Further Reading

The papers, diaries, sketches, execrable poems, and extraordinary maps of William Smith are kept in the archive of the University Museum, Oxford, as are the papers of his nephew and future Oxford professor of geology, John Phillips, and those of the flamboyantly eccentric omnivore Dean William Buckland. The collections of George Bellas Greenough are in the archives of the Geological Society of London. There are other important papers housed in the Eyles Collection at the University of Bristol.

A very few of the books that are fisted below will make enjoyable reading — most notably the two enlightening works by the eminent paleontologist Richard Fortey, The Hidden Landscapeand Trilobite!; Noel Arman’s highly readable study of Dean Buckland in The Dons, and Roger Osborne’s most original The Floating Egg. Other books that seem likely to appeal to the general reader I have marked with an asterisk.

The greatest of all the works noted here — aside, of course, from Darwin — is the majestic tome (no other word can possibly do justice) written in 1933 by W. J. Arkell: The Jurassic System in Great Britain. This utterly beautiful book, elegant in design and writing, represents the life’s work of a man who was passionately fascinated by the most celebrated and, one might say, looking at the rocks and villages along its outcrop, the most English — of all the geological periods. It has long been out of print, and a clean copy will cost a good deal of money. But to anyone whose interest in geology at its best may have been piqued by this short account, I urge them — find yourself an Arkell, buy it, and treasure for yourself and for your descendants. There are all too few books of its like.

To write this book I made use of the following:

  • Allaby, A., and M. Allaby. The Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Allsop, Niall. The Somersetshire Coal Canal Rediscovered. Bath, England: Millstream Books, 1993.
  • *Annan, Noel. The Dons. London: HarperCollins, 1999.
  • *Arkell, W. J. The Jurassic System in Great Britain. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1933.
  • Bassett, Michael G. “Formed Stones,” Folklore and Fossils. Cardiff- National Museum of Wales, 1982.
  • Bennett, Stewart. A History of Lincolnshire. Chichester, England: Phillimore & Co., 1999.
  • Berger, Lee. In the Footsteps of Eve. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
  • *Bernal, J. D. Science in History. London: Watts & Co., 1954.
  • Blundell, D. J., and A. C. Scot. Lyell: The Past Is the Key to the Present. London: Geological Society of London, 1998.
  • *Briggs, Asa. A Social History of England. London: Penguin, 1987.
  • Brooke, J., and G. Cantor. Reconstructing Nature. London: T. & T. Clarke, 1998.
  • Brooke, John Hedley. Science and Religion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
  • Brown, Roger Lee. A History of the Fleet Prison, London. Lampeter, England: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996.
  • Clew, Kenneth. The Somersetshire Coal Canal and Railways. Newton Abbott, England: David & Charles, 1970.
  • Cox, L. R. “New Light on William Smith and His Work.” Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society 25, pt. 1, 1942.
  • –. William Smith and the Birth of Stratigraphy. International Geological Congress, 1948.
  • Craig, G. Y. The Geology of Scotland. London: Geological Society of London, 1991.
  • Craig, G. Y., and J. H. Hull. James Hutton — Present and Future. London: Geological Society of London, 1999.
  • *Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. New York: New American Library, 1958.
  • Daunton, M. J. Progress and Poverty. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995.
  • Davies, G. L. “The University of Dublin and Two Pioneers of English Geology.” Hermathena 109 (1969).
  • Doyle, Peter. Understanding Fossils. New York: Wiley, 1997.
  • Doyle, Peter, and Matthew Bennett, eds. Unlocking the Stratigraphical Record. New York: Wiley, 1998.
  • Duff, P. McL. D., and A. J. Smith, eds. The Geology of England and Wales. London: Geological Society of London, 1992.
  • Eastwood, T. Stanford’s Geological Atlas. London: Edward Stanford Ltd., 1 1964.
  • Edmonds, J. M. “The Geological Lecture-Courses given in Yorkshire by William Smith and John Phillips, 1824-1825.” Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society, 1975.
  • –. “The First ‘Apprenticed’ Geologist.” Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 76 (19 8 1).
  • Eldredge, Niles. The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 2000.
  • Emsley, Clive. Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900. London: Longman, 1987.
  • Eyles, Joan M. “William Smith: The Sale of His Geological Collection to the British Museum,” Annals of Science, 23, no. 3 (1967).
  • –. “William Smith (1769-1839) — a Bibliography of his Published Writings, Maps and Geological Sections, Printed and Lithographed.” Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History. (April 1969).
  • –. “William Smith: Some Aspects of his Life and Work.” In C. J. Schneer, ed. Towards a History of Geology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969.
  • –. “William Smith, Richard Trevithick and Samuel Hornfray: Their Correspondence on Steam Engines 1804-1806.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 43 (1970-71).
  • –. “William Smith’s Home Near Bath: The Real Tucking Mill.” Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History (1974).
  • –. “G. B Greenough, FRS (1778-1855).” Nature, April 16, 1955.
  • Fearnsides, W. G., and 0. M. B. Bulman. Geology in the Service of Man. London: Pelican, 1944.
  • *Fortey, Richard. The Hidden Landscape. London: Pimlico, 1993.
  • *–. Trilobite! London: HarperCollins, 2000.
  • Geikie, Sir Archibald. The Founders of Geology. London: Macmillan, 1897.
  • Giffispie, Charles Coulston. Genesis and Geology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.
  • Gould, S. The Lying Stones of Marrakech. New York: Harmony Books, 2000.
  • *–. Wonderful Life. London: Penguin, 1989.
  • Grantham, John. The Regulated Pasture — a History of Common Land in Chipping Norton. Chipping Norton, England: J. Grantham, 1997.
  • Green, G, W. British Regional Geology. Bristol and Gloucester Region. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1992.
  • Greene, John C. The Death of Adam. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959.
  • Hains, B. A., and A. Horton. A British Regional Geology. Central England. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969.
  • Hardy, Peter. The Geology of Somerset. Bradford on Avon, England: Ex Libris Press, 1999.
  • Harland, W. B., et al. A Geological Time Scale, 1989. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  • *Hawkes, Jacquetta. A Land, London: Cresset Press, 1953.
  • Hill, Christopher. Reformation to Industrial Revolution. London: Penguin, 1992.
  • *Holmes, Arthur. Principles of Physical Geology. New York: Nelson Thornes, 1993.
  • Hutton, James. Theory of the Earth, Vol. III (facsimile). London: Geological Society of London, 1997.
  • Innes, Joanna. “The King’s Bench Prison in the Later Eighteenth Century.” In John Brewer and John Styles, eds., An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: Hutchinson, 1980.
  • *Jones, Steve. Darwin’s Ghost. New York: Random House, 2000.
  • Kearey, Philip. the New Penguin Dictionary of Geology. London: Penguin, 1996.
  • Knell, Simon J. The Culture of English Geology. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2000.
  • Korsmeyer, Jerry. Evolution & Eden. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1998.
  • Lapidus, Dorothy F., with 1. Winstanley. The Collins Dictionary of Geology. London: HarperCollins, 1990.
  • Laudan, Rachel. From Mineralogy to Geology. The Foundations of a Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
  • Le Bas, M. J., ed. Milestones in Geology. London: Geological Society of London,1995.
  • Lindberg, David, and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. God and Nature. University of California Press, 1986.
  • Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology. London: John Murray, 1834.
  • McClay, Keith. The Mapping of Geological Structures. New York: Wiley, 1987.
  • McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Doubleday, 1999.
  • Mather, Kirtley. Source Book in Geology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
  • Meades, Eileen. The History of Chipping Norton. Chipping Norton, England: Bodkin Books, 1984.
  • Melville, R. V. and E. C. Freshney. British Regional Geology: The Hampshire Basin. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1982.
  • Numbers, Ronald L. Creation by Natural Law. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.
  • The Creationists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992
  • Darwinism Comes to America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.
  • *Osbome, Roger. The Floating Egg. London: Pimlico, 1999.
  • Packard, Lisa. Dr. Johnson’s London. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.
  • Pevsner, Nicolaus, and John Harris. The Buildings of England. Lincolnshire. London: Penguin, 1964.
  • Phillips, John. “Biographical Notice of William Smith, LLD.” Magazine of Natural History (1839): 213.
  • –. Memoirs of William Smith, LLD. London: John Murray, 1844.
  • Plumb, J. H. England in the Eighteenth Century. London: Penguin, 1990.
  • Porter, Roy. The Making of Geology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
  • Priestley, Philip. Victorian Prison Lives. London: Pimlico, 1999.
  • Robson, Douglas A. Pioneers of Geology. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England: Natural History Society of Northumberland, 1986.
  • Roderick, Martin. The Great Devonian Controversy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
  • Rule, John. The Laboring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750-1850. London: Longman, 1986.
  • Rupke, Nicolaas. The Great Chain of History. Oxford. England: Clarendon Press, 1983.
  • Sale, Richard. A Guide to the Cotswold Way. Marlborough: Cordwood Press, 1999.
  • Serest, Michel, ed. A History of Scientific Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
  • Sheppard, Thomas. William Smith: His Maps and Memoirs. Hull, England: Brown & Sons, 1920.
  • Singer, Peter. A Darwinian Left. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.
  • Smith, E. A. George IV New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.
  • Smith, Peter L. Canal Architecture. Princes Risborough, England: Shire Publications, 1997,
  • Stanforth, Alan. Geology of the North York Moors. National Park Information Service, 1993.
  • Strahler, Arthur M. Science and Earth History. The Evolution/Creation Controversy. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1987.
  • Thomson, David. England in the Nineteenth Century. London: Pelican, 1991.
  • *Toghill, Peter. De Geology of Britain. Shrewsbury, England: Swan Hill Press, 2000.
  • Tonga, Neil, and Michael Quincy. British Social and Economic History, 1800-1900. London: Macmillan, 1980.
  • Torrens, H. S. “Early Maps of the Somersetshire Coal Canal.” Cartographic journal (June 1974).
  • Truman, A. E. Geology and Scenery. London: Pelican, 1949.
  • Very, David, and Alan Brooks. The Buildings of England. Gloucestershire 1. London: Penguin, 1999.
  • Vile, Nigel. Exploring the Kennet & Avon Canal. Newbury, England: Countryside Books, 1992.
  • Watkins, Alan. Churchill and Sarsden. Gloucester, England: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1988.
  • Wicander, Reed, and James Monroe. Historical Geology. Pacific Grove, Calif: Brooks/Cole, 2000.
  • Woodward, Horace. The History of the Geological Society of London. London: Geological Society, 1907.
  • Ziegler, Peter. Geological Atlas of Western and Central Europe. London: Shell International Petroleum BV, 1990.