Geologists who, at the present time, notwithstanding the devoted attention which has been paid to the phenomena of local displacement, find a difficulty in understanding the causes, may imagine the perplexity in the mind of a _discoverer_. Mr. Smith felt this perplexity severely, but not long. The Canal Bill, on which he was engaged, received the sanction of Parliament in 1794; and one of the first steps taken by the judicious committee of management was to depute two members of their body to accompany Mr. Smith, “their engineer,” on a tour of inquiry and observation regarding the construction, management, and trade of other navigations in England and Wales. The tour extended altogether nine hundred miles, and occupied between one and two months; by one route the party reached Newcastle, and by another returned, through Shropshire and Wales to Bath. Mr. Palmer and Mr. Perkins were gentlemen well acquainted with coal-working, and they willingly stayed to inspect every new invention applied to canals and collieries; but Mr. Smith’s treasured object of consideration on the road, that which occupied all his thoughts in the intervals of professional inquiries, was the aspect and structure of the country passed through, in order to determine if his preconceived generalizations of a settled order of succession, continuity of range at the surface, and general declination eastward, were true on a large scale. It is needless now to say that his general views were justified; he found the strata from the vicinity of Bath and Bristol prolonged into the north of England, in the same general order of succession with the general eastward dip. There is, however, one part of the conclusions adopted in this rapid survey from a postchaise, which merits particular attention. He passed through York on the high road to Newcastle, and saw at a distance of from five to fifteen miles to the east the hills of chalk and oolite. He was satisfied of their nature by their _contours_ and _relative position_, and by their position on the surface in relation to the lias and “red ground” occasionally seen on the road. This is, in fact, the only authority he could rely upon for drawing, in 1800, the continuations of the chalk of Wiltshire, and the oolite of Somersetshire, through the eastern parts of Yorkshire, but he drew them with a considerable approximation to accuracy.