STRATA SMITH

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4221, 8 December 1939, Page 3

STRATA SMITH

THE FATHER OF ENGLISH GEOLOGY.

(By Fredk. Chapman, A.L.S. F.G.S.) Recently the Geologists’ Association of London commemorated the centenary of a great pioneer in English geology, William Smith, by holding a field meeting at Bath, Somerset. Many quarries and geological outcrops to the south of the city were included in the pilgrimage, which had been associated with William Smith’s early field work. Members also visited several old houses round Bath in which he had actually lived. During the last 100 years the achievements of geological science have been immense, and it seems hardly credible that as late as the year 1815 this modest, hard-working English surveyor should have drawn up the first working geological map of England and Wales. His keenness of observation fully grasped the principles and practice of defining the boundaries and relative ages of the rocks he met with, Iby means of their fossil remains. William Smith was thus able to construct a table of strata, and to accompany it with the earliest geological map of his country. Hence the title “the father of English geology.” EARLY TRAINING. William Smith, born in 1769, was the son of a mechanic, who died when William was only eight years old. In early life he was brought up by his uncle, a practical farmer, who taught him how to drain and improve the land. Eventually William Smith learned for himself the rudiments of geometry and surveying. At the age of 18 he qualified as assistant surveyor to Edlward Webb, at Stow on the Wold, Gloucestershire. During the next 6 years William Smith carried out various surveys in the west of England, notably meat Bath. The, inspiration of mapping came to him while surveying the Somersetshire Coal Canal, for which he was resident engineer, from 1794-99. There he recognised the regular succession of strata, with their distinctive fossils. The steeply sloping coal measures were overlaid by the red beds, the lias and the freestone, all gently inclining eastwards. Thus the oldest rocks, lie observed, were generally to: the west, running in a north-easterly and south-fwesterly direction, while the younger rocks overlay them to the east. IDENTIFYING THE FOSSILS. Many ideas for solving geological problems were at this time converging in the observant mind of William Smith, leading to a clearer knowledge of the principles underlying stratigraphy and palaeontology, subjects so essential for a complete grip of geological study as a whole. In 1815, after 20 years of practical surveying amongst the stratified rocks of his country, and when he was 46, he published his geological map of England and Wales, as a series of 15 sheets, on a scale of one inch to five miles. William Smith was at last able to claim the Society of Arts prize that had been offered many years before, but never won. The distinguishing features of the rocks which form h,is classification of strata were the various fossils he found enclosed in them. It was by means of the fossil forms that he was enabled to separate similar-look-ing strata, from one another, such as: the Great Oolite from the Inferior Oolite. Before this period fossils were regarded as mere curiosities, or even freaks of Nature. They were abundant in most roadside quarries, among the rubble broken up for road mending. Among such heaps of waste material the passing traveller might pick out snake-stones or ammonites, Devil’s toenails 'Or gryphaea, bufonites or fish-plates, thunderbolts or belemnites, or even the giant seaurchins called pourids’tones (cypeus). These big oval fossils, as William Smith relates, Were -often used by dairywomen as pound weights, for no inspectors of weights and measures were abroad in those days and an ounde or two one way or the other would naturally average itself in the long run. Among William Smith’s friends was that great geologist Dean Buckland, also an ardent fossil collector in the curly days of Smith’s survey

work. John Phillips, who was Smith’s nephew, relates how the dean, laden with the spoils of collection, often used to ride by the home of Rev. Benjamin Richardson to inquire what their friend “Strata Smith was doing.” The eminent contemporary of William Smith, Dean Conyibeare, shows how careless was Smith of credit due to him, for between 1890 and 1815 he frequently communicated the information he possessed in many quarters, “till in fact, it became by oral diffusion the common property of a large body of English geologists, and thus contributed to the progress of Ithe science in many quarters where the author was little known.” No one has done more in support of William Smith’s claiims for the first clear geological map of England iand Wales than the late Professor Judd, with whom the writer was privileged to be associated in gelogical work for 20 years. Judd published two papers in the “Geological Magazines’’ of 1897 and 1898 on William Smith’s Manuscripft Maps and The Earliest Engraved Maps of England and Wales. In giving a full account of William Smith’s discoveries, Professor Judd mentions that “the failure of the publisher, Debrett, and the limited means and numerous business avocations of| William Smith, made it possible for his claims to be contested. Thanks, however to the splendid loyalty of Smith’s numerous friends—especially Richardson, Townsend and Farey—there exists such a body of evidence concerning Smith’s discoveries and teachings, all published between the years 1801 and 1815, that no .impartial judge can for one moment hesi-

tate in; assigning to Smith that priority, so strenuously claimed for him by Fitton, Farey, Sedgwick and Phillips.” THE WOLLASTON MEDAL. A singularly high token of the esteen in which the Geological Society of London held William Smith’s work was accorded to him in 1831, when the first Wollaston Medal and Prize, were awarded him as an original discoverer. In 1839, on his way to attend a meeting of the British Association a t Birmingham, to which he had been especially invited, Smith contracted what appeared to be a slight cold, but this proving more serious, he gradually saink and passed away, in his 71st year, “leaving a name,” in the words of his friend, Rev. W. D. Conybeare, “that can never be mentioned without the respect due to a great and original discoverer.”