ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub

ART. IV.-Memoirs of William Smith, LL.D., Author of the "Map of the Strata of England and Wales." By his Nephew and Pupil JOHN PHILLIPS, F.R.S., F.G.S., Professor of Geology and Mineralogy in the University of Dublin. London, 1844.

THE year 1769 gave birth, in France and in England, to two men destined to exercise an important influence on the infant science of Geology, if they may not be considered its founders ; for all previous inquiries respecting the structure of the earth consisted of pure assumption, or were largely mixed with it. These were George Cuvier and William Smith-both original discoverers-both men of genius-though possessing minds of different orders, and differing widely in the amount of cultivation bestowed upon them. In Cuvier we behold the accomplished scholar, the profound naturalist and philosopher, one of the brightest stars in the galaxy which adorned the French Institute, the reformer of the established classification of nature, the founder of the new science of Palæontology; we behold, also, the enlightened statesman, called, for his administrative talents, by Napoleon, to the office of counsellor of State, and continued in the same honourable station by the Bourbons of the Restoration and the Dynasty of the Second Revolution.

In William Smith we see the plain English yeoman, the selfeducated land-surveyor, born in a district rich in fossil remains, and led by this circumstance, and by the profession to which he applied himself, to convert the playthings of his childhood into the studies of his riper years, till they conducted him, while using the most homely and unscientific nomenclature, to the important generalizations-that the English stratified rocks have a regular and invariable order of succession that they may be identified, under doubtful circumstances, by their organic contents, and that each had been, in succession, and for a long time, the bed of the sea.

The researches of Cuvier were prosecuted amidst ease and affluence, the sunshine of Court favour, and the applause of associated philosophers; those of Smith were carried on amidst the duties of a laborious profession, which he had formed in a great measure for himself, and in which he might have acquired affluence, could he have explored, with less eagerness, the career of discovery in which he had embarked, and which, like poetry with Goldsmith

"Found him poor at first, and kept him so."

He laboured alone and neglected, through a large portion of his career, with but little private support, destitute of public patronage, without the countenance of scientific associations, and keeping aloof from them, until he had achieved the great work on which D'Aubisson pronounced this eulogium :

"Ce que les minéralogistes les plus distingués, ont fait dans une petite partie d'Allemagne, en un demi siècle, un seul homme (M. William Smith ingénieur des mines,) l'a entrepris et effectué pour toute l'Angleterre, et son travail, aussi beau par son résultat qu'il est étonnant par son étendue, a fait conclure que l'Angleterre est régulièrement divisée en couches, que l'ordre de leur superposition n'est jamais interverti; et que ce sont exactement des fossiles semblables qu'on trouve dans toutes les parties de la même couche, et à des grandes distances.

"Tout en payant au travail de M. Smith, le tribut de l'admiration qui lui est dù, il me sera permi de désirer, que des observations ultérieures en confirment l'exactitude, et déjà, sur plusieurs points, les travaux de minéralogistes Anglais l'ont confirmée.”

He whose labours received this first honourable acknowledgment at the hands of foreigners, and who, in his own country, was called-in the first instance almost in derision-" Strata Smith," was hailed, in his latter days, by the Geological Society of London, as the father of English geology, was presented by them with the first Wollaston medal, struck to reward original discoverers, was honoured, by the University of Dublin, with the somewhat incongruous title of Doctor of Laws, and rewarded with a pension by the Government, at the request of the British Association.

Between the heads of the French and English schools of geology-the former taking the tertiary, the latter the secondary strata for the subject of its researches there were other points of resemblance and of contrast. The decline of life was clouded with affliction to both of them. Cuvier suffered from the loss of children; Smith from pecuniary difficulties. The frame of Cuvier reeled beneath the blow; adversity dashed its billows against Smith as against a rock-his fortitude and patience, his buoyancy of spirit and his enthusiasm, never forsook him amidst the severest distresses.

The ancestors of William Smith, we are told by his nephew and biographer, were a race of farmers, who, for many generations, owned small tracts of land in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. His grandfather, "William Smith of Sarsden, yeoman, eldest son and heir-apparent of William Smith, the elder yeoman of Churchill," on his marriage in 1730, with "Lucy, daughter of Henry Raleigh, yeoman of Prescott, in Oxfordshire," received as a marriage portion, one hundred and ten pounds, in consideration of which his father settled upon the bride as a jointure,

VOL. IV. NO. VII.

G

"one half yardland and half a quarter of a yardland of arable meadow and pasture in Churchill Field." The lands thus described, when consolidated at the inclosure, amounted to nearly ten acres, which were sold, in 1809, for seven hundred pounds. It was the boast of the subject of these memoirs, that these Raleighs were an obscure or forgotten branch and descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh-an opinion for which his nephew has been able to find no support, and on which he very justly remarks, that "it is of very little consequence, in the history of Strata Smith, from what gens he sprung; his immediate ancestors, and all his connexions, were men in humble life: on the oolitic soils, which they had cultivated for ages, he was born and bred; on these he planted, in advance of all other men, the standard of geological discovery; to the study of these, his best days of active mind were devoted, and in these, according to a natural, if fanciful wish, his remains are laid to rest.”

William Smith, the geologist, was the son of John Smith, the second son of the above marriage. At the age of eight years, he was deprived of his father, of whom all he has recorded is, that he was an ingenious mechanic, and died from the effects of a cold, caught whilst engaged in the erection of some machinery. His mother, whose memory he cherished with fond devotion, is described by him as a woman of ability, of a gentle and charitable disposition, and attentive to the education of her children.

"According to his own account, however," says Professor Phillips, "not only were the means of instruction at the village school very limited, but these were, in some degree, interfered with by his own wandering and musing habits. The rural games, in those merrie days' of England, might sometimes attract the wayward, and comparatively unrestrained scholar from his books, but he was more frequently learning of another mistress, and forming, for after life, habits of close and curious contemplation of Nature."

As there are many now who sigh for the revival of those saturnalia of the middle ages, which, despite the Puritans, long lingered in the more sequestered nooks of Protestant England, it may not be uninteresting to give a statement of the items of expenditure at one of these merry makings of Oxfordshire, known as Whitsun Ales, to which William Smith of Churchill was treasurer in the years 1720 and 21. The total receipts in 1721 were £58, 19s., the expenditure £54, 5s. 11d. The disbursements formally vouched being as follow: :

For Ribbands,
Malt,

[ocr errors][merged small]
[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

The lord's man and the lady's man and five maids received nothing.

After his father's death, and his mother's second marriage, his father's eldest brother, William, who died unmarried, and to a portion of whose property he was heir, became young William's protector.

"From this kinsman," says his biographer, "who was but little pleased with his nephew's love of collecting the pundibs and poundstones, or quoit-stones, and had no sympathy with his fancies for carving sun-dials on the soft brown oven-stone of the neighbourhood; he, with great difficulty, wrung by repeated entreaties money for the purchase of a few books to instruct a boy in the rudiments of geometry and surveying. But the practical farmer was more satisfied when the youth manifested an interest in the processes of draining and improving land; and there can be no doubt that young William profited, in after life, by the experience, if it may be so called, which he gathered in his boyhood, while accompanying his relation (old William') over his lands at Over Norton."

The pundibs and poundstones, here spoken of, were fossils of the oolites, the former tenebatulæ, the latter a large echinite, often used by the dairywomen as a poundweight.

With a memory so retentive that whatever he saw he remembered for ever, and was able, to the close of his life, to recall every event of his boyhood, William Smith prosecuted his studies from 1783 to 1786, irregularly, and without assistance, but with ardour and success; began to draw, attempted to colour, and made some progress in those branches of the mathematics, then deemed sufficient for surveyors and engineers, and became, at the age of eighteen, assistant to Mr. Edward Webb, a land-surveyor of Stow-on-the-Wold, who had undertaken the survey of the parish of Churchill, for the purpose of inclosure. The master, like his pupil, was self-taught, deficient in literary acquirements, but skilled in mechanics, mensuration, logarithms, algebra, and fluxions. His practice combined much, such as the determination of the force of water, and the planning of machinery, which is now regarded as the province of the engineer.

From 1788 he was actively engaged in the ordinary business of a land-surveyor, in the course of which he traversed the oolites of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, and the lias and red marls of Worcestershire-visited the Salperton Tunnel, on the

Thames and Severn Canal-examined a boring for coal in the New Forest, opposite the Shoe Alehouse at Platford,—noting, and comparing, and treasuring up for future combination, the variations of the soil, and their connexion with the general aspect and character of the country, and with its agricultural and commercial relations.

In 1791, we find him walking by Burford, Cirencester, Tetbury, Bath, Radstock, Old Down, and Stoneaston, to Stowey, where Webb had made over to him the conduct of a survey. There he observed with surprise red marl similar to that of Worcestershire, holding the same position with regard to the lias and superincumbent rocks. He had previously observed, in the collieries of High Littleton, where he had been employed to make a subterranean survey, some regularity in the strata sunk through in the pits, though the colliers would not allow any regularity in the hills of superincumbent "red earth;" "but on this subject," says Smith, "I began to think for myself."

The repeated surveys which he made of these collieries, in the years 1792-3, suggested to him the idea of a model of the strata in a coal country, formed of the materials of which they are composed, reduced to scale, and placed in the order in which they occur.

Some of the neighbouring gentry, admiring the ability and perseverance manifested by Smith, in his employment at the High Littleton Collieries, interested themselves in the advancement of his professional career, for which the occasion was highly favourable. Canals were then as much the order of the day as railroads are now; and he seized the opportunity to procure instruments, extend his reading, and to qualify himself to practise successfully as a canal engineer.

"This," says his biographer, was a tide in his affairs, which, had he followed the middle current, without stopping to examine the banks, would have led him on to fortune; and even under the great disadvantage of being subject to a strong deflecting force, his career was not unprosperous, and he joined with tolerable compactness the decisions of the engineer to the inquiries of the geologist."

In 1793 he was engaged in executing surveys and levellings for a canal, in the course of which an opportunity presented itself of testing the correctness of a speculation which had occurred to him, as a general law affecting the strata of the district. This was, that the strata above the coal were not horizontal, but all inclined in one direction towards the east, so as to terminate successively on the west, and to resemble, according to his own homely but forcible comparison, the position of the slices in a plate of bread and butter. This supposition he found confirmed,

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »