William Smith (1769-1839) is often referred to as the "Father of English Geology" - a title bestowed on him by The Geological Society, which at first had been reluctant to embrace his vision.
The organisation's first members were drawn from the metropolitan elite, and they took a rather disdainful view of the blacksmith's son turned surveyor.
But the big landowners knew his worth. They brought Smith in to help them maximise the worth of their estates - to drain land, to improve the soil, to find building stone, and, above all, to find coal.
The Geological Society of London was at first disdainful towards the West Country surveyor
It is this work that would have brought him into contact with the rocks and with the fossils that would lead him to his greatest scientific contribution.
John Henry explained: "The concept which enabled him to do the mapping and that drove him along almost obsessively was this realisation that specific fossils were unique to a specific stratum, and that you knew where you were in a sequence if you could see what the fossils were. That was the breakthrough. People had been collecting them for a long time and naming them in the Linnaean way, but without any real idea that they were in a sequence. But Smith knew it."
Today, it is called the "principle of faunal succession", and this idea holds that because fossils succeed one another in order, rocks containing similar fossils are similar in age.
This principle has enabled scientists to construct the geological timescale by which the relative ages of rocks can be measured, and thereby understand the history of the Earth.
No wonder Simon Winchester called his 2001 book about William Smith, The Map that Changed the World.
Monday, 23 March, is Smith's birth date.
Sir David Attenborough is going to unveil a plaque at Smith's former residence at 15 Buckingham Street on London's Embankment.
From June 4, 2012, to Feb 28, 2013, of the 5914 neonates enrolled, information about IQ and breastfeeding duration was available for 3493 participants. In the crude and adjusted analyses, the durations of total breastfeeding and predominant breastfeeding (breastfeeding as the main form of nutrition with some other foods) were positively associated with IQ, educational attainment, and income. We identified dose-response associations with breastfeeding duration for IQ and educational attainment. In the confounder-adjusted analysis, participants who were breastfed for 12 months or more had higher IQ scores (difference of 3·76 points, 95% CI 2·20–5·33), more years of education (0·91 years, 0·42–1·40), and higher monthly incomes (341·0 Brazilian reals, 93·8–588·3) than did those who were breastfed for less than 1 month. The results of our mediation analysis suggested that IQ was responsible for 72% of the effect on income.
Interpretation
Breastfeeding is associated with improved performance in intelligence tests 30 years later, and might have an important effect in real life, by increasing educational attainment and income in adulthood.
