Werner, who was born in 1750, exercised more influence by his teaching than by his writings. His ideas of stratigraphical geology were somewhat vitiated by his theoretical views concerning the deposition of sediment from a universal ocean, in a definite order, beginning with granite, followed by gneiss, schists, serpentines, porphyries and traps, and lastly ordinary sediments. He recognised and taught that these rocks had a definite order "in which the remains of living bodies are successively accumulated, in an order not less determinate than that of the rocks which contain them[2]." The limited value of Werner's stratigraphical teaching is accounted for by Lyell, who remarks that "Werner had not travelled to distant countries; he had merely explored a small portion of Germany, and conceived and persuaded others to believe that the whole surface of our planet, and all the mountain-chains in the world, were made after the model of his own province," and the author of the _Principles_ justly calls attention to the great importance of travel to the geologist. Those who cannot travel extensively should at any rate pay special attention to the works published upon districts other than their own, and even at the present time, the writings of some British workers are apt to be marked by some of that 'insularity' which our neighbours regard as a national characteristic. [Footnote 2: Cuvier's _Eloge_.] It is now time to turn directly to the work of William Smith, who, of all men, exercised the most profound influence upon the study of stratigraphical geology and may indeed be regarded as the true founder of that branch of the science. The memoir of his life which was before mentioned is all too short to illustrate the methods of work which he followed, but in it we can trace his success to three things:--firstly, his 'eye for a country,' to use a phrase which is thoroughly understood by practical geologists, though it is hard to explain to others, inasmuch as it epitomises a number of qualifications of which the most important are, a ready recognition of the main geological features from some coign of vantage, an intuitive perception of what to note and what to neglect, and the power of storing up acquired information in the mind rather than the note-book, so that one may use it almost unconsciously for future work; secondly, ability to draw conclusions from his observations, and thirdly, and perhaps most important of all in its ultimate results, a facility for checking these conclusions by means of further observations, and dropping those which were clearly erroneous, whilst extracting the truth from those which contained a germ of truth mixed with error.