Murchison next investigated, at the instance of Dr. Buckland, the geological age of the Brora coalfield, in Sutherlandshire. Some geologists maintained that the rocks of that district were merely a part of the ordinary coal, or carboniferous system; others held them to be greatly younger, to be, indeed, of the same general age with the lower oolitic strata of Yorkshire. A good observer might readily settle this question; Murchison resolved to try. Again he prepared himself by reading and study of fossils to understand the evidence he was to collect and interpret, and in order to do full justice to the Scottish tract, he went first to the Yorkshire coast, and made himself master of the succession, and leading characters of the rocks so admirably displayed along that picturesque line of cliffs. The summer had hardly begun before he and his wife broke up their camp in London and were on the move northwards. At York he made the acquaintance of two men, with whom he was destined in after life to have much close intercourse and co-operation—the Rev. William Vernon (afterwards Vernon Harcourt) and Mr. (subsequently Professor) John Phillips. Murchison’s own record of the meeting is as follows:—“Phillips, then a youth, was engaged in arranging a small museum at York. He recommended Murchison strongly to his uncle, William Smith, who was then living at Scarborough, and had little intercourse with the Geological Society. From the moment I had my first walk with William Smith (then about sixty years old), I felt that he was just the man after my own heart; and he, on his part, seeing that I had, as he said, ‘an eye for a country,’ took to me, and gave me most valuable lessons. Thus he made me thoroughly acquainted with all the strata north and south of Scarborough. He afterwards accompanied me in a boat all along the coast, stopping and sleeping at Robin Hood’s Bay. Not only did I then learn the exact position of the beds of poor coal which crop out in that tract of the eastern moorlands, but collecting with him the characteristic fossils from the calcareous grit down to the lias, I saw how clearly strata must alone be identified by their fossils, inasmuch as here, instead of oolite limestone like those of the south we had sandstones, grits, and shales which, though closely resembling the beds of the old coal, were precise equivalents of the oolitic series of the south. Smith walked about stoutly with me all under the cliffs from Robin Hood’s Bay to Whitby, making me well note the characteristic fossils of each formation.”