The father of English geology

摘要

The book by Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World, about the life and times of William Smith (1768-1839), the lather of English geology, has now been published in paperback (Penguin, 6.99 pounds: ISBN 0 140 28039 1) (Fig. 4). Inside the covers the only change to the book is a much better colour version of the modern geological map of southern Britain inside the back cover to complement the reduced scale reproduction of William Smith's 1815 map inside the front cover. The rest of this enjoyable book is unrevised, although it would have benefited from at least a few minor corrections (Geology Today, v.17, p.172, 2001). For example, the list of individual Jurassic ammonites illustrated at the start of each chapter still omits the names of the English geological formations they represent. Unfortunate, as the whole point of the book is that William Smith was the first to realize that the fossil types found in a particular sedimentary stratum, were unique to one interval of time. Thus when these same fossils were found in different parts of the country their outcrops could be mapped, and so William Smith was able to produce his revolutionary geological map because he knew these sediments had been deposited during the same time interval.