The Map That Changed the World (35 page)

Overburden:
Any loose material that overlies bedrock.

Paleogeography:
The reconstruction, inferred from geological evidence, of the former physical geography of the earth.

Paleontology:
The study of fossil flora and fauna, in the attempt to infer both the age and relative age of the
sediment
s in which the fossils appear, and gauge the nature of the contemporaneous environment.

Pangea:
A supercontinent that existed (according to most theories) for some forty million years from the late Permian to the Triassic. It was, according to these same theorists, surrounded by a superocean, the Panthalassa.

Pantograph:
A jointed parallelogram of slender rods, used by surveyors for copying diagrams and plans on the same (or on a different scale).

Peat:
A thick organic soil deposit that, if dried, is flammable, burning with a characteristic sweet smell. In some senses regarded as a very primitive form of
lignite,
itself a low-grade
coal.

Petrifaction:
One process of making a fossil, in which chemical precipitates are deposited within the porous structure of the shell or other hard parts of an organism.

Phyllosilicate:
A group of silicates with crystal structures arranged in large sheets, common in many
argillaceous
and low-grade
metamorphic rock
s.

Phylum:
The second highest
taxonomic
classification, one of the main divisions of animal and plant kingdoms.

Plane table:
A surveyor’s instrument, used in conjunction with a sighting glass, for marking the relative positions of observed structures and the angles between them.

Plesiosaur:
A large aquatic reptile, in appearance like (as William Buckland put it) “a snake strung through a turtle,” common in the Jurassic.

Plutonism:
The theory, advanced by Hutton, that held that almost all
rock
s originated as a result of heat and melting, rose from the
mantle
to form new land, only to decay and be regenerated.

Portland Stone:
An Upper Jurassic
mollusk
-rich
limestone
, commonly used for building the grander structures and monument in the large British cities.

Pterodactyl:
A
fossil
reptile found in Jurassic and Cretaceous
sediment
s, noted for its large jaw and membrane attached to the long fourth digit of its forelimb, enabling it to fly.

Quarry sap:
The trace liquids found in some
freestone
s, which, on freezing, allow the
rock
to be split along its
bedding plane
s.

Radiometry:
A common means of determining the age of
rock
s by measuring the relative amounts of “parent” and “daughter” isotopes caused in radioactive decay, the most common pairings being potassiumargon, rubidium-strontium, and samarium-neodymium

Red Marl:
Smith’s name for the Keuper Marl, which consists of red fine-grained siltstones forming the upper part of the Trias.

Rock:
A consolidated or unconsolidated aggregation of mineral or organic matter, formed either by the accretion (
sedimentary rock
s) of grains or sediments, by the crystallization (
igneous rock
s) of molten material, or by the alteration (
metamorphic rock
s) of existing
rock
s under pressure and heat.

Sandstone:
A
sedimentary rock
composed of sand-size particles of silicates bound together by a cement that may be carbonate

Seat earth:
A
fossil
soil, often with plant rootlets still in place, often found immediately beneath a layer of
coal.

Sediment:
Solid material—organic and inorganic—that has settled from suspension in a liquid, usually water.

Sedimentary:
Consolidated
sediment
s, usually with organized into
strata
or with
bedding
characteristics.

Seismic:
Concerned with the vibration of the earth, whether naturally or artificially induced. Pertaining to earthquakes and crustal movement.

Shale:
An
argillaceous rock,
noted for its thin and well-defined laminations.

Siltstone:
A consolidated silt, or a
clay
like
rock
with particles measuring larger than four microns.

Slate:
A low-grade
metamorphic
rock, usually
argillaceous
, and that, because of the extremes of pressure and temperature to which it has been subjected, has well-defined cleavage and
bedding planes.

Smectite:
The
montmorillonite
group of clay minerals, useful for leaching oil from wool.

Solid:
Term used in geological cartography to describe the bedrock, and opposed to the superficial and often glacially derived material, known as
drift.

Stratification:
The layered or bedded arrangement of
rock
s, usually but not uniquely found in
sedimentary
deposits. There can be stratified lava flows and
metamorphic rocks.

Stratum (pl. strata):
A defined layer of
sedimentary rock
, usually separated from other beds above and below by
bedding planes.

Striations:
Small marks and lines, frequently parallel, etched into a solid surface by some external—often glacial—force.

Strike:
The direction taken by a structural surface—most usually a
bedding plane
, and also a
fault
—as it intersects the horizontal. Strike is at ninety degrees to the direction of
dip.

Stromatolite:
A cumbersome fossiliferous mass of an evidently funguslike former nature.

Taxonomy:
The classification of plants of animals. The main taxa, in
descending order, are kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.

Tectonic:
Used in reference to the formation of a major earth structure, usually involving deformation or collision.

Terebratulid:
Order of small brachiopods first appearing in the Devonian, common in the Jurassic, and known in English rural areas as lamp shells.

Tertiary:
One of the great and more recent divisions of the geological time scale, which includes the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene and Pliocene; hence
Tertiaries
, rocks laid down or created—like
Tertiary basalts
—during this period.

Tethys:
The former ocean that broadly separated the two great Mesozoic supercontinental landmasses of
Gondwana
and
Laurasia.

Theodolite:
A surveyor’s instrument for measuring vertical and horizontal angles.

Titanites:
A very large and classical
ammonite.

Trilobite:
A common
arthropod,
with nearly 4000 species, found from the Cambrian to the Permian. Its biography, notable for its importance in displaying Darwinian evolutionary principles, was written by R. Fortey.

Unconformity:
Surface of contact between two series of
rock
s that is sufficiently unconformable to imply a passage of time and often the occurrence of earth movement between the two periods of deposition.

Uniformitarianism:
James Hutton’s belief, formulated in the late eighteenth century, that the natural occurrences observable today have been occurring for millions of years past, and thus—as in “the present is the key to the past”—indicate the basic processes of
geology.

Variscan:
A major orogeny, occurring during the Carboniferous and Permian, relating to the closure of the gap between Africa and Europe. It resulted in the building of many central European mountain chains. See also
Hercynian.

Vein:
A deposit of a mineral, usually crystalline, limited to a fissure or joint of a
rock;
to be compared with a lode, which involves a much wider dissemination of a mineral through a rock body.

Wernerian:
The principles outlined by Abraham Werner of Freiburg, Germany, in the early nineteenth century, which were broadly based on
Neptunism,
and inspired a large school of mapmakers and students of
geology
—which Werner himself preferred to term “geognosy.”

Wollastonite:
A silicate mineral noted for its long fibers, used in the making of the insulating material known as rock wool; it was named after William Wollaston, the medal in whose name remains the highest honor that can be given a geologist. The first winner, in 1831, was William Smith.

The papers, diaries, sketches, execrable poems, and extraordinary maps of William Smith are kept in the archive of the University Museum, Oxford, as are the papers of his nephew and future Oxford professor of geology, John Phillips, and those of the flamboyantly eccentric omnivore Dean William Buckland. The collections of George Bellas Greenough are in the archives of the Geological Society of London. There are other important papers housed in the Eyles Collection at the University of Bristol.

A very few of the books that are listed below will make enjoyable reading—most notably the two enlightening works by the eminent paleontologist Richard Fortey,
The Hidden Landscape
and
Trilobite!
; Noel Annan’s highly readable study of Dean Buckland in
The Dons
; and Roger Osborne’s most original
The Floating Egg
. Other books that seem likely to appeal to the general reader I have marked with an asterisk.

The greatest of all the works noted here—aside, of course, from Darwin—is the majestic tome (no other word can possibly do justice) written in 1933 by W. J. Arkell:
The Jurassic System in Great Britain
. This utterly beautiful book, elegant in design and writing, represents the life’s work of a man who was passionately fascinated by the most celebrated—and, one might say, looking at the rocks and villages along its outcrop, the most
English
—of all the geological periods. It has long been out of print, and a clean copy will cost a good deal of money. But to anyone whose interest in geology at its best may have been piqued by this short account, I urge them—find yourself an Arkell, buy it, and treasure for yourself and for your descendants. There are all too few books of its like.

To write this book I made use of the following:

Allaby, A., and M. Allaby.
The Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences.
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1999

Allsop, Niall.
The Somersetshire Coal Canal Rediscovered
. Bath, England: Millstream Books, 1993.

*Annan, Noel.
The Dons.
London: HarperCollins, 1999.

*Arkell, W. J.
The Jurassic System in Great Britain.
Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1933.

Bassett, Michael G. “Formed Stones.”
Folklore and Fossils.
Cardiff: National Museum of Wales, 1982.

Bennett, Stewart.
A History of Lincolnshire.
Chichester, England: Phillimore & Co., 1999.

Berger, Lee.
In the Footsteps of Eve.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

*Bernal, J. D.
Science in History.
London: Watts & Co., 1954.

Blundell, D. J., and A. C. Scot.
Lyell: The Past Is the Key to the Present
. London: Geological Society of London, 1998.

*Briggs, Asa.
A Social History of England.
London: Penguin, 1987.

Brooke, J., and G. Cantor.
Reconstructing Nature.
London: T. & T. Clarke, 1998.

Brooke, John Hedley.
Science and Religion.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Brown, Roger Lee.
A History of the Fleet Prison, London.
Lampeter, England: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996.

Clew, Kenneth.
The Somersetshire Coal Canal and Railways.
Newton Abbott, England: David & Charles, 1970.

Cox, L. R. “New Light on William Smith and His Work.”
Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society
25, pt. 1, 1942.

——————.
William Smith and the Birth of Stratigraphy
. International Geological Congress, 1948.

Craig, G. Y.
The Geology of Scotland.
London: Geological Society of London, 1991.

Craig, G. Y., and J. H. Hull.
James Hutton—Present and Future.
London: Geological Society of London, 1999.

*Darwin, Charles.
The Origin of Species.
New York: New American Library, 1958.

Daunton, M. J.
Progress and Poverty.
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Davies, G. L. “The University of Dublin and Two Pioneers of English Geology.”
Hermathena
109 (1969).

Doyle, Peter.
Understanding Fossils.
New York: Wiley, 1997.

Doyle, Peter, and Matthew Bennett, eds.
Unlocking the Stratigraphical Record.
New York: Wiley, 1998.

Duff, P. McL. D., and A. J. Smith, eds.
The Geology of England and Wales.
London: Geological Society of London, 1992.

Eastwood, T.
Stanford’s Geological Atlas.
London: Edward Stanford Ltd., 1964.

Edmonds, J. M. “The Geological Lecture-Courses given in Yorkshire by William Smith and John Phillips, 1824–1825.”
Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society
, 1975.

——————. “The First ‘Apprenticed’ Geologist.”
Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine
76 (1981).

Eldredge, Niles.
The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism.
San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 2000.

Emsley, Clive.
Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900.
London: Longman, 1987.

Eyles, Joan M. “William Smith: The Sale of His Geological Collection to the British Museum,”
Annals of Science,
23, no. 3 (1967).

——————. “William Smith (1769–1839)—a Bibliography of his Published Writings, Maps and Geological Sections, Printed and Lithographed."
Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History.
(April 1969).

——————. “William Smith: Some Aspects of his Life and Work.” In C. J. Schneer, ed.
Towards a History of Geology
. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969.

——————. “William Smith, Richard Trevithick and Samuel Homfray: Their Correspondence on Steam Engines 1804–1806.”
Transactions of the Newcomen Society
43 (1970–71).

——————. “William Smith’s Home Near Bath: The Real Tucking Mill.”
Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History
(1974).

——————. “G. B Greenough, FRS (1778–1855).”
Nature
, April 16, 1955. Fearnsides, W. G., and O. M. B. Bulman.
Geology in the Service of Man.
London: Pelican, 1944.

*Fortey, Richard.
The Hidden Landscape.
London: Pimlico, 1993.

*——————.
Trilobite!
London: HarperCollins, 2000.

Geikie, Sir Archibald.
The Founders of Geology.
London: Macmillan, 1897.

Gillispie, Charles Coulston.
Genesis and Geology.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Gould, S.
The Lying Stones of Marrakech.
New York: Harmony Books, 2000.

*——————.
Wonderful Life.
London: Penguin, 1989.

Grantham, John.
The Regulated Pasture—a History of Common Land in Chipping Norton.
Chipping Norton, England: J. Grantham, 1997.

Green, G. W.
British Regional Geology: Bristol and Gloucester Region.
London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1992.

Greene, John C.
The Death of Adam.
Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959.

Hains, B. A., and A. Horton.
A British Regional Geology: Central England.
London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969.

Hardy, Peter.
The Geology of Somerset.
Bradford on Avon, England: Ex Libris Press, 1999.

Harland, W. B., et al.
A Geological Time Scale, 1989.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

*Hawkes, Jacquetta.
A Land.
London: Cresset Press, 1953.

Hill, Christopher.
Reformation to Industrial Revolution.
London: Penguin, 1992.

*Holmes, Arthur.
Principles of Physical Geology.
New York: Nelson Thornes, 1993.

Hutton, James.
Theory of the Earth, Vol. III
(facsimile). London: Geological Society of London, 1997.

Innes, Joanna. “The King’s Bench Prison in the Later Eighteenth Century.” In John Brewer and John Styles, eds.,
An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
. London: Hutchinson, 1980.

*Jones, Steve.
Darwin’s Ghost.
New York: Random House, 2000.

Kearey, Philip.
The New Penguin Dictionary of Geology.
London: Penguin, 1996.

Knell, Simon J.
The Culture of English Geology.
Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2000.

Korsmeyer, Jerry.
Evolution & Eden.
Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1998.

Lapidus, Dorothy F., with I. Winstanley.
The Collins Dictionary of Geology.
London: HarperCollins, 1990.

Laudan, Rachel.
From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Le Bas, M. J., ed.
Milestones in Geology.
London: Geological Society of London, 1995.

Lindberg, David, and Ronald L. Numbers, eds.
God and Nature.
University of California Press, 1986.

Lyell, Charles.
Principles of Geology
. London: John Murray, 1834.

McClay, Keith.
The Mapping of Geological Structures.
New York: Wiley, 1987.

McKibben, Bill.
The End of Nature.
New York: Doubleday, 1999.

Mather, Kirtley.
Source Book in Geology.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Meades, Eileen.
The History of Chipping Norton.
Chipping Norton, England: Bodkin Books, 1984.

Melville, R. V. and E. C. Freshney.
British Regional Geology: The Hampshire Basin.
Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1982.

Numbers, Ronald L.
Creation by Natural Law.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.

——————.
The Creationists.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992

——————.
Darwinism Comes to America.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

*Osborne, Roger.
The Floating Egg.
London: Pimlico, 1999.

Packard, Lisa.
Dr. Johnson’s London.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.

Pevsner, Nicolaus, and John Harris.
The Buildings of England: Lincolnshire.
London: Penguin, 1964.

Phillips, John. “Biographical Notice of William Smith, LLD.”
Magazine of Natural History
(1839): 213.

——————.
Memoirs of William Smith, LLD.
London: John Murray, 1844.

Plumb, J. H.
England in the Eighteenth Century.
London: Penguin, 1990.

Porter, Roy.
The Making of Geology.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Priestley, Philip.
Victorian Prison Lives.
London: Pimlico, 1999.

Robson, Douglas A.
Pioneers of Geology.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England: Natural History Society of Northumberland, 1986.

Rudwick, Martin.
The Great Devonian Controversy.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Rule, John.
The Laboring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750–1850.
London: Longman, 1986.

Rupke, Nicolaas.
The Great Chain of History.
Oxford. England: Clarendon Press, 1983.

Sale, Richard.
A Guide to the Cotswold Way.
Marlborough: Cordwood Press, 1999.

Serest, Michel, ed.
A History of Scientific Thought.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Sheppard, Thomas.
William Smith: His Maps and Memoirs.
Hull, England: Brown & Sons, 1920.

Singer, Peter.
A Darwinian Left.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.

Smith, E. A.
George IV.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.

Smith, Peter L.
Canal Architecture.
Princes Risborough, England: Shire Publications, 1997.

Stanforth, Alan.
Geology of the North York Moors.
National Park Information Service, 1993.

Strahler, Arthur M.
Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy.
Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1987.

Thomson, David.
England in the Nineteenth Century.
London: Pelican, 1991.

*Toghill, Peter.
The Geology of Britain.
Shrewsbury, England: Swan Hill Press, 2000.

Tonga, Neil, and Michael Quincy.
British Social and Economic History, 1800–1900.
London: Macmillan, 1980.

Torrens, H. S. “Early Maps of the Somersetshire Coal Canal.
” Cartographic Journal
(June 1974).

Truman, A. E.
Geology and Scenery.
London: Pelican, 1949.

Very, David, and Alan Brooks.
The Buildings of England: Gloucestershire 1
. London: Penguin, 1999.

Vile, Nigel.
Exploring the Kennet & Avon Canal.
Newbury, England: Countryside Books, 1992.

Watkins, Alan.
Churchill and Sarsden.
Gloucester, England: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1988.

Wicander, Reed, and James Monroe.
Historical Geology.
Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, 2000.

Woodward, Horace.
The History of the Geological Society of London.
London: Geological Society, 1907.

Ziegler, Peter.
Geological Atlas of Western and Central Europe.
London: Shell International Petroleum BV, 1990.