William Smith, the 'Father of English Geology,' is rightly regarded as the founder of stratigraphical geology on a true scientific basis, but like all great discoverers, his work was foreshadowed by others, though so dimly, that this does not and cannot detract from his fame. It is desirable, however, to begin our historical review at a time somewhat further back than that at which Smith gave to the world his epoch-making map and memoirs. Before the eighteenth century, stratigraphical geology cannot be said to have existed as a branch of science--the way had not been prepared for it. Data had been accumulated which would have been invaluable if at the disposal of open-minded philosophers, but with few exceptions prejudice prevented the truth from becoming known. There were two great stumbling-blocks to the establishment of a definite system of stratigraphical geology by the writers of the Middle Ages, firstly, the contention that fossils were not the relics of organisms, and, secondly, when it was conceded that they represented portions of organisms which had once existed, the assertion that they had reached their present positions out of reach of the sea during the Noachian Deluge. For full details concerning the mischievous effects of these tenets upon the science the reader is referred to the luminous sketch of the growth of geology in the first four chapters of Sir Charles Lyell's _Principles of Geology_. The disposition of rocks in strata, and the occurrence of different fossils in different strata, was known to Woodward when he published his _Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth_ in 1695, and the valuable collections made by Woodward and now deposited in the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge, show how fully he appreciated the importance of these facts, though he formed very erroneous conclusions from them, owing to the manner in which he drew upon his imagination when facts failed him, maintaining that fossils were deposited in the strata according to their gravity, the heaviest sinking first, and the lightest last, during the time of the universal deluge. The following extracts from Part II. of Woodward's book, show the position in which our knowledge of the strata stood at the end of the seventeenth century: "The Matter, subsiding ..., formed the _Strata_ of Stone, of Marble, of Cole, of Earth, and the rest; of which Strata, lying one upon another, the Terrestrial Globe, or at least as much of it as is ever displayed to view, doth mainly consist.... The Shells of those Cockles, Escalops, Perewinkles, and the rest, which have a greater degree of Gravity, were enclosed and lodged in the _Strata_ of Stone, Marble, and the heavier kinds of Terrestrial Matter: the lighter Shells not sinking down till afterwards, and so falling amongst the lighter Matter, such as Chalk, and the like ... accordingly we now find the lighter kinds of Shells, such as those of the _Echini_, and the like, very plentifully in Chalk....