The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  In the painting a poised young man sits in a chair beneath a tree, gazing out confidently at the viewer. Under his cap his hair is fashionably curled and powdered to suggest a wig. The ruched sleeves of his gown loll nonchalantly off his shoulders, and the loosely draped collar about his neck signifies his attainment of a Master of Arts degree. A book perches on his crossed and stockinged knee, his finger in place as if he intends soon to return to its pages. It is a small, self-assured portrait, a representation emblematic of one young man's graceful entrance into the community of knowledge.

  Coming of age was a momentous rite of passage in the life of a young gentleman. It was also a critical episode in the relationship between a father and son, being, as it was, intricately wrapped up in the matter of inheritance. Property in England was rarely owned outright; it operated instead under a system called strict settlement, in which the land was owned by the family in perpetuity, with each generation holding it in trust for the next. If the son was the tenant "in tail" on the family property, when he reached the age of twenty-one the father and son together could break the entail on the property and resettle the inheritance—usually transferring the entail to the son's typically as-yet-unborn first son.45

  Smithson's passage to manhood, of course, involved no such connection between father and son, and no transfer of patrimony or legacy.46 The Duke of Northumberland, absent in Smithson's college register at matriculation, was naturally not at Oxford to witness his illegitimate son's success. The duke, in fact, was on his deathbed. On June 6, 1786, at the age of seventy-four, he died at Syon House. For days afterwards he lay in state at Northumberland House, amidst hundreds of flickering candles and piles of roses as a steady stream of mourners came to pay their respects. On the 21st, following a vast procession of mourning coaches and men on horseback, the duke was buried in the family vault at Westminster Abbey, surrounded by the tombs of kings and queens and the nation's poets and heroes.47

  The Duke of Northumberland's will was probated on July 4. Smithson was not mentioned in it. His father's death stood as an acute reminder that Smithson, never intended to inherit any mantle, would not ever even be recognized. In the long gallery at Syon,

  where the ceiling coffers undulated in a geometric pattern that babbled in synch with an equally busy carpet, small roundels peered out along the length of the decorated walls. Alongside portraits of Harry Hotspur, Henry VIII, and the first Earls of Northumberland, Smithson's half-brother Lord Warkworth ascended, his portrait as the new second Duke of Northumberland, along with that of his wife, joining those of his parents. The pageant of succession, the official line of the Percy family, continued.

  When the season began again in London in the autumn, Smithson once more was taken under the wing of his scientific mentors, Henry Cavendish and Richard Kirwan. Cavendish took him again to the dinner of the Royal Society Club, and Kirwan took him as his guest to most of the weekly Royal Society meetings between December and January 18, 1787, when the certificate recommending "James Lewis [sic] Macie Esq. M.A. late of Pembroke College Oxford, & now of John Street, Golden Square a Gentleman well versed in various branches of Natural Philosophy & particularly in Chymistry & Mineralogy" was posted on the wall of the Royal Society's meeting room.48

  During the requisite twelve weeks that the certificate hung on the wall at Somerset House, Smithson's sponsors came forward to vouch their support. Richard Kirwan, Charles Greville, and the Royal Society's secretary Charles Blagden had all signed the certificate prior to its posting. Blagden never became a good friend of Smithson's, but as Henry Cavendish's personal assistant he would have jealously noted that the elder statesman of science was grooming this young Oxford man as a protégé and duly gotten on board as a sponsor. Cavendish's name, in fact, soon followed under those of the first three sponsors. Last to join the list was Smithson's friend from the Society for Promoting Natural History, David Pitcairn.

  When Smithson was balloted for and accepted into the Royal Society on April 18, 1787, he became at the age of twenty-two the group's youngest member.49 This in itself was cause enough for jubilation and pride, but Smithson's entry also placed him firmly in the bosom of the society's power structure; his backers were all men closely aligned with the president Sir Joseph Banks. In 1784 Banks had survived the "dissensions," a rancorous and lengthy debate over his maneuvers to influence the selection of members for the governing council. From this near putsch—a real referendum on Banks' leadership—the president of the Royal Society had emerged chastened but steadfast. A number of the allies who had rallied to him in the time of crisis were those who adopted the young Smithson.

  The following week Smithson attended his first ever meeting as a member, signed the book and paid his dues. He immediately dove into the culture of the society, embracing its wide-ranging network and its connections to communities around Europe. On May 3, he brought the first of many of his own guests, Johan Gadolin, a Finnish chemist and mineralogist who had studied under the pioneering Torbern Bergman at Uppsala.50 Smithson in those first years of membership brought a guest nearly every week—old friends from Oxford, instrument makers, literary friends, and, most especially, the foreign scientists like Gadolin, whom he was probably meeting at Sir Joseph Banks' breakfasts and at other scientific salons around town.

  The Polish poet and mathematician Jan Sniadecki, in England on a study trip prior to the construction of the new astronomical observatory in Krakow, was another such guest of Smithson's. So was the German chemist Johann Friedrich August Göttling, author of Description of a portable chest of chemistry, and Johann Caspar Dollfuss, a Swiss pharmacy student in London for several years in the late 1780s. With these friendships Smithson began cultivating an international network of scientific correspondents before he even left London to explore the Continent.51

  And through these foreign visitors Smithson seems to have reached out even further, to prominent scientific figures abroad he had not yet encountered personally. Lorenz von Crell, the founder of the first German chemistry journal, was eager for correspondents to supply him with the latest information from England; by 1790 two of his key contacts at the Royal Society seem to have been Sir Joseph Banks and Smithson, who was then still in his early twenties and unpublished.52 Smithson, who had enjoyed something of the reputation of a prodigy ever since college, and perhaps even before, was clearly eager to make a success of himself and open to every opportunity.

  Over the course of several months during the winter of 1787-8 Smithson was invited to form part of an exclusive committee at the Royal Society charged with verifying the accuracy of Henry Cavendish's latest experiment. Cavendish, using the same techniques and apparatus that had enabled him a few years earlier to make his groundbreaking observations on the composition of water, had managed to produce "nitrous acid" (nitric acid) from a mixture of dephlogisticated and phlogisticated air (the components, as Cavendish and his peers understood it, of common air: oxygen and nitrogen). The replication of this labor-intensive experiment lasted through the winter, with Smithson attending along with a handful of others early in the day at the society rooms in Somerset House to witness the work.53

  Public experiments such as these served a crucial role in the process of the verification of facts in the eighteenth century, at a time when many discoveries were completely upending long-held truths. Such experiments, often written up as publications—Cavendish reported this trial in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions of 1788—served as a kind of demonstration for the wider community of scientists. In this particular instance, many experimentalists—like Martinus van Marum in Holland, who owned the largest electrical machine then existing—had been unable, despite sophisticated equipment, to replicate Cavendish's results. Witnesses such as Smithson, then, were relied upon to serve as authenticators of the findings. Within the very first year of his membership Smithson, despite his youth, was clearly already part of an inner circle of the Royal Society's chemists.

  Cavendish's experiments on air h
ighlighted the confused state of chemical thought in the 1780s. Cavendish believed he had demonstrated with this experiment that the electric spark had deprived phlogisticated air of its phlogiston and left behind only nitrous acid (nitric acid); likewise, with his detonation of inflammable and dephlogisticated air (hydrogen and oxygen) he thought he had shown that dephlogisticated air was "in reality nothing but dephlogisticated water, or water deprived of its phlogiston." The theory of phlogiston had creakily served the chemical community for nearly one hundred years, being adapted and refined every so often to accommodate troubling inconsistencies or contradictory experiment results. In 1782 Kirwan claimed that he had finally fathomed the actual substance; he identified eight states of phlogiston and posited that at its most rarefied phlogiston was in fact inflammable air (hydrogen).54 The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, however, after years of research, soon launched a full-blown attack against the existence of phlogiston.

  In his Reflexions sur le phlogistique Lavoisier proposed a radically different solution to the mystery of combustion. He claimed that metals and wood when burned did not release phlogiston; they did the opposite. They absorbed air—Priestley's dephlogisticated air (oxygen). It was Henry Cavendish's experiments, which had led Lavoisier to make his own investigations into the composition of water, that had ironically bolstered the case for this new theory. The French chemists who were convinced by Lavoisier's experiments joined him in his efforts to convert public opinion. In 1787 Lavoisier together with Fourcroy, Berth ollet, and Guy ton de Morveau published a treatise, Methode de nomenclature chimique, which laid out this new system of chemistry, using an entirely new vocabulary. Such a radical overhaul of traditional wisdom could not be expected to find easy acceptance; Cavendish condemned it as "very mischievous."55 British suspicion of the French theory was compounded by a bias against the elitism of French laboratory practice; Lavoisier's instruments were extremely expensive, making them available only to a very exclusive circle.

  In the meantime Smithson's old mentor Richard Kirwan penned a passionate defense of the phlogiston theory. The French school—and it did seem to English eyes to operate as a team, well-organized and with strong government backing—immediately began to form their rebuttal. Madame Lavoisier translated Kirwan's text into French, and within the year Lavoisier and his associates offered their response, refuting each of Kirwan's points. Lavoisier continued to lay out his theory in his Tradé Elémentaire de Chimie of 1789. Here he listed the bodies he could not decompose further. These simple substances, or elements, replaced those of Aristotle. Lavoisier's list—which included light and heat, or caloric, as Lavoisier called it; the gases oxygen, azote (nitrogen), and hydrogen; carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus; and sixteen known metals—was not meant to be definitive. It was intended instead as a challenge to others: "As chemistry advances towards perfection, by dividing and subdividing, it is impossible to say where it is to end; and these things we at present suppose simple may soon be found quite otherwise," he explained. What were the exact compositions of acids and salts? The search for elementary bodies thus became a central focus of chemistry as it entered the nineteenth century.56

  In these last decades of the eighteenth century the landscape of chemistry was changing so rapidly that the ground could hardly be found underfoot. The so-called French system—Lavoisier's radical proposition of a new nomenclature—threatened to obliterate the entire tradition on which English chemistry rested. What had long been known as "dephlogisticated air" was now to be called oxygen, "inflammable air" would be hydrogen, "fixed air" carbon dioxide, and so on. Lavoisier, however, was not only proposing to rename every substance and abandon a long-held common language. He was replacing the playing field altogether, enforcing his new ideas by making the actual terms dependent on his theory. He had constructed a new system in which all terms were now identified by their place in an antiphlogistic world. To the English it would come to seem as anarchic and abrupt an overthrow of tradition as the overthrow of the monarchy.

  At the end of 1787, Kirwan—still steadfast in his embrace of phlogiston—moved back to Dublin on account of failing health. In 1789 he issued a defense of his essay, but finally in 1791 he relinquished his beliefs in favor of the French system. It was Joseph Priestley who remained phlogiston's most determined champion. Later on, from his new life in the United States, where he had escaped after the torching of his house and laboratory in the Birmingham riots on the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, Priestley would write, "There have been few, if any, revolutions in science so great, so sudden, and so general, as the prevalence of what is now usually termed the new system of chemistry, or that of the Antiphlogistians, over the doctrine of Stahl, which was at one time thought to have been the greatest discovery that had ever been made in the science."57 Priestley when he penned this in 1796 still believed in phlogiston, though he acknowledged that he knew hardly a soul who hadn't been converted to the French school of thought. In the heat of those prime years of debate on the matter of one of the most pressing questions of chemical theory in his time, Smithson, it seems, wanted to see for himself.58

  FIVE

  Science and Revolution, 1788-1791

  Monsieur Macie qui aura l'honneur de vous remettre cette lettre est membre de la Société Royale et beaucoup plus verse dans la chymie philosophique que des personnes de son age … comme il ambitionne beaucoup votre connaissance, j'ai cru vous la devoir demander pour lui. [Mr. Macie, who has the honor to present this letter is a member of the Royal Society and far exceeds his peers in his knowledge of philosophical chemistry … as he greatly desires to make your acquaintance, I thought I should oblige him by asking you.]

  —Sir Joseph Banks to Antoine Lavoisier, April 1788

  ON APRIL 3, 1788, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, who had been nominated by Cavendish, Blagden, Greville, and others, was elected to the new foreign list of the Royal Society. On that same day another Frenchman was balloted for: the vivacious and controversial Abbé Jean-Louis Soulavie. Soulavie was the first person Smithson sponsored for membership in the Royal Society, but it was not a successful debut. Soulavie was a bold, self-taught geologist who had recently penned an enormous eight-volume Histoire Naturelle de la France Meridionale. His theories about the extinction of species and the significance of volcanic activity in geological history drew plenty of skeptics, though he was awarded a prize for his book from France's Académie des Sciences.1 He had the backing of a number of prominent Royal Society Fellows; Richard Kirwan, for example, had taken Soulavie as his guest to a meeting in 1787 during Soulavie's visit to London that year—which is probably when Smithson made his acquaintance. But Soulavie was a radical in politics, and when the votes were counted at Somerset House he was rejected.2

  Smithson does not seem to have burdened himself with Soulavie's blackballing, having perhaps more important goals in his sights. He wasted no time after the election in soliciting a letter of introduction to Lavoisier from Sir Joseph Banks. He may even have hoped to be the one to carry news of the honor of membership across the Channel to the great man himself, but Banks ensured that would not be the case by entrusting the task, as he explained in the letter to Lavoisier, to another. This letter of introduction offers a window into Smithson at age twenty-three, seen through the eyes of the powerful president of the Royal Society. Banks did not speak French, and it is not too difficult to imagine him overflowing a great chair in his library at Soho Square, dictating in English how he wished to describe Smithson, his secretary scribbling furiously and running off to produce a translation. In the end the letter described a man not so different from Banks himself in years past—a precocious, talented young upstart, fearsomely ambitious but full of warmth and winning enthusiasm.3 Banks, like Smithson, was an Oxford graduate who had become F.R.S. at a very early age (twenty-three). His explorer days, though, were now well behind him. As James Boswell explained, "Banks was an elephant, quite placid and gentle, allowing you to get upon his back or play with his proboscis."4 Smithso
n seems to have tapped into this gentle giant, reminding the sedentary, gouty autocrat of his earlier self-—the adventurer, the intrepid investigator.

  It was July, as it turned out, before Smithson finally set foot in Paris. His companion for the trip was Charles Greville, who had recently disposed of his mistress Emma Hart by shipping her and her mother off to his widower uncle, the aged vulcanologist and collector Sir William Hamilton, head of the English community at the court in Naples—where she eventually met and famously took up with Lord Nelson. "A cleaner, sweeter bed-fellow did not exist," Greville said, but Emma could not bring him what he most needed: a handsome inheritance. Greville was on the lookout for a woman with at least £30,000—a quest that remained unfulfilled all his life; he died, like Smithson, a bachelor.5

  The fascination Greville and Smithson had for each other was all-engrossing, and it was grounded in their pursuit of the latest, most spectacular mineral finds. Smithson's goals for his own collection seem to have changed dramatically as a result of this trip, but at the start, as these two finely appointed collectors set off for the Continent, they were very much of one mind. Greville was older than Smithson but probably not much wiser—he was legendarily short for cash even as he pursued his extravagant collecting of virtu. But he seems to have been devoted to his eager and intelligent young companion. Like Henry Cavendish, Greville clearly valued Smithson's powers of observation. Writing to Sir Joseph Banks during a controversy with the French over the process for melting platinum, Greville requested that Banks set up a public experiment and entreated him: "Do not let too many philosophers attend but good ones.—& I wish you would let Macie be of the party."6 Smithson in his turn embraced a playful friendship with Greville, where he could write of bringing a specimen "some morning to pay its compliments to your specimens, to compare it with them."7 For Smithson Charles Greville above all probably represented what he might have attained without the stigma of illegitimacy and the strictures of his status as a naturalized citizen. Greville was an MP for Warwick, a Lord of the Admiralty, and he had sat on the Privy Council with none other than Smithson's father, the Duke of Northumberland (Greville had hit a ceiling on how high he could rise, however, despite his being the brother of the Earl of Warwick, on account of his uncontained enthusiasm for the American cause during the Revolutionary War).8