SMITH, WILLIAM (b. Churchill, Oxfordshire, England, 23 March 1769; d. Northampton, England, 28 August 1839), geology.

    leased a large house in London. There he set up his collection of fossils on sloping shelves to represent the different strata. This collection was inspected in 1808 by members of the newly formed Geological Society of London.

In 1812 a London map engraver and publisher, John Cary, offered to publish Smith's geological map of England and Wales on a scale of five miles to the inch. Plates were specially engraved, and Smith himself decided what place names were to be inserted. During 1813 and 1814 he added the geological lines; and when the coloring was carried out he insisted on the use of a novel feature - each formation was colored a darker shade at its base to make clear how the beds were superimposed. In May 1815 the completed map, A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, With part of Scotland, was exhibited in London to the Board of Agriculture, to the Royal Institution, and to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. This society had offered annually since 1802 a premium of fifty guineas for a mineralogical map of England and Wales. Smith received this award. By March 1816, 250 copies of the geological map had been colored and issued to subscribers; most of the maps were numbered and signed by Smith and duly noted in his diary. Probably 400 copies in all were issued, of which fewer than a hundred are known to be extant.

The map was sold at five guineas (£5.25) a copy, but the costs of production and coloring must have absorbed most of the proceeds. About this time he found himself in severe financial difficulties. In 1812 he had leased a quarry near the Coal Canal and had set up a sawmill and stoneworks under the management of his brother John; but the stone proved to be of poor quality because the quarry was intersected by unsuspected faults. Smith's debts had rapidly increased. For this reason he decided to sell his vast collection of fossils, arranged stratigraphically, to the British Museum; and he began negotiations with the government in 1815. Unfortunately the sum he eventually received was well below his expectations - £500 in installments with a further £100 in 1818 for some additional fossils. About 2,000 of these fossils, mostly bearing Smith's original reference marks, are still in the collections of the British Museum (Natural History). Also, museum officials demanded a catalog; and Smith had to give much time to its compilation, although he was aided by his nephew John Phillips, then aged fifteen.

Despite his difficulties, during the next few years Smith published several works. Strata Identified by Organized Fossils, in four parts (London, 1816 - 1819), in which fossils from the London Clay (Tertiary) down to the Fuller's Earth Rock (Middle Jurassic) were shown on nineteen colored plates. Stratigraphical System of Organized Fossils Part I (London, 1817) described fossils from the London Clay down to the Marlstone of the Lias, with particular reference to those purchased by the British Museum, and contained a “Geological Table of British Organized Fossils Which Identify the Course and Continuity of the Strata in Their Order of Superposition, as Originally Discovered by W. Smith Civil Engineer; With Reference to His Geological Map of England and Wales.” This table was also issued separately and later was included in a volume of geological sections (1819), five large folding sheets of hand-colored panoramic horizontal sections, across different parts of southern England. A geological section from London to Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales, usually included in this work, had also been issued separately in 1817.

Cary, who published these geological sections, now provided Smith with maps of the English counties to color geologically; and in May 1819 geological maps of Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, and Wiltshire were published. This work continued up to 1824. In all, twenty-four maps of twenty-one counties were issued; Yorkshire, the largest English county, required four sheets. Other county maps were in an advanced state of preparation, but never appeared with geological coloring.

From 1820 Smith lived in the north of England. For many years he had no settled home - but lived in lodgings wherever his work or inclination led him. During 1824 and 1825 he and his nephew John Phillips (who later became professor of geology at Oxford) lectured on geology in several Yorkshire towns, but rheumatism and increasing deafness made it difficult for Smith to continue this occupation. In 1828 he was offered a post as land steward to Sir John Johnstone of Hackness (a village near Scarborough in Yorkshire), a great admirer of Smith's work. Smith lived at Hackness for about five years and while there mapped, on a scale of six-and-a-half inches to the mile, the Jurassic rocks of the Hackness Hills. This beautiful and accurate map was published in 1832.

In 1831 Adam Sedgwick, president of the Geological Society of London, announced that the first Wollaston Medal had been awarded to Smith “in consideration of his being a great original discoverer in English Geology; and especially for his having been the first, in this country, to discover and