William Smith

And Werner, and Gyutton not pay attention to the presence of fossils in a variety of layered rocks. William Smith fill this gap and announced a new line of stratigraphy. Smith was not a scientist, but had talent, not sensing the significance of his discovery, he was due to his modesty, perhaps, not be published observations made by him, if by that is not prompted by his friends. Not having any connections with the scientists of the time, this talented self-taught made the subject of their research layered rocks of England. Supervising the construction of a canal, he was able to produce a series of observations of rocks containing many fossils. Another young man, only twenty-six years old, Smith has come to an original conclusion. "All beds - he says - sequentially deposited on the seabed, and each of them contains the remains of organisms that lived during his education in each layer are observed their own fossils, and on them, then in certain cases, you can install simultaneous formation of rocks of different localities. Thus he managed the entire group of British sedimentary rocks from the Carboniferous system and ending with the chalk, broken down to a certain number of divisions that are in different places of the earth met with the same fossils. Smith himself was not familiar with fossils, but the case has brought him to two lovers paleontology Richardson and Tounsendsom (Townsends), which are collected and treated them to the collection. While Smith does not think more about the publication of the results produced: by chance, over lunch, a friend suggested that record set by a sequence of layers. Smith immediately dictated a short plate, which listed the names of twenty-three successive groups, stated their power, the most important fossils properties of its rocks and those areas where observations were made. The table was not published, but has spread to numerous handwritten images.