SMITH, WILLIAM ( English geologist, called "the Father of English geology," and known among his acquaint ances as "Strata Smith," was born at Churchill in Oxfordshire on March 23, 1769. At 18 he became assistant to Edward Webb, surveyor, of Stow-on-the-Wold, and traversed the Oolitic lands of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, the Lias clays and red marls of Warwickshire and other districts, studying their varieties of strata and soils. In 1791 his observations at Stowey and High Littleton in Somersetshire first impressed him with the regularity of the strata. In 1793 he executed the surveys and levellings for the line of the Somerset coal canal, in the course of which he con firmed his supposition, that the strata above the coal were not horizontal, but inclined in one direction—to the east—so as to terminate successively at the surface.
On being appointed engineer to the canal in 1794 he made a tour with regard to inland navigation. He carefully examined the geological structure of England, and corroborated his general ization of a settled order of succession in the strata. In 1794 he coloured his first geological map—that of the vicinity of Bath— showing the ranges of the different strata across England.
In 1799 Smith dictated his first table of British Strata, now in the possession of the Geological society of London. It was headed Order of the Strata, and their imbedded Organic Remains, in the neighbourhood of Bath; examined and proved prior to 1799. In 1813 Joseph Townsend published, with acknowledgment, much information on the English strata communicated by William Smith, in a work entitled The Character of Moses established for veracity as an historian, recording events from the Creation to the Deluge.
Meanwhile Smith was completing and arranging the data for his large Geological Map of England and Wales, with part of Scotland (15 sheets, 1815). The map was reduced to smaller form in 1819; and from this date to 1822 21 separate county geological maps and several sheets of sections were published in successive years, constituting a Geological Atlas of England and Wales. Smith's collection of fossils was purchased in 1816-18 by the British Museum. In 1817 a portion of the descriptive catalogue, Stratigraphical System of Organized Fossils, was published. In 1816 he had commenced the publication of Strata Identified by Organized Fossils, with figures printed on paper to correspond in some degree with the natural hue of the strata. In this work (of which only four parts were published, 1816-19) is exemplified the principle he established of the identification of strata by their included organic remains. In 1831 the Geological society of London conferred on Smith the first Wollaston medal; and from the government he received a life-pension of LIoo per annum. The last years of his life were spent at Hackness (of which he made a good geological map), near Scarborough, and in the latter town. He died at Northampton on Aug. 28, 1839.
His Memoirs, edited by his nephew, John Phillips, appeared in 1844.