Geology, the study of the structure and formation of the Earth, is the baby of all the other sciences. Until comparatively recently, scholars paid little attention to rocks and rock formations. Indeed, the word geology only appeared in the English language in 1735 and took another seventy or so years to enter general usage. Geology made its first appearance in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (大英百科全书) in the 1810 edition. Despite this inclusion, the science of geology remained largely ignored until much later in the century.

Nowadays the mystery of the Earth and its formation fascinates geologists across the world. However, few people know that the whole modern discipline of geology and the way we look at our world owes its inspiration to a single man with an extraordinary passion for landscape and rocks. That man was William Smith, who was born in 1769 in the small village of Churchill in the south of England.

From an early age William showed a strong interest in the world about him and asked questions about the landscape that no one could properly answer. As a young boy William picked up strange-looking stones that lay in the fields around his home and felt that some of the most common patterns in these stones looked like animals found living in the sea. He asked the men of knowledge and science in the district how these stones came to find themselves here. No one, it seemed, had answers to his questions or even thought it remotely interesting to ask the questions in the first place.

A chance meeting with a man called Edward Webb led to William being offered a position to work down the mines. He came to realise that different types of rock lay at different levels as he went deeper underground. This led William to suggest that older rocks lay deeper than newer rocks.

Armed with his new found insight into the birth of rocks, William walked the length and breadth of Great Britain with the intention of surveying and categorising all the wonderfully different types of rocks that he found. It took William many years of frustration and hardship to draw a huge map of Great Britain by hand. The map, on display today at Burlington House in London, uses beautiful colours to show every layer of rock below in the most precise detail. Unique in its time, William’s map gave birth to every geological survey that we take for granted in the world today.