
by a comparative survey of their organic contents, he extended his 
observations to districts far distant from that in which they were origin- 
ally commenced, and fixed at length, on a substantial basis, the im- 
portant doctrine of general formations. 
In was in 1794, that Mr. Smith first saw the wolds and moorland 
hills in the eastern part of Yorkshire; and, guided by the knowledge 
which he had even then acquired of the correspondence of contour 
between different portions of the same strata, he decided at once, on a 
distant view, that the wolds were composed of chalk, and that the moor- 
lands belonged to the oolitic series of rocks. This opinion was fully 
expressed in his manuscript Map of the Strata of England, for the 
publication of which proposals were issued in 1800. 
