at the time. The scheme of reconciliation perfectly
adequate in 1814 was found in 1839 to be no longer so; and this mainly
through a peculiarity in the order in which geological fact has been
evolved and accumulated in this country, and the great fossiliferous
systems studied and wrought out; to which I must be permitted briefly to
advert.

William Smith, the "Father of English Geology," as he has been well
termed (a humble engineer and mineral surveyor, possessed of but the
ordinary education of men of his class and profession), was born upon
the English Oolite,--that system which, among the five prevailing
divisions of the great Secondary class of rocks, holds exactly the
middle place. The Triassic system and the Lias lie beneath it; the
Cretaceous system and the Weald rest above. Smith, while yet a child,
had his attention attracted by the Oolitic fossils; and it was observed,
that while his youthful contemporaries had their garnered stores of
marbles purchased at the toy shop, he had collected, instead, a hoard of
spherical fossil terebratulae, which served the purposes of the game
equally well. The interest which he took in organic remains, and the
deposits in which they occur, influenced him in the choice of a
profession; and, when supporting himself in honest independence as a
skilful mineral surveyor and engineer, he travelled over many thousand
miles of country, taking as his starting point the city of Bath, which
stands near what is termed the Great Oolite: and from that centre he
carefully explored the various Secondary formations above and below. He
ascertained that these always occur in a certain determinate order; that
each contains fossils peculiar to itself; and that they run diagonally
across the kingdom in nearly parallel lines from north-east to
south-west. And, devoting every hour which he could snatch from his
professional labors to the work, in about a quarter of a century, or
rather more, he completed his great stratigraphical map of England. But,
though a truly Herculean achievement, regarded as that of a single man
unindebted to public support, and uncheered by even any very general
sympathy in his labors, it was found to be chiefly valuable in its
tracings of the Secondary deposits, and strictly exact in only that
Oolitic centre from which his labors began. It was remarked at an early
period that he ought to have restricted his publication to the
formations which lie between the Chalk and the R