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

    teach the identification of strata, and to determine their succession by means of their imbedded fossils” (Proceedings of the Geological Society, 1 [1834], 271). The gold medal (not then ready) was presented to Smith the following year at the British Association meeting in Oxford. This recognition of Smith's fundamental contribution to geology was followed by an award by the government of an annuity of £100. In 1835 whilst at a British Association meeting the LL.D. was bestowed on him at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1834 he left Hackness to live at Scarborough, and in 1835 moved into Newborough Cottage, Bar Street. He regularly attended the annual meetings of the British Association, to which he twice contributed papers; and at Scarborough he spent many hours writing reminiscences, fragments of geology, and notes on many topics.

Smith's last geological task was performed in 1838, when he accompanied Henry de la Beche, director of the newly established Geological Survey, Charles Barry, the architect, and C. H. Smith, a sculptor and mason, on a horse-and-carriage tour of the principal quarries of England and Scotland in order to choose a suitable stone for the new Houses of Parliament. On this tour particular attention was paid to the condition of the stone in old abbeys and churches. In 1839 the official report recommended the use of a magnesian limestone from certain quarries at Bolsover Moor, Derbyshire. As building proceeded, the supply of stone proved inadequate; and further supplies of magnesian limestone were obtained from the Anston quarries eight miles to the north in Yorkshire. Although this stone proved excellent when used for the Museum of Practical Geology, opened in 1851, it failed badly in parts of the Parliament buildings; and as early as 1861 an inquiry was held about its decay. The present view is that the stone was unsuitable for the highly decorated Parliament buildings, although satisfactory for the classic style of the museum. Smith's notes made at the time of the tour indicate that he was well aware of the many factors that can affect the condition of stone buildings. Had he not died suddenly from a chill on his way to a British Association meeting in Birmingham, his specialized knowledge and supervision might have made a marked difference in the selection of stone for the more deeply sculptured portions of the Houses of Parliament.

Smith's contributions to the advancement of geology were chiefly practical and were based on field geology; and to seek in his works, published or unpublished, theoretical considerations of a profound nature is a waste of time. Smith was a surveyor, a working man, not an academic; and he saw his discoveries as tools that could be used to promote the economic development of his country, in agriculture and in industry. Many of his unpublished notes confirm this viewpoint.

It is perhaps not widely realized how the geological succession in England itself contributed to William Smith's rapid progress in interpreting its order. In England it is possible to find sedimentary rocks of every age from Precambrian through Paleozoic to Mesozoic and Tertiary, and only the older Paleozoic rocks are so folded and compressed that interpretation of their succession is difficult. In only a few places in England does the intrusion of granites or other igneous rocks cause some disorder and irregularity; local folding and faulting also occur, but the intense folding and faulting that gave rise to the complicated Alpine structures of Europe reached only the very south of England, as minor ripples. Nor are there vast gaps in the succession, such as occur, for example, in the eastern United States, where the Jurassic beds are entirely absent and Cretaceous sediments directly overlie Triassic ones. In the former kingdom of Saxony, where Werner sought to distinguish “formations,” the Jurassic rocks are also absent and the Cretaceous ones rest directly on Paleozoic or even older rocks.

This view is confirmed by T. H. Huxley, in his address to the British Association in 1881, “The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology.” He stated that “this modest land-surveyor, whose business took him into many parts of England, profited by the peculiarly favourable conditions offered by the arrangement of our secondary strata . . .” (Collected Essays, IV [London, 1895], 37).

Unlike certain naturalists, Smith did not concern himself with the extinction of species or the living analogues of fossils. His knowledge of biology was minimal and he regarded fossils solely as a means of identifying a particular stratum, such as the Cornbrash or the Coral Rag. He did not recognize any age difference in these beds. Hence his approach was quite different from that of the naturalists Buffon and Soulavie, who earlier had concluded that rocks containing fossils of which there were no known living representatives must be older than those containing fossils part or all of which resembled creatures living in modern oceans. Smith did, however, recognize before 1800 that fossils worn by attrition found in alluvial beds indicated that the beds were deposited later than those containing the unworn fossils.