In England, William Smith, "the father of English geology," died. Born in 1769, Smith, like many another English scientist, was self-taught and perhaps all the more independent for that. He discovered that the fossils in rocks, instead of being scattered haphazard, are arranged in regular systems, so that any given stratum of rock is labelled by its fossil population; that the order of succession of such groups of fossils is always the same in any vertical series of strata in which they occur, and that a fossil, having once disappeared, never reappears in a later stratum. The facts which he unearthed were as iconoclastic in their field as the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. [Sidenote: Spanish civil war] [Sidenote: Carlist reverses] [Sidenote: Flight of Don Carlos] [Sidenote: Decline of Spain] In Spain, a signal defeat of the Carlists at Pennecerrada during the previous year had caused a decisive turn in the civil war. Don Carlos' attempted march on Madrid had to be abandoned, and was followed by the retreat of his forces to the Ebro. General Espartero forced back the Carlist forces step by step, and carried the fight into the Basque provinces. There the struggle degenerated into a war of extermination. The Carlist leaders turned against one another. The priests excommunicated the generals, and the generals in turn shot the priests. At last, by the middle of September, so many of the insurgents had surrendered to Espartero that Don Carlos found himself almost without followers. He gave up the struggle and fled into France. This ended the civil war. It had lasted six weary years, and had proved almost as disastrous for Spain as the great Peninsular War. Robbed of her former colonial resources, excepting only those from Cuba and the Philippines, Spain's finances were all but ruined. Of industrial progress there was next to none. The country relapsed into semi-barbarism. [Sidenote: American Whig Convention] [Sidenote: Henry Clay's candidacy.] [Sidenote: Financial failures] [Sidenote: Longfellow's poems]