The Map That Changed the World (13 page)

The day of that visit to the thousand-year-old minster goes unrecorded, by Palmer, by Perkins, and by the historians of the
great church. Smith himself makes the briefest mention—“from the top of York Minster I could see that the Wolds contained chalk in their contour”—a remark that allows what Roger Osborne suggests to sound more than plausible. It further allows his solid and reliably old-fashioned Mr. Samborne Palmer to write in his supposed diary that for this reason, that unremembered day on the tower of the greatest church in northern England, remains the birthday of the science of stratigraphy. We do not know the precise date; but we do know that the event took place, and that, with Smith at last revealing his theories to two members of the more general public, the science he had for months been on the brink of creating was now announced, and so now existed.

The word
stratigraphy
itself was not to appear in print for another seventy years, and that in a description of Smith’s own work. The word
stratigraphical
, however, was to appear a good deal sooner—in 1817, in fact—and it did so as the title of a book by Smith, in which he expatiated on the ideas he first conceived in High Littleton, which possibly—just possibly—he first made public on that cool and windy late summer’s day, two hundred feet on top of the great cathedral in the city of York.

A
nd here in the narrative certain fact takes over once again from supposition. The diaries and the memoirs offer fragments from the journey. The trio made a few more northward miles, with Smith now fully confident of his thesis and eagerly and loudly proclaiming his observations and thoughts to all who would listen. His diary interweaves as diaries do the trivial with the profound. He notes how they dined on “pine-apples at the Black Swan,” but that when they left town next morning, how geologically similar were the Hambleton Hills to the Cotswolds, three hundred miles back to the southwest; how there were cliffs of the familiar red marl near Thirsk; how there was a yellow limestone lying unconformably above the coal at Ferryhill and
Piercebridge; and yet how in Harrogate, newly opened as a fashionable spa, Dr. Perkins was persuaded to take “a nauseous draft of sulphur-water as we sat in the chaise.”

By the end of September the party was back in Bath, and Smith, invigorated and brimming with ideas, settled himself down to the making of the canal. However, matters did not turn out exactly as he had hoped. The engineering work turned out to be very trying, his masters proved exacting, and though by the very nature of his work he was suffused with the geology of the region, he found he had no time to think, to assemble the broader picture. What he had hoped would be an intellectually stimulating time he found to be frustrating. He was obliged, he wrote, to suspend temporarily “my much wished-for opportunity…to make an accurate delineation of the stratification throughout England.”

However, he was able to mitigate what he thought of as his stratigraphical impotence with the pleasures of burgeoning economic success. Within months of coming back from his tour, he left his rooms at Rugborne Farm and took a lease on the central house in a small and elegant Georgian crescent on the hills just outside and overlooking the city of Bath itself. He was now being paid well—a guinea a day plus traveling expenses—and he had few outgoings and no family to support. He was able to dress as befitted a gentleman of the time, and to engage in a modest round of social events—though so far as can be gathered from his diaries, he tended to restrict himself to the gentleman-scientists of the town, the divines and the antiquaries and the men of odd enthusiasms.

He had no eye for art, no ear for music, he was not socially confident enough to venture to the salons and the tearooms, and he resisted all temptation to become a fop, a dandy, or a dilettante. He was an engineer, a surveyor, a man of minerals and, as he saw it, of great scientific ideas. He was content simply to work with the canal excavators, who called at his house each day in response to advertisements he had placed in the
Bath Chronicle
,
and to travel with them to superintend the painstaking, inch-by-inch digging of the works; and he was then happy to come home and gaze from his windows at a prospect that clearly pleased:

The city of Bath is of course very proud to have had William Smith as a resident, and in 1926 it unveiled a plaque to him. Local worthies explained why the city had so eminently suited him. “Of all the countries with which I am acquainted, no one is so interesting to the geologist as the vicinity of Bath, because in no other are so many strata exposed to view,” said one. And another:

Stimulating and fashionable though the city might be, Smith evidently chafed—either at the daily commute by horseback to the digging sites, or because of a more general longing for the rural life to which he was so accustomed. With a year of leasing the house in Cottage Crescent
*
he had taken semipermanent
rooms in the old Swan Inn at Dunkerton, which is right on the route of the canal (and also where the Roman road, the Fosse Way, crosses the canal’s route; and where the new cuttings revealed a Jurassic passage, the transition from the Lias in the west of the village, to the inferior oolite, and the limestones of which all Bath is made).

And then, eighteen months or so later still, the restless Mr. Smith moved yet again. For sixteen hundred pounds—three hundred paid as cash, the rest borrowed on a mortgage that was to have the direst of consequences for him many years down the line—he bought his first-ever property, a small and exceptionally pretty estate known as the Tucking Mill.

There has been some confusion as to exactly which house it was he bought. The two-story Tucking Mill Cottage, with its unusual Gothic sash windows, that stands on the narrow, leafy
road between Midford and Monkton Combe—and that has a memorial tablet in its front wall saying that Smith once lived there—seems not to be it. Instead, shrouded by trees to the east of this house is a much plainer and more severe structure, the Tucking Mill House. A tiny brook separates the two properties and, as it happens, this same brook divides two parishes—the one to the west where the tableted cottage stands is the parish of South Stoke, while that with the unmarked, plainer house is the parish of Monkton Combe. And a search of the tax returns shows that it was property in the Monkton Combe parish, owned by a Mr. E. Candler, that Smith bought in March 1798. He must, therefore, have owned the house. A little local controversy still simmers, suggesting that the plaque be moved, in satisfaction of historical accuracy, if not necessarily in the interests of local real estate prices.

Tucking Mill—currently wrongly identified (by a plaque, still visible at the bottom right hand of the house) as Smith’s home.

In any event it could hardly be more appropriate than for Smith to live in a Tucking Mill.
Tucking
is the old word for “fulling,” which is the process whereby wool is scoured, beaten, and cleansed of the lanolin grease with which sheep make themselves warm and waterproof. The substance used to wash the raw wool is to be found, uniquely, in the very Jurassic strata that Smith was slicing through with his canal—a clay, found in the
Middle Jurassic between the inferior and the great oolites, and known as fuller’s earth. It is a strange claylike rock, rich in a hydrous aluminum silicate mineral known as smectite, which happens to have the ability to absorb oil. To live in a house that is named after a process in which geology plays an essential part brings a fine symmetry to William Smith’s living condition, and one that almost certainly contributed to his eagerness to buy the house in the first place.

Tucking Mill House, nearby, was in fact where William Smith lived.

Whether it was a wise and prudent decision he would not know for more than twenty years. Yet, as the eighteenth century was coming to a close, Smith had at least all the outward trappings of gentlemanly achievement. He had an excellent job, a group of admiring and influential friends, and now at last he had an elegant house with a small lake, a waterfall, and seventeen acres of well-laid-out grounds.

He was able to use it as his headquarters—not merely for his work but to house the collection that was now fast becoming central to all his activities, and his employment of which is central to the modern memory of him. Tucking Mill House is where William Smith set aside a room, and had carpenters build for him glass-fronted cabinets, so that he could house, collate, catalog, organize, and display his growing collection, from the rocks around him locally, and from his travels far and wide, of fossils.

The unique arrangements of fossils, as he had first realized as he emerged from the collieries at High Littleton, were what enabled him to tell one stratum from another. It was the arrangements of fossils that would empower him to predict what was underground where, and to make a map of it all. In all his searches to come, fossils would be the key.

Parkinsonia parkinsoni

I
n eighteenth-century Britain it was a mark of refinement and impeccable good taste to own and display a collection of fossils. Not only were the objects themselves rare and beautiful, well worthy of display in specially constructed glass cabinets; the simple possession of them hinted at a thirst for knowledge, an awareness of natural philosophy, a sympathetic understanding of the mysterious processes of the earth. And gradually it was from within the world of fossil hunting—a world that would soon be inhabited most prominently by William Smith—that the ideas emerged that would eventually lead Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace to reach their profound conclusions about the origins of species.

Perhaps for the British
boulevardier
in the eighteenth century, the interest in fossils was for their beauty and rarity, little more. The items, be they small or large, plant or animal, or merely the mysterious results of the fossil-making “plastic force,” would be displayed with reverence, handled with delicacy, viewed with awe. Collectors of fine jade today are a fair compar
ison with those of fossils two centuries ago—in that they are proud and protective, given to learning and (usually) the possession of some social standing. The clear and important difference is that the intricacies of objects made of jade are the artifice of human beings, while the strangely beautiful shapes and marks that delineate a fossil are the evidence—if ever in eighteenth-century Britain there was agreement on this matter—of the work of God.

The
Dictionary of National Biography
records the occurrence of the plural word
fossils
293 times, and 177 prominent men and women from British history are listed as having had an interest in, or more likely a collection of, such treasures. Most of the listed collectors appear to have lived between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Few people whose lives are otherwise worthy of recording seem to have collected fossils before 1700; and as with postage stamps and coins, few contemporary amateur fossilists will admit to a mania for collecting them.

Indeed the fashion—for that is all it was, a fashion—began to die in mid-Victorian times. The spread of travel and a growing amazement with the outside world suddenly began to make anthropological souvenirs more valued as icons than dirt-encrusted items from earth history. All of a sudden drawing rooms became places to record and show off the material rewards of journeying through space, rather than the dusty and mysterious objects that came from journeying through time. What had hitherto been a signifier of drawing-room decorum seemed overnight to become the pastime of the dull, and then steadily to evolve into what amateur paleontology is now: no more than the mark of the nerd.

There is much to learn from the
DNB
about the nature and the habits of onetime fossil collectors. The 177 entries show the typical collector of the time to have had certain outward similarities of background, knowledge, and social standing. Most of them—this being the less sexually enlightened end of the nine
teenth century—happened to be men, although by chance it was a young Dorset woman who was perhaps the most famous fossil collector of them all.

Mary Anning was thirty years younger than William Smith, and there is no record that the pair ever met—but her birthplace and scene of all her paleontological triumphs, the small seaside town of Lyme Regis, evidently interested Smith: In one of his notebooks there is a rough sketch-map of the Lower Jurassic sea-cliffs there, dated 1794—five years before Mary Anning was born.

Her life was short indeed, even by the standards of the day—and yet the fact that she survived a lightning strike (which killed three adults) when she was a year old always lent locals a suspicion that hers would be an eccentric and furious one. Most of it she spent carefully prying choice specimens of fossil creatures from the Lias cliffs near her home. Her father had taught her something of fossil gathering, since his own business was making the very cabinets in which the well-heeled local collectors would keep their specimens. Her best-known find is the original ichthyosaur, a massive confection of shiny brown bones she first disposed of to the duke of Buckingham, which is now carefully reconstructed in London’s Natural History Museum. She was only twelve when she found it, only twenty-two when she discovered a juvenile specimen of the huge marine reptile later
named a plesiosaur,
*
and not yet thirty when she found a near-perfect specimen of the bird progenitor, the pterodactyl, and sent it off to Oxford.

A fossil ichthyosaur.

For a while this untutored young woman made a sizable income, either by selling fossils to visitors—for whom Lyme Regis is still a major tourist center today—or leading would-be collectors to the cliffs to find specimens for themselves. The names of her customers are like a roll call of the leading geologists—of the day—William Conybeare, Sir Henry de la Beche (who lived nearby), Dean William Buckland. But slowly the popular craze for collecting began to wane, and by 1847, when Mary Anning died at the age of forty-eight of breast cancer, she had been all but forgotten and had passed into obscurity.

De la Beche, who went on to become the first director of the British Geological Survey, drew a fanciful cartoon for her, showing what Dorset might have looked like in the Middle Jurassic, with enormous and rather genial-seeming monsters rising from the steaming deeps. The drawing became rather popular, and Sir Henry made sure that all the proceeds went to Mary, to help this modest heroine of the science as her fortunes began to decline.

A fossil plesiosaur.

There was another woman geologist and collector whose name does not figure in the existing DNB, but should.
*
She was Etheldred Bennett, a great-granddaughter of a seventeenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury. She was born in 1776, and she definitely met William Smith—indeed, gave him a piece of the well-known Tisbury coral, of which she was England’s best-known collector. She made a specialty of exploring the Middle Cretaceous upper greensand in the Vale of Wardour, in Wiltshire: As a relative wrote, “while other ladies of her time were doing needlepoint and chattering over their cups of India tea, she became competent at systematic scientific research, as well as the vigorous fieldwork of fossil hunting.” She had a monograph privately printed:
A Catalogue of the Organic Remains of the County of Wilts
. All evidence suggests she died a maiden aunt; her family insisted that one of the specimens later placed in her collection, nestled among her sponges and her corals, and thanks presumably to a cooperative undertaker, was her own heart, unbroken but quite petrified—transformed to resemble a stone, as a geologist’s heart perhaps deserves to be.

Most amateur collectors were comfortably established, for fossil collecting was widely seen as a fashion for gentlemen of leisure. Men like, for example, the redoubtable Sir John St. Aubyn, fifth baronet, sheriff of Cornwall until his death in 1839, a grand master of the Freemasons, and a man who augmented his immense collection of minerals by buying for one hundred pounds the entire fossil collection of the remarkable Richard Greene of Lichfield. Greene, so far as we know, was a like-minded swell who had amassed (to the approval of his friend and relative Samuel Johnson) a houseful of “coins, crucifixes, watches, minerals, orreries, deeds and manuscripts, missals, muskets, and specimens of armour,” as well as hundreds of ancient shells, graptolite etchings, and ammonites made of iron pyrite.

Then there was, at almost exactly the same time, the East India Company’s naval officer, London banker and magnificently named Searles Valentine Wood the Elder, whose curiosity was first stirred while he was convalescing in Norfolk, but who, once recovered, embarked on a lifelong study of the fossil mollusks to be found in the construction sites of London. He was a member of the little-known body the London Clay Club, and wrote book after book on his enormous collection of fossil bivalves, which he eventually donated to the British Museum. The Natural History Museum in South Kensington, where they rest today, is replete with the evidence of a century’s worth of enthusiasms like Valentine’s—collection after collection, testimony to the value of the amateur scientists who so flourished in this remarkable time in British history.

Many of the most assiduous fossilists were what used to be called “divines”—a curious happenstance, considering the assault that any intelligent understanding of fossils would later have on divinity’s most firmly held notions, like the Creation and the Flood. The Reverend Thomas Lewis of Ross-on-Wye is characteristic of the type: He is proud enough to offer a self-description—“geologist and antiquary”—rather than to note his formal position as vicar of Bridstow. His name may be forgotten by the curacy, but it is remembered in at least three Silurian fossil species that were named after him, all of them appropriately worthy (as may befit a clergyman) and rather dull.

Many of the priestly collectors found in fossil hunting a much-needed intellectual stimulus, a relief from the unengaging topics that normally fill a parson’s life. The Reverend George Young, from the Scottish village of Coxiedean, was a theologian attracted to the mysteries of fossils. He had been taught by John Playfair, one of the giants of early academic geology, and he came to prominence in 1819 with his discovery, in Yorkshire, of a gigantic reptile ichthyosaur since identified as
Leptopterygius acutirostris
.

Though the find brought the enthusiastic Presbyterian minis
ter some national fame—for a while he was held in almost the same esteem as Mary Anning—it equally confronted him with an interesting challenge, an acute mental and moral dilemma. It forced him to ponder two possibilities that his religious beliefs sternly discountenanced: animal extinction on the one hand (there were no living ichthyosaurs—and so this particular species must have vanished), and animal evolution on the other (the crocodiles and dolphins to which this beast appeared to have been related were much less primitive than this—and so some advances must have taken place over time; the less fit and able must have been weeded out and left behind to die). Consideration of either of these possibilities was a heresy and an anathema to contemporary followers of the Bible, who regarded the great book (as do fundamentalists today) as nothing less than a documentary history of the planet.

The Reverend Young was forced in consequence to engage in some interesting spiritual gymnastics to come to terms with the problem. He eventually committed his conclusions to paper in 1840 in a book with what might be considered the somewhat contradictory title
Scriptural Geology
. The science he advanced in it was not overendowed with logic: The ichthyosaur he had found was not extinct, he declared, because a living specimen would probably be found sooner or later: “…when the seas and large rivers of our globe shall have been more fully explored, many animals may be brought to knowledge of the naturalist, which at present are known only in the state of fossils.” (It would have amused Mr. Young greatly had he been alive at Christmas 1938, when the first coelacanth was found on the deck of a trawler newly come ashore in South Africa. He would doubtless have thought this vindicated his otherwise dreamily unscientific view.)