Electronic edition published by Cultural Heritage Langauge Technologies (with permission from Charles Scribners and Sons) and funded by the National Science Foundation International Digital Libraries Program. This text has been proofread to a low degree of accuracy. It was converted to electronic form using data entry.
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