The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Most young men heading off to the Continent on a warm July morning had mischief on their minds. The libertine ways of France permitted behavior that otherwise might have raised eyebrows in London society. "It is much to be regretted," intoned J. Andrews at the opening of his Letters to a Young Gentleman on his setting out for France (1784), "that the majority of our travelers run over to France from no other motives than those which lead them to Bath, Tonbridge, or Scarborough. Amusement and dissipation are their principal, and often their only, views."9

  This jaunt to Paris was not, however, a dabbling, dissolute trip, or not wholly in any case. Smithson and Greville set forth with a collegial group of men, all of whom shared a thirst for knowledge; Smithson's journey was evidently to continue the heady brew of coffeehouse conversation that characterized his London life. Most appear to be friends from the Coffee House Philosophical Society. Major Valentine Gardiner, who had also been proposed for Coffee House Philosophical Society membership by Richard Kirwan, was a balloon enthusiast (he had ascended with James Sadler at Oxford) who had served with the 16th Regiment of Foot in America. Edward Gray, trained in medicine, was the keeper of Natural History and Antiquities at the British Museum; his membership in the Royal Society, like Smithson's, had been sponsored by Greville. Two of the other traveling companions might have been John Vinicombe, a Pembroke exhibitioner from Cornwall and friend to Davies Giddy, who was serving as tutor and chaperone for Thorn Price, a rather wealthier Cornish son from Magdalen College. These last two had left Oxford in June 1788 and did not return there until three years later, bearing the signature gift from France at that time: the tricolor cockade. (The one they left with Davies Giddy at Pembroke in 1791 became "an object of much curiosity" in Tory Oxford, and the other students so clamored for a copy that Giddy engaged an attendant at the college to make some replicas, though he prudently decided against distributing them.10)

  Visitors to ancien régime Paris were welcomed first by the police for passport control. The tall, grey-roofed city on the Seine was newly contained within a high stone wall established by the fermiers généraux for collecting tax. Coming from the coast, travelers typically rode in past the royal sepulture at St. Denis and the windmills of Montmartre, through the classical customs barriers of the new wall, and down the old Roman road right through the city to the terminus at rue Notre Dame des Victoires. The police checked papers and inquired as to the nature of the journey, the places to be visited, and the establishment in Paris where the traveler was lodging. For most this was a routine exchange. The resulting notation—kept still today in the archives of the Ministére des Affaires Etrangéres in Paris, the repository to which the police quickly handed over their information on foreigners in order to coordinate a more effective surveillance—was typically brief. If, however, the visitor hailed from a particularly illustrious family, pages were devoted to chronicling the heroic exploits of the traveler's ancestors. On the very day that Smithson, Greville, and the others passed into Paris, so too did the MP Dudley Ryder, Earl of Harrowby. Milords Greville, Macie, Gardiner et al. were duly noted. The ancestry of "Sir Dudley Rider" on the other hand was lauded for three pages in the ledger, the officer noting with especial flourish the family's valiant sacrifices made for kings long dead (Edwards II and IV). If Smithson witnessed this treatment, it would not have been lost on him the privileges the French accorded those of noble parentage. Smithson—descended from kings!—had none of his antecedents noted. He was, like his companions, simply a Milord anglais, intent apparently on spending only a few days in Paris before continuing on to partake of the pleasures of Spa, the fashionable watering hole in the Ardennes.11

  The group descended on the Hotel du Moscovie on the rue des Petits Augustins (today the rue Bonaparte), one of a number of hotels popular with the English in the warren of medieval streets by the Seine in the old aristocratic quartier of the Faubourg St. Germain. Paris' air was much cleaner and brighter than that of coal-fired London, but the French capital was a shock for visitors accustomed to London's decorous street life, with its crisp sidewalks of York stone flagging and roads wide enough for four carriages abreast. Here narrow, rutted streets, filled with mud and refuse and overshadowed by tall stone houses, were so crowded as to be almost impassable. Carriages backed and ground their wheels against each other; young men in cabrioles darted recklessly amongst the crowds. "Walking, which in London is so pleasant and so clean that ladies do it every day," remarked the English writer—agronomist Arthur Young, "is here a toil and a fatigue to a man, and an impossibility to a well-dressed woman."12

  In July and August Smithson and Greville traveled out into the countryside. They might have carried on with their fellow English travelers to gamble and socialize at Spa, where years earlier Smithson's mother's ill-fated affair with John Marshe Dickinson had begun. At some point during that summer of 1788, though, Smithson and Greville ended up in the Alps, for when they returned to Paris on September 19 the passport control officer noted that they had been "running around Switzerland."13

  Switzerland had long been a popular destination for the English. It was the homeland of Voltaire and Rousseau, a seat of liberty and learning, a place, as Smithson's cousin George Keate had said, where "philosophy is studied more than the sword."14 Smithson's relative in fact had done much to promote a love of Switzerland; he had written a history of Geneva and its laws, and penned a number of poems as well, including "The Alps," one of the earliest poems in English to praise the beauty of the mountains. For many English visitors, Switzerland served primarily as a charming way station en route to and from Italy, experienced from the perspective of their sedan chair. Lady Webster, in fact, when heading home to England at the end of her Grand Tour, insisted on riding over the Alps backwards, so as to be able to continue to look at Italy.15 As the century wore on, though, and a taste grew for the sublime, Switzerland's outsized landscape—with its immense vistas, terrifying cold and ice, avalanches, abysses, and villages populated with people disfigured by goiter—became fascinating in its own right.

  For scientists as well there was a dramatic shift in the perception of the mountains. Not so long ago the venerable French naturalist the Comte de Buffon had dismissed mountains as static, hideous deformations of nature, blighted features of the landscape. Smithson and his scientific peers now saw them in a wholly different light, as products of the earth's wrenching transformations. To these men the Alps offered themselves up as mineralogical cabinets of evidence—treasure chests in which to uncover a catalogue of the earth's development and clues to a theory of the earth. Smithson and Greville came to Switzerland with all the enthusiasm of the pioneer, eager to meet the men who were mapping the frontier and to see the mountains at first hand. Smithson armed himself with Jacob Wyttenbach's Instructions pour les voyageurs qui vont voir les glaciers et les Alpes du canton de Berne, the first guide to studying the geology of the mountains, written by one of the pioneers of glaciology.16

  Just the year before Smithson's arrival the Swiss scientist Horace Bénédict de Saussure had scaled Mont Blanc, the highest point in Europe, one of the first to do so. The research he conducted on this and other ascents—collecting samples, testing the temperature and conditions of streams and glaciers, making barometric readings, estimating the relative humidity of the atmosphere, and even measuring the pulses of all the members of his party as they made their way into the thin air of the summit—fueled his massive work-in-progress, a four-volume description of the Alps.17 De Saussure was part of a vibrant community of savants in Geneva and Lausanne. Geneva boasted an excellent university, rich natural history collections, and the new and widely read journal founded by the Pictet brothers, the Bibliothèque Britannique. 18

  Smithson made several contacts in this thriving Enlightenment society that he kept for the rest of his life, including the mineralogist Henri Struve in Lausanne. But on this first trip to Switzerland he was introduced to this community by a man who was perceived first of all as a gentleman and a collector
, rather than as a scientist—a fact that may well have colored perceptions of Smithson, and one that also serves to highlight some of the conflict inherent in Smithson's aspirations and desires. Charles Greville's passion for mineral collecting was driven by his aesthetic collector instincts rather than by any real desire to comprehend a larger system. De Saussure on first meeting him found him "ready to talk rocks: at first I was afraid he wanted to get the benefit of my observations, but I found with a pleasure which was perhaps ignoble that he was not a serious student and did not attempt to generalize. He was on the look-out for curious specimens for his collection, without any consideration for grouping them. I recognised that he was in no sense a formidable rival."19 Greville's renown in Switzerland derived not from his pursuit of mineralogy but rather from his role as an unparalleled exemplar of the folly of English aristocratic extravagance. There was probably still talk in the monastery of St. Gotthard of the time some years earlier when he had insisted on crossing the narrow, treacherous pass in his carriage instead of on muleback—and of the poor donkeys that had struggled to ensure the wheels had not slipped off the vertiginous mountain track and the eighteen louis that had greased various palms to enable such a feat.20 Was Smithson, at least initially, also dismissed by association as a wealthy dilettante?

  Smithson wanted to be valued as a real contributor to knowledge. He was busily cultivating a network of collaborators and colleagues, he was building a comprehensive mineral cabinet, and he was working to the point of exhaustion in his laboratory. But, unable to relinquish his deep-seated need for recognition as the son of the Duke of Northumberland, he remained attentive first of all to presenting himself as a well-born gentleman and patron. On the Continent at least, freed from the stigma of his illegitimacy, Smithson seems to have been able to travel uncontested as a wealthy, educated foreigner, a fact that may have played a large role in his decision to settle in France later in life. This tension between his scientific ambitions and his aristocratic aspirations endured his entire life. His inclination for the world of patronage served him well in the clubbable, gentlemanly circles in which science was promulgated in the eighteenth century, but in the decades to come science itself was to leave the realm of the gentleman amateur and begin to enter the domain of the professional.

  By late September 1788 Greville and Smithson were back in Paris, staying once more on the rue des Petits Augustins. Paris on the eve of the Revolution was already in a state of turmoil. The country was on the verge of financial collapse. Wild storms in July had devastated crops in the countryside, bread prices had rocketed, and famished peasants were streaming into Paris seeking relief. People rioted throughout the country, in Brittany, Burgundy, Béam, and Provence. Near Grenoble there was fighting in the streets, an incident that came to be known as the Day of the Tiles after angry residents hurled their roofing materials at the soldiers who came to subdue them. In Paris police clashed with protestors amidst bonfires on the Pont Neuf; there were many casualties and arrests. Crowds cheered the burning in effigy of the new finance minister Loménie de Brienne, the Archbishop of Toulouse, who was forced a few weeks later to resign. The King announced finally that the Estates General would, for the first time since 1614, be summoned to Versailles in May the following year to address the nation's grievances.21

  For one with money, though, Paris despite the chaos continued to be a city of delights. Smithson had a line of credit with Jean-Frédéric Perregaux, the well-connected Swiss banker whose thriving Paris banking house catered particularly to wealthy English tourists.22 He probably passed a lot of time in the gambling houses tucked under the arcades in the Palais Royal, the epicenter of fashionable Paris. As the private property of the Due d'Orléans, a cousin of the King, the Palais Royal existed as a law unto itself. "It is a city in the middle of Paris, where all breathe grandeur, ease, and liberty," proclaimed a 1788 guidebook.23 At the Palais Royal all levels of society mixed together and the latest in every entertainment or luxury could be purchased. Pilâtre de Rozier, Paris' own Icarus, the very first balloonist (and the first to die, too, in a dramatic explosion over Boulogne), had established a museum nearby, where chemistry demonstrations and experiments of electrical effects were popular with the ladies.24 In the waiterless Cafe Mechanique tables disappeared into the floor and reappeared resplendent with food. Ladies of the night promenaded as secure as duchesses, and pamphleteers cried out their causes. All enjoyed a freedom and looseness that provided the breeding ground for the fomenting of the Revolution.

  Moreover, Paris was overflowing with scientific conversation. Charles Greville's brief, stimulating visit to Holland with Sir Joseph Banks in early 1773 can probably be taken as something of a model for this trip of Greville and Smithson's. In Holland Greville and Banks made many contacts with the scientific community; they hunted for rare books in dusty old shops and visited private cabinets and public collections. From the herbarium at the University of Leiden to the menagerie at Loo, they took in all the natural history wonders the country had to offer.25 In Paris now with Smithson, instead of the discussions of botany that preoccupied Greville in Holland, mineralogy would have been the topic of choice, a passion that bound these two men together as ardently as botany did Banks and Greville.

  Smithson presumably called upon Lavoisier in his apartments at the Arsenal, carrying the letter of introduction from Sir Joseph Banks. Lavoisier was actively seeking to convert members of the British scientific community to his new system, so he probably warmly welcomed his young visitor. Sir James Hall, a Scotsman who visited Paris in 1786, told his uncle that he had "received the greatest civilities from him [Lavoisier]—I have a standing invitation to dine with him every Monday."26 And Arthur Young, who visited in 1787, recalled Lavoisier's talented young wife Marie-Anne serving a "dejeuné Anglois" of tea and coffee; he found her learned scientific conversation to be "the best repast," and much admired the "splendid" and "noble" machines of the laboratory.27 Among the many other scientists Smithson met on this trip, he also befriended the chemist Comte Claude Berthollet, who was director of the Gobelins tapestry factory and inspector of dye-works for the government. Just as he had in Scotland, Smithson came away from this trip having met the most important figures in chemistry; and although there is no trace of the impression that Lavoisier made on the young Smithson, Berthollet became a friend and colleague for life.

  Science in France, which enjoyed a long tradition of government support, was conducted very differently than in England. The Académie des Sciences had a fixed number of members, restricted solely—unlike in England—to scientists who had proven their worth, with each seat awarded a pension. In addition to the Académie des Sciences, which like its Royal Society counterpart had been in existence for over a century by the 1780s, the institutions of the Paris Observatory, the Ecole des Mines, the College Royale, and the Jardin du Roi all employed scientists in positions of stature. Other military and technical government operations also required scientific advisers, and figures like Berthollet or Lavoisier could be found supervising the Sévres porcelain manufactory, the Gobelins tapestry works, the Ponts et Chaussees, and the munitions factory at the Arsenal.28

  Smithson and Greville would have met all the principal figures of French chemistry, attended public lectures and demonstrations, and studied the significant collections. Mineral cabinets seemed to lurk behind the elegant doors of nearly every sizeable hôtel. One guidebook listed upwards of fifty important collections, including that of the Due de la Rochefoucauld—the honorary secretary of the Académie des Sciences and a passionate admirer of the United States, whose hôtel was just around the corner from where Smithson and Greville were staying.29 Smithson and Greville probably visited the mineral collector Comte de Bournon, whom Greville later helped to escape Paris during the Revolution, and they surely studied the extensive mineral cabinet at the new Hotel de la Monnaie (the Mint) along the river across from the Louvre, run by the jowly Balthazar-Georges Sage, who had been installed as the first director of Fra
nce's new Ecole des Mines.

  Paris in the 1780s was the scene of a critical new development in mineralogy, the science of crystallography. René-Just Haüy, professor of mineralogy at the Jardin du Roi and at the Faculté des Sciences of Paris and one of the principal architects of the new science, became a lifelong friend of Smithson's.30 Haüy believed he had uncovered a series of fundamental rules that confirmed nature's simplicity and provided a mathematical means of determining species; he argued that each crystal had an underlying "primitive form," like a cube or a rhomboid, whose dimensions could be expressed as ratios of square roots, and he was convinced that these internal forms, once discerned, could provide a new system of mineral classification.31 Smithson rapidly became expert at the techniques of this new science—like the use of the goniometer to determine the angles between the crystal's faces—adding these tools to his ever-increasing arsenal as an experimentalist. William Thomson was soon praising Smithson's talents, saying, "He is the best mineralogist I know—especially for crystallography."32

  Crystallography, which offered the possibility of a systematic approach to mineral classification, proved hugely appealing to Smithson. While it ultimately never superseded his belief in chemical analysis as the best key to understanding the mineral kingdom, it had a radical impact on his collecting habits. At some point in the months following this trip to Paris Smithson entirely reorganized his system of collecting, to focus exclusively on the principles of crystallization. He was no longer interested in the large, impressive, and beautiful clusters sought after by gentleman connoisseurs like Charles Greville or his cousin George Keate. From this point forward, Smithson desired only perfect single crystal specimens. "The bodies I want are all kinds of crystals, and I value them in proportion as they show well their form," he later explained to one Italian colleague. "Hence I esteem first these which are isolated and quite complete, and after these, single crystals broken from groups. Amorphous minerals do not enter into the plan of my collection."33