William Smith Uses Fossils to Determine the Order of the Strata in England and Helps Develop the Science of Stratigraphy
Overview
Stratigraphy, the study of rock strata, emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century for both scientific and economic reasons. Although William Smith was the first to use fossils to trace a long series of strata over a large area, his practical rather than scientific approach meant that his work was not influential outside of England. Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart, however, were well established in the scientific community, and their slightly later research became the basis for most future work on fossils and geological history. Nevertheless, William Smith is usually remembered as the father of English geology and as a pioneer of stratigraphy.
Background
In the late eighteenth century scientists began to ask a new kind of question about the structure of Earth's crust. Before, they had only been interested in the physical and chemical origins of rocks and the valuable minerals that they contained. Now, knowing the historical order in which strata (layers of rock) had been deposited became an important part of geology, too. The addition of this new emphasis was primarily due to a German mining teacher named Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817).
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