Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/342

314 at work. When you travel between Tunbridge Wells and London, you know that the train on the railway is kept going under the influence of fire and water. But before Hutton men little realized that the everlasting hills and seas with barriers supposed to be impassable were likewise under the influence of fire and water repeatedly exchanging places. When Hutton put forward the truth, there were few at first to believe it.

Before Hutton died, William Smith was at work. No Linnæus has yet arisen to regulate the naming of human beings. Therefore this William Smith has to be distinguished from others of the same name in an unscientific and roundabout manner. By one of the singular genealogical expressions which are used to confer honour, he is known as "The Father of English Geology." He became the parent of this giant offspring when he was as yet little more than a boy, by discovering the laws of stratification. He made it clear that the layers of the stratified rocks could not have all been formed at once, that the sequence in position of upper and lower implied a sequence in age of newer and older. If in housebuilding it would be difficult for a man to begin with the attics and the roof, and afterwards to lay the foundation and construct the ground-floor, it would be equally difficult for Nature, after laying down one stratum upon the ocean-bed, to deposit a newer one, not on the top of the older, but underneath it. William Smith showed, moreover, that the relics of life are not distributed hap-hazard through the water-formed rocks, but that over large areas there is a definite relation between the age of a stratum and the character of its fossils, from which it follows that, at least within those areas, at different ages of the rocks there have been differing sets of living organisms. In this respect the strata must not be compared with our houses, for an old Elizabethan mansion may shelter a family of the Victorian age, and the same ancient abbey enshrine the bones of warriors and poets of many successive periods; but in an old Silurian stratum you will never find Cretaceous or Miocene fossils.

Born in the very same year with William Smith, but in a different rank of life, was the illustrious Cuvier, Georges Chrétien Léopold Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier. Goldsmith somewhere speaks of the public as "that miscellaneous being, at