The Map That Changed the World (6 page)

Terebratulids—
Lobothyris
—used as marbles by William Smith and his school friends.

The entire notion of fossils, in fact—what they were, why they were where they were, what possible deeper meaning was signified by their existence—was quite profoundly different from anything that is imaginable today. When William Smith was growing up, everything about them—whether they were commonly found examples like brachiopods or echinoids, whether ammonites or trilobites, gastropods or graptolites, or teeth or ribs or fragments of coral—was seen in a very different light. Assumptions were made about them and conclusions were drawn from their existence that bear little relation to what is today considered objective reality.

P
ythagoras, it is often said, knew well what these mysterious bodies were, two thousand years before anything resembling the modern science of paleontology had begun shuffling out of the shadows. But, Pythagorean foresight aside, the world had long been steeped in a degree of ignorance that seems barely credible today.

Until the beginning of the eighteenth century the objects found inside rocks were known not as
fossils
—that word had a much more general usage, meaning anything, minerals and crystals included, that had been dug up from the ground. Any item that had been unearthed or discovered lying in a field and that had the look of an animal or a plant about it—an obvious shell, say, or a sea urchin, a leaf, or a piece of branch—was known, cumbrously though perhaps quite reasonably, as a “figured stone.”

A few of these stones were easy to explain—some, like those that happened to have a shape vaguely resembling a human head, or a carrot, or a ship, had almost certainly been shaped accidentally. Tree limbs or animal bones that had never been mineralized
and that were merely stuck in mud or in the sand by a riverbed were obviously pieces of modern organic life which had died and become mired in the earth. The figured stones that interested and amazed people in the seventeenth century—and people, aristocrats and members of the leisured classes especially, amassed enormous collections of them, with both the Royal Society and Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum housing them in handsome display cases—were those that were clearly made of mineral material. These were thus definable as stones, and yet they looked uncannily like something that had once been living, or else they mimicked the aforesaid shells, sea urchins, leaves, or pieces of branch.

They obviously could not possibly
be
such things—that went without saying. To suggest otherwise was either to court ridicule—a once living shell, thrust halfway up a mountain, indeed!—or else to be accused of apostasy or heresy, for tinkering with the ordered faiths of nature. But to gaze at them in astonished rapture—this is what the nobly born of England did three centuries ago, much as later generations gazed in awe at mounted specimens of the coelacanth, or at specimens of rock from the surface of the moon.

No. Such things, so awesome and wondrous to behold, could only be explained in one way. Clearly they were unique creations of the Almighty himself—
lapides sui generis
is the phrase now employed (“stones unto themselves”). They existed for one reason only, and that was to reinforce in humankind’s collective mind the omnipotence and imaginative beneficence of God. He placed the figured stones where they were discovered, using to do so what was termed a
vis plastica
, a plastic force. He used the force to insert into rocks miraculously perfect simulacra of living things, for the sole purpose of reminding the entire human race that God did indeed move in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. And there, to the enraptured viewers of the stones, was an end to it.

The science that was needed to justify such a belief to skeptics was simple enough. This, after all, was still the time of phlogiston
*
and the ether, and the firmly held belief that mountains grew like trees, organically, upward and outward. To anyone who imagined such a thing, it did not require too much of a leap of imaginative faith to conclude that mysterious stone objects found in the earth were there either because (
a
) they had been infused (on heaven’s command) with some kind of petrifying fluid, (
b
) they had had their nature changed by a kind of juice that emanated from nearby mineral seams, or (
c
) that the stars had exerted some kind of magnetic or gravitational influence on them from the heavens. And if all these theories failed the rigorous tests of observation, then one could always simply resort to (
d
), the mysterious ways of God: Collectors would argue that a divine virtue was behind the placing of all fossils, using the word
virtue
in the old sense, rare now, of meaning “by way of supernatural power.”

Old-fashioned scientific explanation appealed most of all, especially to those who, in post-Restoration England, were trying to make some order out of the chaos they perceived in the world. To the scientists the idea that a stone might grow into the shape of a sea urchin was surely not outlandish at all. If a perfectly symmetrical crystal could grow out of apparently nothing, if a mysterious process of chemistry could make a stalactite or a kidney stone or a coral—a rock that grows—then why could not the same kind of inexplicable and enigmatic natural force make a stone that looked like a shell, or a tree, or, as in the case of the Oxfordshire pound stones, in the shape of a hedgehog, and do so, moreover, deep within the body of a rock?

However, there was more to it than this. Even if the theoret
ical processes behind the formation of such figured stones were correctly guessed by these seventeenth-century philosophers, there was a host of additional unanswered questions: How did these figured stones get to all the places where they were found? Why did some kinds of rocks—those in wild moors of Devon, or in the mountains of North Wales, or the high hills of Shropshire—have almost no such stones buried within them, while other kinds, such as those that made the hills of Devon or were found in the quarries of Oxfordshire or the coalfields of Northumberland, possessed them in enormous numbers?

Why, as an early naturalist named John Rawthmell noticed in the 1730s, did most of these curious figured stones crop up inside those rocks that were to be found in a rough line that stretched in a northeasterly direction clear across England, from the cliffs of Dorset and via the Cotswold hills in the south, up through Leicestershire to Yorkshire and the great cliffs in the coast near Whitby?
*
And as corollary to this thought—if God was behind their distribution, why were the stones not left scattered around everywhere, to be found uniformly and randomly, like the stars?

It had been towards the end of the seventeenth century that the first very few and very bold observers raised (albeit timidly) the ultimate heretical thought: the possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, these objects actually
were
what collectors and scientists and countrymen had long been loath to consider admitting—the organic remains of the very creatures that they looked like.

It was men like Nicolaus Steno, a Dane, and Robert Hooke, a Briton, who blazed the trail: To them the unsayable became the irrefutable—these fossil stones, they were certain, had indeed
once been living creatures.
*
Hooke argued his case particularly logically and meticulously. He identified three stages that could be witnessed on all sides, which he said demonstrated the three stages in the formation of a typical fossil.

In the first stage, wholly unpetrified bones, shells, and vegetable remains were to be found in beds of mud, peat, and moss. The rock around them was unformed, the fossils within still almost as organic as when they had been alive.

Then, second, in lignites and brown coals—the sedimentary beds that were not properly rocks but were slightly more solid and consolidated than mud and peat—there were bones, shells, and parts of trees and leaves that had been somehow
changed
. These specimens, which by now could perhaps formally be called fossils, had been half petrified. In their present-day resting place inside layers of half-formed rock, they too were half formed, being neither wholly organic, as when they were alive, nor yet wholly stone.

In the next stage they would become so. In layers of coal—a fully consolidated rock, though born from peat and lignite in turn—Hooke noted that there were leaf-, tree-, and other shell-like remains to be found that were as wholly coal-like, coal-colored, and self-evidently coal as coal itself. Could it perhaps be, he wondered, that great pressure, great heat, or complex physicochemical reactions had transformed the once organic remains into minerals, just as the mud had been transformed into peat, the peat into lignite, and the lignite into the solid black rock-mineral called coal? Could not a slow and uniform process, which had been so visible in the making of coal itself, work its mysterious magic on the life forms that had been present at the origin, turn them into stone, and make them into fossils?

Most scientists of the time still dismissed such ideas as laughable. What event, they asked tangentially, could possibly have swept these remains to where they were now found? Could Noah’s great flood (which was then implicitly and almost universally believed, as it would be for the better part of another century) have been so violent and so massive as to wash shells up onto mountaintops—where, it had to be admitted, they had been found? Could these creatures have been swept onto the land at the moment of Creation?

No to both, said the seers of the day: Noah’s flood was said in Genesis to have been a short and placid affair, and as for Creation—since it was widely accepted that the land was created before life—it would be impossible for any organic remains to be infiltrated deep inside the newly created rocks because there was no life in existence to be so inserted.

In addition it had not escaped the notice of some collectors that many of the figured stones they found represented animals and plants that did not seem currently to exist. This suggested, in other words, that if indeed the stones were relics, they were relics of living creatures that were no longer around and had since become extinct. Since extinction was an impossible, unthinkable event in any divinely created cosmos, then this notion too was invalid, inappropriate, and wholly wrong.

A
nd yet, as the eighteenth century opened, so these long-held beliefs and prejudices were confronted with increasing vigor by counterargument, by solidly mounted challenges to the dogmas and received wisdoms and ecclesiastical imperatives of old, and, most important, by evidence.

The ideas of Steno and Hooke, however hostile their initial reception by the Church, however flaccid their initial acceptance by the public, began slowly to take root. At about the same time there came a vague, inexpressibly gossamer-fragile thought that there might be some kind of link between two of the concepts
that were an implicit part of the fossil collector’s system of belief. People began to wonder if these stones might actually be the relics of living things, and placed where they were found by no less an agency than what they liked to call the Noachian Deluge—Noah’s flood.

Perhaps somehow the flood could be implicated in shifting these objects, even to where they now existed in the rocks of high mountain ranges and on the Oxfordshire meadows. Perhaps somehow this same flood could also be implicated in the process that created the objects in the first place. Perhaps the rocks and all that lay inside them—the Chedworth Buns, the pundibs, the oyster shells, the fern leaves, and the crystal corals, fish skulls, and lizard bones—had all somehow been precipitated or had crystallized themselves from the fluid of a universal, flood-created sea. Perhaps, if such things were demonstrably true, then maybe, just maybe, the matter of intense puzzlement that had already confused untold generations of naturalists—What were fossils and why were they found where they were?—might be solved.

The flood, in short, was to be the eighteenth-century answer to everything. Noah was now the key. Half a century before 1769, when William Smith was born, the notion that figured stones were just inorganic and petrified replicas, cunningly inserted inside rocks to prove the omnipotent genius of God, had been at last abandoned, conveniently forgotten, regarded if at all as a distant cosmic joke. A more modern and more reasonable science was on its way to being forged.

And if today the long survival of ideas about the flood, which must have colored and tainted the thinking of such an eighteenth-century observer as the young William Smith, seem more than a little ludicrous, then at least Smith was brought up free from having to believe that his pound stones and his pundibs were just minerals. He knew, as the thinking world was then coming to accept, that echinoids and terebratulids were not minerals at all, but, as Steno and Hooke had taught, had once been animals.

S
o even though William Smith was brought up in a society still in the firm grip of purblind churchly certainty, his scientific training—such as it was—allowed for a measure of liberality. James Ussher was still there on the margins, to confuse; to deny his beliefs was to risk being branded a heretic. But in the later decades of the eighteenth century it was also possible, and moreover
acceptable
, for a thinking student to suppose that life, far older than humankind and perhaps far stranger than humankind could imagine, might once have existed on the planet.