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The “Kelloways Stone” plate from Strata
GSA TODAY | SEPTEMBER 2015 attention of the president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks.
Attempts at early publication of Smith’s stratigraphic work were
foiled by his prospective publisher’s bankruptcies, so in 1804
Banks opened a subscription toward publication of Smith’s
geological map, but the subscription drew only one other
supporter. Nevertheless, in 1803 Smith had established a
London office, and beginning in 1805 he displayed his ordered
fossil collections there on shelves corresponding to the strata.
On 24 March 1805, in a most significant first, Smith was able to
inform those hunting coal near Bruton in Somerset that they were
wasting time and money because they had been misled by superfi-
cial similarities into digging where no coal could be reached.
From 1806, and following Banks’ support for map publication,
Farey began to extol Smith’s work in several magazines. Smith
continued to add specimens from new strata to his increasingly
large collection of the “characteristic” fossils he found in England. are a fundamental underpinning of biostratigraphy and a basis of
The Geological Society of London was founded in late 1807, but
many of its members remained unconvinced of the value of
Smith’s work and rather proposed to publish a rival map! By 1810,
they were ostracizing Farey for his outspoken support of Smith.
Finally, in 1812, the London mapmaker John Cary offered to
publish Smith’s map, with specially engraved plates for which
Smith designed topographic details. The first version was
published in September 1815, dedicated to Banks, who had imme-
diately realized the economic significance of Smith’s results. This
map was continually modified until at least 1818, and copies with
mid-1830s watermarks survive.
By 1815, Smith was in serious financial trouble, and in June
1819 he was imprisoned for debt, spending almost ten weeks in the
King’s Bench prison in London. Smith’s financial difficulties were
broadly due to “laissez-faire” policies, with a critical lack of
governmental support for work like his. However, the immediate
cause of Smith’s imprisonment was an unfortunate investment in
a quarrying concern. The disaster was only partially assuaged
between 1815 and 1818 by enforced sale of his wonderful fossil
collections, at Banks’ instigation, to an uninterested British
40
identified by Organized Fossils, part 3,
September 1817, by William Smith, mineral
surveyor. These Kelloways fossils had allowed
Smith, in 1805, to determine that the
expensive Bruton Coal Trial of 1803–1810
would prove both misplaced and futile.
Museum. Smith’s library also had to be sold; only some of his
personal papers were rescued by a friend.
Smith’s achievements were enormous. His 1815 map helped
inspire the French government to fund an equivalent mapping
project. J.-F. d’Aubuisson de Voisins wrote in 1819 “what it has
taken the most eminent mineralogists half a century to achieve in
a small area of Germany, one man has undertaken and accom-
plished single-handed for the whole of England; and his work is
quite as fine in its results as it is astounding in its scope.”
Smith in later life finally received some recognition of his
pioneering work, including the first Wollaston Medal of the
Geological Society of London (1831), which 146 years later named
after Smith its medal for excellence in contributions to applied
and economic aspects of geology. The methods Smith developed
every student’s field mapping exercise to the present day.
FURTHER READING
Online gateway to Smith’s maps and much more:
www.strata-smith.com.
d’Aubuisson de Voisins, J.-F., 1819, Traité de géognosie, ou exposé
des connaissances actuelles sur la constitution physique et
minérale du globe terrestre: Strasbourg, F.G. Levrault, 2 vol.,
in-8, pl. d-rel.. 665 p.
Phillips, John, 1844, Memoirs of William Smith LL.D.: London,
Murray (reprinted in 2003 with additions by Hugh Torrens by
the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution), 288 p.
Torrens, H.S., 2004, William Smith, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography: http://www.oxforddnb.com.
The “Rock Stars” series is produced by GSA’s History and Philosophy
of Geology Division. Learn more at www.gsahist.org/notices/HIST_
RSGuide_revised_12-13.pdf.