Allow me to introduce myself. My name,
as reflects my humble origins, is Mr William Smith,
engineer and mineral surveyor. The past twenty four years,
whether in a professional capacity, or at my own expense,
I have traveled the length and breadth of much of England and a good part of Wales
and in all of these wanderings, I have pursued one great purpose
and that has been to identify and to map out
the different geological strata that make up this island of Britain.
It is a task, I think, never before accomplished upon such a scale.
It all began in 1791
when I was employed to survey the coal workings at High Littleton
near Bath in Somersetshire. It was there that I first appreciated
the order and the regularity of the strata lying above the coal veins
always above the coal there was the red earth, or marl,
and above that the blue lias limestone and so forth.
And these strata all appeared to be inclined in the same direction
and were stacked one upon the other, like so.
Later, when I became engineer and surveyor
for the Somersetshire Coal Canal Company
in 1794, I found further proofs of this regularity
by observing the strata that were laid bare in cutting canals across a large tract
of country.
I was but a young man in my early twenties then
and and since then I have uncovered many more strata,
as you may see from the map behind me. Yet, I could not have accomplished this
had it not been for one important discovery. I knew that
many of these strata had long ago formed the bed of the sea
and they contained the fossil remains of sea creatures, like nothing
now living, such as this beautiful ammonite,
which the country folk call a snake-stone.
I found that each strata of rock had its own distinct assemblage of fossils
by which it could be characterised and distinguished from
other strata, and this knowledge enabled me
to distinguish different strata, or the same strata
in different parts of the country, whether it be the south coast
of Dorsetshire
or the northeast coast of Yorkshire. Now,
with such a map as you see here, it is possible to predict
where strata of coal, iron ore,
limestone, sandstone or clay may be discovered.
No longer need immense sums of money
be imprudently and wastefully expended
in looking for coal and other minerals in places where there is no prospect of them
being found. The colours that I have chosen for my map
reflect in some degree the natural color
of each strata of rock, excepting the chalk which,
being white, I thought best to indicate in green,
like the grassy swathes or our English downs. And as further example,
the oolitic limestone, from which we obtain our finest building stones,
I have shown in yellow,
much like the colour of this ammonite, which comes out of the same stratum
of rock. The lowest part of each stratum
I've given a darker shade of colour to, to enable you to
distinguish it's base from its top. I think I can state with some pride
that my map of the strata of England and Wales, which you see here but
a small part, encompasses
the most detailed geological survey of this island.