The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  He knew of William Smith from meeting him at the Philosophical Society meetings in Scarborough (he had contributed, gratis, the stone for building the rotunda), and in 1828 hired him as his land steward. He gave him the use of a vicarage close to where Hackness Grange now stands (as a hotel); and for the six following years Smith lived as pleasant a life as can be imagined, meditating, writing, living (as Phillips noted, with some asperity) like “a happy farmer,” and performing only one task of geological significance—making a beautiful large-scale and fully hand-colored map of the Hackness Estate, which hangs today in pride of place in the Hall—the big house—having survived a fire that raged through most of the rest of the house early in the last century.

  All passing geologists of note now suddenly took great care to stop at Hackness, both to see Smith and to congratulate his patron—this “sincere friend to geology”—for taking care of the kindly old man who bumbled amiably around his estates. One of those who visited was the Derbyshire-born chemist and lens maker William Vernon, who came by in 1826. It was precisely at this time that the first suggestions were made that William Smith’s contribution to geology should somehow be formally recognized.

  Whether Vernon first put the idea in Johnstone’s mind, or whether (as the romantic view maintains) the enlightened nobleman actually suggested it to Vernon remains unclear. But what is known indicates the subsequent chain of events. William Vernon dashed off a letter to Roderick Murchison, the Scottish soldier who had established himself as one of the great architects of geology, the founder of the Silurian period and, with Sedgwick, cofounder of the Devonian. In this letter Vernon said, as forcefully as courtesy allowed:

  Smith has dedicated his life to geological enquiries, and has done perhaps more than any individual for the science, and is at an advanced age in poverty and dependence.

  There has been nothing in his conduct or character to diminish the respect due to his exertions in the cause of knowledge and the compassion which his circumstances excite…. I have thought a subscription might be raised…a small annuity purchased for him, sufficient to secure his not dying in the Poor House.

  I should be much obliged to you if you would do what you can to forward it. I am sure you will find many able and willing friends to this project, in Dr. Buckland and many other members of the geological Society.

  The mills of the Geological Society grind exceeding slow. There was still some opposition among the old guard—the “anti-Smith alliance” of Greenough and his friends, who had seen to it that as late as 1822 Smith was still denied even membership of the organization. But this was now changing, and rapidly. A new breed of scientists was directing the society’s affairs these days—scientists who accorded as much honor to the practical men, the men who went out into the field in the damp and chill and happily dirtied their hands in the finding of facts, as to the theorists and thinkers in what was, after all, a fundamentally practical field of study.

  Vernon’s appeal—or was it perhaps Sir John Johnstone’s appeal?—fell on ears that were fully attentive. All agreed that some distinction should be given to Smith: The only question was the timing—the feeling that, given the continuing power and influence of Greenough’s faction, it would be imprudent to make an immediate move. Smith was content, employed, more or less free from financial woes: Matters could wait awhile longer.

  But by the time Adam Sedgwick was settled in the chair of the society four years later, it was time to move. All of a sudden, and at long, long last, the most powerful and influential body of geologists in the world could right the wrongs it had done to Smith during the past quarter century. It would summon the old man down from Yorkshire to London, it would garland him with the greatest honors it had in its power to bestow. Now was the time for the scientific establishment to beg forgiveness, and to offer to William Smith his long-overdue reward for what was officially recognized as one of the most memorable of human achievements.

  17

  All Honor to the Doctor

  Aulacostephanoides mutabilis

  A medal shall be struck in fine gold, not exceeding the value of ten guineas, and it shall have on its obverse side the bust to the left and to the right, Wollaston.”

  It was just before Christmas 1828 that William Hyde Wollaston died in London at the age of sixty-two. Two weeks earlier he had written a formal letter to the Geological Society, announcing that he was planning to make a bequest of a thousand pounds’ worth of stock, in the hope that an award might be created—the first year’s income would be for making the die—and handed out each year to one individual for his or her research “into the mineral structure of the earth.”

  It was in some ways an odd choice. William Wollaston was not a geologist but a chemist, though said by all to be a man blessed with the most acute powers of observation. He could apparently see even the tiniest of flowers while riding on horseback. He invented the camera lucida* after noticing something odd in the crack in his shaving mirror. He was one of the few men who ever noticed a mirage on the river Thames. He was a doctor, an expert on kidney stones and on mineral-based enlargements of the prostate.

  He specialized in the chemistry of exotic and precious heavy metals. He discovered palladium and, from its rose-colored salts, refined rhodium. He made a fortune from finding clever new ways of working with platinum.* He invented the reflecting goniometer, an instrument that could measure the precise angles between the faces of microscopic-size crystals. And during his lifetime he published no fewer than fifty-six academic papers on “pathology, physiology, chemistry, optics, mineralogy, crystallography, astronomy, electricity, mechanics, and botany,” but made not a single contribution to the science of geology itself. He has, however, a mineral named after him—a calcium silicate called wollastonite, which is formed when limestone is crushed hard against another rock.

  But his medal, awarded every year since 1831, is without peer in the world of geology: To be a recipient of the Wollaston Medal is to become the equal of a Nobel laureate, in a discipline for which (despite its universal and elemental nature, and in common with mathematics) Alfred Nobel puzzlingly and shamefully left no bequest. The Wollaston is the Oscar of the world of rocks, fought for gamely, campaigned for bitterly, and if awarded, then accepted with the secure knowledge that career and reputation are guaranteed for life.

  Yet at the time the medal was struck the science it sought to reward was still very much in its infancy. Physics, chemistry, and medicine had long been fully fledged: When Nobel offered his prizes for excellence in them, they had been around for centuries. Wollaston’s bequest, on the other hand, was designed for practitioners of a science that had been totally unknown—at least by the name geology—a mere six decades before. And it was a science that, because of bigotry, intolerance, churchly disapproval, and the fundamental assumptions it sought to challenge, suffered more than the usual share of growing pains—pains that were mirrored precisely by the difficult evolution of the Geological Society itself.

  Set up when the science was just staggering to its feet, the society was made up initially of men who had more pretense about them than solid achievement. In the outside world, said George Greenough, “the term geology…was little understood.” Few men “beyond the pale of our little coterie” aspired, he said, to become geologists. The early members of the society—or at least, the more powerful among them—were bent more on following field of elegant drawing-room fashion than pursuing and disseminating much rigorous scientific research. Most of them seemed blissfully unaware that there was in fact a very real and a profoundly important science buried within the aimless charms of their fossil and mineral collecting.

  So there was a good deal of tension, unanticipated at the time, and yet with hindsight quite understandable, once the men of real worth—those who recognized that they were in at the beginning of a very real new science—began to rise through the society’s ranks. There was tension in particular once such men began not simply to rise but to overwhelm and displace
the smug “little coterie” whose fossil collectors’ dining club it originally was.

  In few sciences can there have been such an ugly rivalry. John Phillips, William Smith’s nephew, first came to live full-time in London in 1831 and reported that he found it all vastly amusing, noting in his journal that “the jealousy among the men of science here is wonderful.” Others found it less so. Thomas Webster, who was the curator of the society’s museum, wrote that he was surrounded by “a band of busy, jealous, active and revengeful witlings who have gained and kept their ascendancy partly from contempt, partly from the indolence of others.” George Greenough, who as president of the society was responsible for setting its early temper, had once been held in awe: Now he was being dismissed as merely “a charlatan and a blockhead” others in his various factions were described as “quacks,” “jackals,” and “pilferers.”

  Gradually, though, the passions subsided; and by the late 1820s the new elite was in place, to remain unassailably there for many years. Controversies continued to rage, as in any stimulating environment—but thenceforth they tended to be about geological dogma and discovery, much less about money, influence, and class. The academic tone was rising by the day: Sedgwick and Murchison, the two colossi of the discipline, were now firmly in position, battling royally over such technical matters as the succession in the Lower Paleozoic. In place too was perhaps the most colorful and clever of all nineteenth-century geologists, the great showman-scientist who preceded John Phillips as professor at Oxford, Dean William Buckland.

  Buckland is perhaps better known today for his antics than his discoveries and beliefs. He had a voracious need to check everything. He tried to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom, offering mice in batter and steaks of bison and crocodile to guests at breakfast, but reserving the viler things for himself—he declared that he found mole perfectly horrible, and the only thing worse was that fat English housefly known colloquially as a bluebottle. His sense of taste seems not to have been ruined by such experimentation—he once found his carriage stranded in the nighttime fog somewhere west of London, scooped some earth from the road and tasted it and declared to his companions, with relief, “Gentlemen—Uxbridge!”

  He was a great skeptic, particularly where Catholics were concerned. Once, led to a dark stain on the flagstones of an Italian cathedral, which the local prelate insisted was the newly liquefied blood of a well-known martyr, he dropped to his knees, licked the darkened spot, and announced that it was in fact the urine of bats.

  But above all he was a fieldworker—a scrabbler-about in meadows, a clamberer, a hammerer. His best-known discovery was of the thousands of broken bones in a cave in North Yorkshire; these he declared to indeed be evidence of the Deluge, the Flood—but since the bones it had swept up into the cave in cold, windy Yorkshire were those of tropical animals—hyenas, elephants, lions—the event had in fact happened many thousands of years ago, when the weather was tropical, and not according to Ussher’s dogmatic timetable.

  The six days of Creation were properly to be thought of as Six Ages, he said. Scientific observation had now displayed, without a shadow of doubt, that there was much more to the Bible than could be learned from its strict literal interpretation. The new science of geology, in other words, was now capable of asking—and probably of answering—the truly great questions, the fathomless wonderment about God, the cosmos and humankind. The conclusions to which Buckland, the keenest of all observers, eventually came were to change the relationship between science and religion for all time. And geology, this brand-new science, with a brand-new society and now a brand-new medal from Wollaston, was the key to the unlocking of thousands of years of fettered and blinkered prejudice.

  It was this holy trinity of geology’s new young grandees—Sedgwick, Murchison, and Buckland, none of them older than forty-five—who saw to it that it was William Smith who would be awarded the first-ever of the society’s Wollaston Medals.

  No matter that he was not a member of the society and had never been invited to be, or that just nine years beforehand his membership had been blackballed by Greenough’s old guard. No matter that he was lowborn, that he was uneducated, a provincial, a convicted debtor, and that even more contemptible of figures, a practical man. No matter that he had accused some of the more august members of the geological establishment of stealing his work, of cheating him of his due. No matter that a quarter of a century’s worth of ill feeling had accumulated, that factions existed and battled among themselves, and that the kingdom’s entire geological universe had been upset. Now, the wise men decreed, was the time for atonement and reconciliation.

  The message had gone out from Sir John Johnstone at Hackness, via Mr. Vernon, to Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, from Murchison to Dean William Buckland, and from Buckland to Adam Sedgwick, who was both Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge and, since 1829, the Geological Society’s president. The debate was brief, the die was cast. A formal resolution was passed at a special meeting of the society’s council, without dissent (despite Greenough’s council membership) on January 11, 1831, both that the first medal be given to Smith, and that he should be granted the proceeds of Wollaston’s so-called Donation Fund, established to provide a modest income to a scientist whose career, through no fault of his own, was—if the double pun may be permitted—on the rocks.

  William Smith was at Hackness when he was first given the momentous news, in a letter sent by hand from the society. His excitement and delight are infectious: One can sense the pleasure, the new spring in his step, the feeling of relief and gratitude and of a wrong being righted, at last!

  “Last night I received Professor Sedgwick’s official letter,” he writes at the end of the month to his nephew—who himself was now well on in his own distinguished career.* “He presses me to appear in person at the Society’s Anniversary on the 18th February,” and where he would “go through the form” of being presented with the medal. “The form” was necessary because in fact the medal itself was not finished when time came for the award—but the society went ahead anyway, giving itself up to a state of what for the geological world is very close to rapture.

  “At their meeting every countenance glowed with delight,” Smith wrote to his niece,

  when the twenty guinea purse was delivered to me…then ninety merry philosophical faces glowed over a most sumptuous dinner at the Crown & Anchor. The new President Mr. Murchison took the Chair. On his right sat Mr. Herschel, Sir John Johnstone, Professor Sedgwick, myself, Mr. Blake, Dr. Fitton…after drinking much success to their fellow associates in science they drank my health, coupled with the numerous Geological Societies which now spot the range of the Oolitic series was given with three times three, which was truly drunk with enthusiasm.

  Old William Smith sounds to have been almost a little tipsy while writing this letter; but disabled by drink or not, he had clearly remembered to see to it that Sir John Johnstone had been invited, so that the man who had rescued him from rural obscurity was on hand to watch the revels of his elevation to the corps d’élite of the nation’s scientists.

  And as Adam Sedgwick was to make clear, it was a corps d’élite with but one member. The closing paragraphs of his short speech are worth quoting at their high-flown length, not least because they include the one phrase—an injudicious hyperbole, some churlish few will say—that has since marked the memory of William Smith out for all time, and that remains carved on his headstone and in gilt letters on a dozen public memorials.

  I for one can speak with gratitude of the practical lessons I have received from Mr. Smith; it was by tracking his footsteps, with his maps in my hand, through Wiltshire and the neighbouring counties, where he had trodden nearly thirty years before, that I first learnt the subdivisions of our oolitic series, and apprehended the meaning of those arbitrary and somewhat uncouth terms, which we derive from him as our master, which have long become engrafted into the conventional language of English geologists and, through their infl
uence have been, in part, also adopted by the naturalists of the continent.

  After such a statement, gentlemen, I have a right to speak boldly, and to demand your approbation of the Council’s award…. And if it be denied us to hope that a spirit like that of Wollaston should often be embodied on the earth, I would appeal to those intelligent men who form the strength and ornament of the Society, whether there was any place for doubt or hesitation? Whether we were not compelled, by every motive which the judgment can approve, and the heart can sanction, to perform this act of filial duty, before we thought of the claims of any other man, and to place our first honour on the brow of The Father of English Geology…. [I]t was he that gave the plan, and laid the foundations, and erected a portion of the solid walls, by the unassisted labour of his hands….

  I think it a high privilege to fill this Chair, on an occasion when we are not met coldly to deliberate on the balance of conflicting claims in which, after all, we may go wrong, and give the prize to one man by injustice to another; but to perform a sacred duty where there is no room for doubt or error, and to record an act of public gratitude, in which the judgment and the feelings are united.

  William Smith, now sixty-two years old, slightly lame from rheumatism, a little deaf, but otherwise as fit and wiry as a field geologist has a right to be, sat beaming throughout. He made a short speech of thanks, noting that Sir Isaac Newton had been born on the Oolite, and remarking on how the science of geology might have changed “had he looked down at the ground instead of up at the apple”—a remark that produced a clatter of (presumably polite) laughter that enabled Smith to resume his place and “hide my honoured head among the seated.”

  Before he did so, however, he presented the society with three documents that have remained in Burlington House apartments ever since. He had discovered among his papers the original manuscript version of the Table of Strata he had dictated to Benjamin Richardson, in Joseph Townsend’s drawing room, thirty-two years before;* and he had found his circular map of Bath, colored in by hand in 1799; and he offered one of his elegant precursors to his great geological map of the nation shown as the frontispiece to the story.