The Map That Changed the World (34 page)

And there were dark rumors about the stone selection committee—its members were accused, obliquely, of having merely junketed around the countryside, during a pleasant summer, at the taxpayers’ expense, and not applying themselves properly to what was a profoundly serious business. It was Sir Henry de la Beche who took the brunt of public criticism. He had to testify before two select committees that were established specifically to make sure no public buildings ever suffered so embarrassing a fate again. No one seems to have blamed William Smith for anything: His involvement, said his admirers and detractors alike, was more of a sinecure for an honored ancient. Few had expected he would perform any kind of actual task on the committee, useful or otherwise.

I
n the years since Barry and Pugin built their masterpiece, the Palace of Westminster has suffered heroically from the capital’s pollution, and further committees have recommended all manner of replacement stones in the hope that some might cheat the acid rainfall. These days the Commons building has been wholly rebuilt, using another limestone entirely—the warm, honey-colored semioolitic limestone from the Middle Jurassic of Lincolnshire, known as Clipsham stone.

Smith would have found the ironies delectable: first that he
managed to escape the opprobrium of the initial choice of a rock from the gloomy and fossil-free Permian; and second, that in the end it was his most favored horizon—the Jurassic oolitic formation for which he and his great map are best known—that was used to face his country’s best-known public building. Once again, the allure of the lively and warm shallow seas of Middle England’s Middle Jurassic proved inescapable and irresistible.

W
illiam Smith set out for Birmingham for the next British Association meeting the following August. He had spent the previous week in Oxfordshire, wandering through a number of great gardens—which John Phillips points out were spread across basement rocks of both between the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. By this point Phillips seems to have become more than a little carried away by romantic notions about his elderly uncle’s enduring interests—and has him placed here in summertime Oxfordshire, yet again pondering the great questions about Mesozoic stratification. One has to doubt it. More than likely this stooped, deaf, rheumatic old man was taking time just to smell the roses, and to keep out the possibility of a late summer chill.

This he did not manage. His coach stopped in Northampton, and as he was in no great hurry, he decided to put up for a few days with an old friend named George Baker. He caught a cold, suspected nothing, and went to bed. But the cold settled on his lungs, and it worsened. Doctors were called. John Phillips, already in Birmingham for the meeting, was summoned, and arrived in Northampton on the morning of Tuesday, August 27. There was little he could do. Uncomplaining or unknowing, William Smith died shortly after ten o’clock on the following night.

He was buried nearby, in Saint Peter’s Church. There are a number of memorials—the most poignant, with the longest and
most erudite eulogy, stands in Saint Peter’s. It is a marble column, and it is topped, quite appropriately, with a copy of a bust by Matthew Noble. It was an appropriate choice indeed, since the sculptor was a man Smith had met and befriended in Hackness, the Yorkshire village where, eight years before, his life had changed so much for the better, and public recognition of his astonishing talents got properly under way.

Smith’s own grave outside the church is topped by a massive block of sandstone, now so corroded that if there was any inscription, it is quite illegible. The original of Noble’s bust of Smith stands in the museum in Oxford, near others of Buckland, Huxley, and Charles Darwin; there is another copy in the Geological Society, close to one of his nemesis, George Greenough. There is a tall monument standing beside the country bus shelter on the green in the little village of Churchill, where he was born; and a cul-de-sac of modern houses nearby has been named William Smith Close. There is a signpost pointing to Rugborne Farm, which Smith himself thought of as the birthplace of the science he created. There is a plaque on Joseph Townsend’s house in Bath, where the table of the strata was dictated. There is another on the house at Tucking Mill—though as it happens, and typically for the memory of this often-forgotten, often-overlooked man, it is on the wrong house, and nobody has made any serious moves to try to shift it. And in the Geological Society there is a portrait. Beneath it, within the frame, there is a cut-out circle containing a lock of his hair, gray and curled, and apparently snipped off as he lay in the George Baker’s upstairs bedroom on the evening he died.

Overlooking this vaguely macabre memorial is a long marble staircase, and high up on the wall beside it, a pair of pale blue curtains. Behind these curtains, if anyone can be found to pull the tasseled cord to part them, is the greatest of all memorials—the very map that William Smith created, all by himself, in a labor of love that lasted for fifteen years, or, in truth, for all his life.

Normally the map remains hidden from view, to keep it shielded from the light. The blue velvet curtains remain pulled firmly shut. The hundreds who pass by each day seldom glance up at it—and even if they do, few of them ever ask to see it, and fewer still ever stop to wonder who created it, and why, and exactly how.

From F. M. Gradstein and J. Ogg, “A Phanerozoic Time Scale,”
Episodes
19, nos. 1 & 2 (1996).

Ammonite: A mollusk
, with a shell coiled in on itself, containing folded internal compartment walls, living between the Devonian and Upper Cretaceous.

Annelid:
A classic type of worm, having a long tubular body composed of a large number of rings.

Annularia:
Needle-shaped leaves of the horsetail plant
Calamites
that are arranged in rosette-like whorls. (The leaf whorls are named separately from the stems, which are actually called
Calamites
and are a common fossil.

Anthracite:
A hard, jet black, metallic-looking flammable
rock
that is the highest-ranking coal, the only version that can rightly be considered properly
metamorphic.

Anthracosia:
Nonmarine
bivalve
common in certian horizons in the British Carboniferous
Coal Measures
, and a useful stratigraphic indicator.

Arenaceous:
Sandy, composed of sand grains.

Argillaceous: Rock
s or
sediment
s that are composed chiefly of
clay
and clay minerals.

Arthropod:
The largest phylum in the animal kingdom, with species that inhabit all kinds of environment: Typically they have segmented bodies, jointed appendages, and a hard carapace or exoskeleton. Insects and
trilobite
s are classic arthropods.

Ashlar:
A hewn stone, cut into flat slabs, used for facing buildings.

Asteroceras:
A classic Lower Jurassic
ammonite
, with an attractively ridged
outer shell, common in the Lias of Yorkshire and elsewhere in northern England.

Batch:
Waste pile from a Somerset coal mine

Bedding plane:
The surface that divides one layer in a
sediment
from another, usually marked by a change in color, composition, or texture.

Belemnite:
The hard, fossilized calcitic guard, usually pencil-shaped, that is often the only preserved part of a squidlike
cephalopod.

Bituminous coal:
The most common form of
coal
, softer and less pure than
anthracite.

Bivalve:
An aquatic
mollusk
, frequently fossilized, that has two calcareous shells that enclose the living parts of the animal.

Brachiopod:
Solitary, bilaterally symmetrical
bivalve
marine invertebrate.

Brash:
Loose broken rock forming the highest stratum beneath the soil of certain districts. Cornbrash, brashice. Perhaps a corrupt form of the French
brèche
.

Carboniferous limestone:
Fossil-rich marine
limestone
laid down in the Carboniferous era, forming much of the characteristic landscape of the western Pennine Hills and northern Somerset.

Carstone:
A brown
sandstone
with an interstitial cement of
limonite.

Cephalopod:
The most complex and highly organized class of
mollusks
(with a distinct tentacled head), which include the fossil
ammonites
and the modern squids, octopuses, and pearly nautilus.

Cirripede:
A low class of
crustacean
, such as a barnacle.

Chalk:
A soft, porous, and fine-grained
limestone,
characteristically white in color, most memorably found in the cliffs of southern Kent—“the white cliffs of Dover.”

Chert:
A form of quartz, very finely crystalline, that often forms irregular nodules in other
sediments.

Chronostratigraphy:
A geological time scale that uses fixed and internationally defined standard reference points.

Clay:
A
sediment
defined as having particles less than four microns in diameter.

Clunch Clay:
William Smith’s somewhat inelegant—and quickly replaced—name for what is now called the Oxford Clay.

Coal:
A combustible organic
sedimentary
rock formed of compressed decomposed plant remains.

Coal measures:
A Western European
stratigraphic
term used for the
rock
s of the Upper Carboniferous.

Coelacanth:
A type of bony fish thought to have been extinct for fifty million years before the discovery of a living specimen, classified as
Latimeria chalumnae
, off the South African coast in 1938.

Coprolite:
Fossilized animal droppings.

Coral Rag:
Coarse-grained rubbly limestone—one of the oldest building stones used in Oxford and the surrounding villages. William Smith’s name for the formation now included in the Corallian.

Cornbrash:
William Smith’s formation name, taken from Wiltshire dialect, for a coarse, shelly limestone of the Great Oolite that disintegrates and breaks up easily, providing soils ideal for growing corn. See also
brash
.

Crinoid:
A class of
echinoid
comprising the stalked sea lilies and feather stars.

Crust:
The outermost solid layer of the earth, separated from the underlying
mantle
by the so-called Mohorovicic Discontinuity.

Cycad:
One of the more important fossil floras of the Mesozoic, resembling small palm trees.

Cyclothem:
A recurring sequence of beds found in many
sedimentary rock
s, notably in the Upper Carboniferous, in coal-rich series.

Dip:
The angle in degrees between the horizontal and any inclined geological feature, most usually the
bedding plane
of a series of
sediment
s.

Dislocations:
Any surface across which there is a loss of continuity—for example, a
sediment
interrupted by a
fault.

Drift:
Superficial geological material in a landscape, often brought by ice or glacial meltwater. The term is used in geological mapping, and is distinguished from
solid.

Echinoid:
The class of
echinoid
to which sea urchins and sand dollars belong.

Estwing:
Noted American manufacturer, based in Rockford, Illinois, of geological and other hammers.

Facies:
The combined
lithological
and
paleontological
characteristics of a
sediment
from which it is usually possible to infer the environmental conditions at the time of deposition.

Fault:
A fracture in a geological structure, caused by movement and shear across a surface, resulting in displacement.

Flint:
A microcrystalline form of silica found usually in
chalk
, which in other
sediment
s is called
chert.

Fool’s gold:
Iron pyrite, usually in cubic crystals that have the appearance of yellow metal.

Forest Marble:
An argillaceous laminated shelly limestone in the Great Oolite Series, which when polished passes as marble. Named by William Smith after the Forest of Wychwood, which in his time extended over a much greater area.

Fossil:
Originally an adjective meaning “ancient” now a noun used to denote the preserved remains or evidence, usually found in
rock
s, of previous organic life.

Friable:
Property of a
rock
that can be disintegrated by the slightest pressure, such as that between two fingers.

Freestone:
A fine-grained
rock
that can be cut and sawn with little risk of fracturing.

Fuller’s Earth:
Term used either for the
montmorillonite
clay employed in the wool industry to remove lanolin or in stratigraphy to define an upper part of the Middle Jurassic in southern England.

Gastropod:
A
mollusk
with a single coiled shell and a foot, the anterior part of which is developed into a head.

Genus:
A
taxonomic
term, low in rank (between Family and Species), and usually consisting of closely related species.

Geology:
The study of the solid part of a planet.

Geotherm:
The variation of a temperature with depth in the earth.

Gondwana:
Former southern supercontinent.

Goniometer:
An instrument for measuring the angles between the faces of crystals.

Graptolite:
A tubelike creature, with branched extensions, found in many
shales
and
slates
of Ordovician and Silurian age.

Gymnosperm:
Plants—frequently found fossilized in Carboniferous
rock
s—with their seeds held in cones, as with cycads and ferns.

Hercynian:
A term still occasionally in use for a Permo-Triassic
orogenic
episode; generally called the
Variscan.

Horsetail:
A type of fern commonly found in Carboniferous
rock
s.

Ichthyosaur:
A fishlike marine reptile, becoming extinct in the Middle Cretaceous.

Igneous:
One of three primary
rock
types found in Earth’s
crust
(see also
metamorphic
,
sedimentary
), igneous
rock
s have solidified from molten
magma
generated deep within the planet.

Iron pyrite:
A metallic-looking sulfide of iron, known jocularly as
fool’s gold.

Kellaway’s Beds:
Richly fossiliferous calcareous clay and sandstone beds forming the basement of the Oxford Clay, and resting directly on the
cornbrash
. Smith’s term for it was “Kelloway’s Stone.”

Laurasia:
Former northern supercontinent.

Lepidodendron:
A tree, commonly found fossilized in Carboniferous
coal
deposits, notable for its size—up to one hundred feet tall—and scaly bark.

Lias:
Somerset quarryman’s term, from either the pronunciation of the word “layers” or the French for a kind of
limestone
, which now applies to a period of the Lower Jurassic.

Lignite:
Low-grade brown-black
coal
.

Limestone:
A
sedimentary rock
of which the principal ingredient, from either shelly remains or precipitates, is calcium carbonate.

Limonite:
A yellow-brown inferior iron ore, often found in large earthy masses in a variety of forms.

Lingula:
A type of
brachiopod
, still extant, but known from as far back as the Cambrian.

Lithology:
A description of the major macroscopic features of a type of
rock
—particularly texture, color, and composition.

Magma:
A molten fluid of complex silicates and metals formed within the
crust
or upper
mantle
of the earth, which may be extruded by volcanic eruptions or other
igneous
activity to form solid and consolidated rocks.

Magnesian limestone:
A
limestone
in which some ten percent of the calcium carbonate has been replaced by a magnesium carbonate, resulting in a much denser and harder
lithology.

Mantle:
The zone in the earth between the hard crust and the liquid metallic core.

Marlstone:
A half-formed
argillaceous limestone
, with a large proportion of
clay
, microfossils, and relic ooze.

Metamorphic:
One of the three basic
rock
types (see also
sedimentary
and
igneous)
in which pressure, temperature, and time have greatly deformed and recrystallized the original.

Millstone Grit:
A coarse
sandstone
, found in the Carboniferous of Britain, much used for building in the English North.

Mollusk:
A phylum of animals with a fleshy body usually surrounded by a calcareous shell or shells.

Montmorillonite:
See also
smectite
. A sheet silicate mineral, found in some
clays
(most notably
fuller’s earth
) and widely used for its absorptive powers.

Mosaic theory:
Used to describe the general belief among early geologists in divine creation of the earth, and in the occurrence of the
Noachian
flood, or Deluge.

Neptunism:
A theory, popularized by
Werner
, which held that all
rock
s were precipitates from a primordial ocean.

Noachian:
Pertaining to Noah, and to the persistent belief among nineteenth century geologists that the Flood with which he was associated had profound and global geological significance.

Oolite:
A common
limestone
composed primarily of tiny spherical accretions of calcium carbonate around a quartz core.

Orogeny:
A period of
crustal
compression that results in mountain-building and consequent major changes in geological conditions.

Ostrea:
The oyster.

Outcrop:
That part of a
rock
unit that is exposed at the earth’s surface.