A BRLSI Publication

William Smith LL.D:
by his nephew & pupil
John Phillips FRS, FGS

Reprinted limited edition from the original copy presented to the Institution by the author. (Only 500 copies were originally published in 1844.)

William ‘Strata’ Smith, the father of English geology, was an engineer & surveyor who worked in southern England in the late 18th century. Fifty years before Darwin published his ideas on natural selection, Smith collected fossils as he designed & dug canals, and he noted that each layer (stratum) contained a unique assemblage of fossils, and that he could identify the different formations by the characteristic fossils in each.
The BRLSI publication outlines Smith’s working life in the Bath area and throughout the UK. He worked as
a civil & water engineer, geologist, land & mineral surveyor, & cartographer. Three important additions are included in the book by the leading authority on Smith, Professor Hugh Torrens:

 An introduction & general overview of the
life of this Father of English Geology.
 His William Smith lecture given to the
Geographical Society of London in 2000.
 Full indexing of the contents to create a
valuable reference tool.

William Smith’s 1815 Geological Map of England & Wales

This is the first title from our library in what is planned to be
a series of limited edition reprints.

See also: Simon Winchester. The Map that Changed the World (Penguin, 2002).