94 
Gallery, 
No. 11. 
William 
Smith. 
Historical and Type C oiled ions. 
him to the care of his uncle, who acted as his guardian. 
William’s uncle did not approve of the boy’s habit of collecting 
stones (“pundibs” = Ter ebrat nice, and “quoit-stones” = GUjpeus 
sinuatus ) ; but seeing that his nephew was studious, he gave 
him a little money to buy books. By means of these he taught 
himself the rudiments of geometry and land-surveying, and at 
the age of eighteen he obtained employment as a land surveyor 
in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and other parts, and had 
already begun carefully and systematically to collect fossils 
and to observe the structure of the rocks. In 1793 he was 
appointed to survey the course of the intended Somersetshire 
Coal-Canal, near Bath. For six years he was the resident 
engineer of the canal, and, applying his previously-acquired 
knowledge, he was enabled to prove that the strata from the 
New Red Marl (Trias) upwards, followed each other in a regular 
and orderly succession, each bed being marked by its own 
characteristic fossils, and having a general tendency or “dip ” 
to the south-east. 
To verify his theory he travelled in subsequent years over 
the greater part of England and Wales, and made careful 
observations of the geological succession of the rocks, proving 
also, by the fossils obtained, the identity of the strata over very 
wide areas along their outcrops. 
His knowledge of fossils advanced even further, for he dis- 
covered that those in situ retained their sharpness, whereas the 
same specimens derived from the drifts or gravel- deposits were 
usually rounded and water-worn, and had reached their present 
site by subsequent erosion of the parent-rock. 
In 1799 William Smith circulated in MS. the order of suc- 
cession of the strata and imbedded organic remains found in the 
vicinity of Bath. 
His Geological Map of England and Wales is dated 
1815. 
On June 1, 1816, he published his “ Strata identified by 
Organised Fossils,” with illustrations of the most characteristic 
specimens in each stratum (4to). 
In 1817 he printed “ A Stratigraphical System of Organized 
Fossils,” compiled from the original geological collection depo- 
sited in the British Museum (4to). 
In 1819 he published a reduction of his great Geological 
Map, together with several sections across England. 
These have just been presented to the Museum by Wm. 
Topley, Esq., F.R.S., F.G.S., and are exhibited upon the wall 
near Smith’s bust. 
Mr. Smith received the award of the first Wollaston Medal 
and fund in 1831, from the hands of Prof. Sedgwick, the 
President of the Geological Society — “As a great original 
discoverer in English geology, and especially for his having 
