The Geology of England and Wales 1

Abstract

THE well-known volume of Conybeare and Phillips, entitled “Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales,” which was published in 1822, and was based on an earlier and slighter work of the second-named author, has long held an honourable place among geological classics. It has served, indeed, to supply to some extent the want so universally felt of a descriptive memoir or handbook to William Smith's Geological Map, a work which “the father of English geology” could never be prevailed upon to write himself. The “Outlines,” however, is but a fragment, the second part of the work, which was to have dealt with the oldest rocks and with questions of Economic Geology, never having been published ; and more than half-a-century of research, carried on in connection with a science which appears to have as yet lost none of the vigour and elasticity of youth, have of course rendered much of the information contained in it obsolete. The only work of more recent date which occupies somewhat the same ground is D'Archaic's “Histoire des Progrès de la Géologie,” which aimed at doing for all those portions of the globe which had been geologically explored, what Conybeare and Phillips had attempted for England alone. This work is one of the very highest order of merit ; its author being equally distinguished for his industry in the compilation of materials, his skill in arranging them, and his boldness and originality in generalising from them. But such a design as that of the “Histoire des Progrès” was perhaps too ambitious to be within the compass of the efforts of any single individual ; at all events, after the portions relating to the Tertiary and Secondary strata had appeared in a series of eight volumes, between the years 1847 and '60, the work, which had up to that time been published by the Geological Society of France under the auspices of the Minister of Public Instruction, was finally abandoned.