in 1762 became Woodwardian Professor, had before 1788 discovered (what he never published) the first approximate succession of the Mesozoic rocks, in the district extending from Yorkshire to the country about Cambridge. Michell's account was discovered written by Smeaton on the back of a letter dated 1788. The following is the succession as quoted in Phillips' memoir (p. 136):

The order of succession of the Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic and Permian beds will be readily recognised as indicated in this section, though the discovery of the detailed succession of the Jurassic rocks was reserved for Smith.

In the year 1778, John Whitehurst published An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth, containing an Appendix in which the general succession of the strata of Derbyshire is noted. The main points of interest are that the author clearly recognised the 'toad-stones' of Derbyshire as igneous rocks, "as much a lava as that which flows from Hecla, Vesuvius, or Ætna," though he believed that they were intrusive and not contemporaneous, and he also foreshadows the distinction between the solid strata and the superficial deposits,—"we may conclude," he says, "that all beds of sand and gravel are assemblages of adventitious bodies and not original strata: therefore wherever sand or gravel form the surface of the earth, they conceal the original strata from our observation, and deprive us of the advantages of judging, whether coal or limestone are contained in the lower regions of the earth, and more especially in flat countries where the strata do not basset."

Werner, who was born in 1750, exercised more influence by his teaching than by his writings. His ideas of stratigraphical geology were somewhat vitiated by his theoretical views concerning the deposition of sediment from a universal ocean, in a definite order, beginning with granite, followed by gneiss, schists, serpentines, porphyries and traps, and lastly ordinary sediments. He recognised and taught that these rocks had a definite order "in which the remains of living bodies are successively accumulated, in an order not less determinate than that of the rocks which contain them[2]." The limited value of Werner's stratigraphical teaching is accounted for by Lyell, who remarks that "Werner had not travelled to distant countries; he had merely explored a small portion of Germany, and conceived and persuaded others to believe that the whole surface of our planet, and all the mountain-chains in the world, were made after the model of his own province," and the author of the Principles justly calls attention to the great importance of travel to the geologist. Those who cannot travel extensively should at any rate pay special attention to the works published upon districts other than their own, and even at the present time, the writings of some British workers are apt to be marked by some of that 'insularity' which our neighbours regard as a national characteristic.

It is now time to turn directly to the work of William Smith, who, of all men, exercised the most profound influence upon the study of stratigraphical geology and may indeed be regarded as the true founder of that branch of the science. The memoir of his life which was before mentioned is all too short to illustrate the methods of work which he followed, but in it we can trace his success to three things:—firstly, his 'eye for a country,' to use a phrase which is thoroughly understood by practical geologists, though it is hard to explain to others, inasmuch as it epitomises a number of qualifications of which the most important are, a ready recognition of the main geological features from some coign of vantage, an intuitive perception of what to note and what to neglect, and the power of storing up acquired information in the mind rather than the note-book, so that one may use it almost unconsciously for future work; secondly, ability to draw conclusions from his observations, and thirdly, and perhaps most important of all in its ultimate results, a facility for checking these conclusions by means of further observations, and dropping those which were clearly erroneous, whilst extracting the truth from those which contained a germ of truth mixed with error.

Besides writers referred to above "some foreign writers, in particular Scilla and Rouelle, appear to have made very just comparisons of the natural associations of fossil shells, corals, &c. in the earth, with the groups of similar objects as they are found in the sea, and thus to have produced new proofs of the organic origin of these fossil bodies; but they give no sign of any knowledge of the limitation of particular tribes of organic remains to particular strata, of the successive existence of different groups of organization, on successive beds of the antient sea. Mr Smith's claim to this happy and fertile induction is clear and unquestionable[3]." We get a clue to the manner in which he arrived at his view in the following passage[4]:—"Accustomed to view the surfaces of the several strata which are met with near Bath uncovered in large breadths at once, Mr Smith saw with the distinctness of certainty, that 'each stratum had been in succession the bed of the sea'; finding in several of these strata abundance of the exuviae of marine animals, he concluded that these animals had lived and died during the period of time which elapsed between the formation of the stratum below and the stratum above, at or near the places where now they are imbedded; and observing that in the successively-deposited strata the organic remains were of different forms and structures—Gryphites in the lias, Trigoniæ in the inferior oolite, hooked oysters in the fuller's earth,—and finding these facts repeated in other districts, he inferred that each of the separate periods occupied in the formation of the strata was accompanied by a peculiar series of the forms of organic life, that these forms characterized those periods, and that the different strata could be identified in different localities and otherwise doubtful cases by peculiar imbedded organic remains