William Smith was born at Churchill, a village in Oxfordshire, on the 23rd of March, 1769, the year which gave birth to Cuvier. Of his parents he always spoke with great regard, but there is little in the recollections which he has preserved of them, to show in what degree they contributed to form his remarkable character. His father he described as “a very ingenious mechanic,” and mentions as the cause of his death a severe cold caught while engaged in the erection of some machinery. Deprived of this parent before he was eight years old, it was fortunate for him that his mother was a woman of ability, of gentle and charitable disposition, and attentive to the education of her children. An expressive pencil sketch and a characteristic description, both from memory, record his devotion to his mother. According to his own account, however, not only were the means of his instruction at the village school very limited, but they were in some degree interfered with by his own wandering and musing habits. The rural games in those “merrie daies” of England might sometimes attract the wayward and comparatively unrestrained scholar from his books; but he was more frequently learning of another mistress, and forming, for after-life, a habit of close and curious contemplation of nature. After his father’s death and his mother’s second marriage, the person to whom he was principally to look up to for protection, was his father’s eldest brother, to a portion of whose property he was heir. From this kinsman, who was but little pleased with his nephew’s love of collecting the “pundibs”[2] and “poundstones,” or “quoitstones,”[3] and had no sympathies with his fancies of carving sun-dials on the soft brown “oven-stone”[4] of the neighbourhood, he with great difficulty wrung, by repeated entreaty, money for the purchase of a few books fit to instruct a boy in the rudiments of geometry and surveying. But the practical farmer was better satisfied when the youth manifested an intelligent interest in the processes of draining and improving land; and there is no doubt that young William profited in after-life by the experience, if it may be so called, which he gathered in his boyhood while accompanying his relative (“old William”) over his lands at Over Norton. Whatever he saw, was remembered for ever. To the latest hours of life he retained a clear and complete recollection of almost every event of his boyhood and often interested young and old by his vivid pictures of what he had seen when a child. These notices would be swelled to an unreasonable degree by introducing the pleasant stories of “the narrative old man;” but the following recollections, written in his seventieth year, of events which had passed fifty-six years before, are worth preserving as evidence of this peculiar circumstantiality of memory.