lNTItODOCTIOX.

xlv

method and more systematic form. His attempts at theorizingmust now appear to all but his most devoted adherents, amongthe most unsuccessful and unphilosophical ever made, and eventhese are gradually abandoning one by one all his most charac-teristic opinions. There was, however, in his character anenergetic determination of all his powers to the advancementof his favorite pursuit, which communicated itself to his wholeclass, and doubtless lie has done more than any other individualto promote its career.

The travels of Saussure in the Alps, and of Pallas in variousparts of the Uussian territory, but especially the former, affordedhowever contributions to the advancement of true geologicalscience, more important perhaps in themselves than the methodi-cal arrangements of the Freyberg school, and certainly muchmore so than all its theoretical accompaniments.

In 1790 Air. William Smith, (a name which can never, intracing the history of English geology, be mentioned without therespect due to a great original discoverer) appears to have com-menced his researches in the neighbourhood of Bath, havingin that year drawn up a tabular view of the strata exhibited inthat district, which in fact contained the rudiments of his sub-sequent discoveries. Ten years afterwards he circulated pro-posals for publishing a treatise on the Geology of England tobe accompanied by a coloured map and sections, and in the in-terval had freely communicated the information he possessedin many quarters, till in fact it became by oral diffusion thecommon property of a large body of English geologists, and thuscontributed to the progress of the science in many quarterswhere the author was little known. In this same interval, be-tween 1790 and 1800, several volumes of reports were pub-lished by the Board of Agriculture, many of them containingmuch local geological information ; and to this board mustundoubtedly be ascribed the honour of having produced theearliest geological maps of uni/ part of England ; for its firstseries of reports published in 1794 contains very adequategeological maps of the North riding of Yorkshire , of Derby­ shire , and of Nottinghamshire , and a less perfect one of Devon-shire ; that of Kent, published in 1796, has a regular geolo-gical map of that county (which indeed after the treatise ofPacke in the beginning of the century it was easy to construct).Between (his date and 1813, the same hoard has also givenuseful maps of Sussex, Surrey, Berks, Bedford, Gloucester,Wilts, Lincoln, Durham, and Cheshire, besides publishing asecond report of Derbyshire dedicated exclusively to its mine-ralogy by Mr. Farey. Maton’s tour through the western