The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  When Smithson was still collecting large mineral specimens, he had commissioned a pair of elegant cabinets in which to display them. These "decently ornamental" cases, William Thomson told John Hawkins in 1789, Smithson had never had occasion to use, because he had "so completely changed his plan, f[ro]m oversized specimens, to minute single crystals."34 After this Paris trip Smithson entirely abandoned the idea of a gentleman's collection. His collection when it came to the Smithsonian in the late 1830s had grown to number some ten thousand of these tiny, "extremely perfect" specimens, all systematically arranged, constituting "a very complete Geological and Mineralogical series" and carefully labeled with Smithson's notes.35 Henceforth, it seems, Smithson dedicated himself to building a comprehensive study collection—the ultimate tool for that essential eighteenth-century project, the encyclopedic ordering and categorizing and controlling of nature.

  Smithson was back in London by early November 1788, when the city was bedecked with lights to mark the centennial of the Glorious Revolution, and all over the country people celebrated England and her constitution. The anniversary was overshadowed, however, by alarming reports from the palace of the King's descent into madness; the crisis consumed Parliament and erupted into a full-blown struggle for control of the government, which was not resolved finally until the King's remarkable "recovery" three months later. Early November was also the opening of the Royal Society season, and Smithson dove right into the hubbub of activity, bringing guests, attending meetings, and putting prospective members forward. On November 6 he took Dr. George Shaw, an Oxford friend who was teaching a course of botany at the university, as his guest to the weekly meeting. Smithson was priming Shaw for election, the first of a number of people he successfully backed for fellowship.36 Shaw became F.R.S. in early 1789. Two months later Smithson joined a number of prominent colleagues—including Cavendish, Blagden, Josiah Wedgwood, and John Hunter—in sponsoring Johann Karl Wilcke, the head of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.37 Soon after, he also supported his famous new acquaintance in Paris, Comte Berthollet, for membership.

  By the summer of 1789 all eyes were on France. At a pace that could scarcely be believed, the strongest, most entrenched monarchy in Europe collapsed. In three dramatic months a new representative assembly was formed, a declaration of the rights of man drawn up, the privileges of the aristocracy reneged, and plans laid for the drafting of a constitution. The storming of the Bastille by the people, and the crumbling of those ancient walls, came to symbolize the destruction of the very foundations of the ancien regime. The French Revolution was initially greeted enthusiastically by many in England. Even the Duke of Dorset, then ambassador to the court at Paris and a favorite of Marie Antoinette, wrote home: "The greatest revolution that we know anything of has been effected with, comparatively speaking—if the magnitude of the event is considered—the loss of very few lives. From this moment we may consider France as a free country, the King a very limited monarch, and the nobility as reduced to a level with the rest of the nation."38

  Smithson was absolutely euphoric over the turn of events. For him and his coffeehouse society friends, the Revolution augured nothing less than the birth of an entirely new future. "Stupidity and guilt have had a long reign," Smithson believed, "and it begins, indeed, to be time for justice and common sense to have their turn." The French Revolution, as he saw it, was "consolidating the throne of justice and reason." The scientific breakthroughs of the previous decades made clear to Smithson and his like-minded contemporaries that massive improvement could be brought to society. Reason, a rational experimental approach, and education were the essential building blocks. "If the millions of money and the thousands of individuals which are at present sacrificed to war should be applied to the promotion of science and arts," Smithson believed, "what may not we expect even in our time!"39 The human community could perhaps be perfected. At the very least, through the application of scientific method, it could be brought to a whole new level of existence. Smithson echoed the radical Priesdey in arguing for a future in which science would serve as the crowning authority, rather than royalty or the Church.

  It was America's example that had paved the way. The American war had awakened the slumbering nation of France "from the sleep of despotism in which they were sunk," as Thomas Jefferson observed in Paris in early 1789.40 Priestley argued that the American and French revolutions had transformed the world "from darkness to light, from superstition to sound knowledge, and from a most debasing servitude to a state of the most exalted freedom."41 They were now witnesses to nothing less than the beginning of a new age in the history of human development.

  Smithson and his friends felt themselves to be at the center of this sea change. When Davies Giddy came to London in anticipation of becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society, the visit "formed an Epoch in [his] Life." In his diary the twenty-four-year-old breathlessly recorded every impression of his weeks in the big city, from having his hair done to the hour he went to bed after an evening of fireworks at Ranelagh Gardens (4.00 a.m.). His Cornish friend John Hawkins hosted him at his house in Chandos Street, Cavendish Square. Giddy called on Smithson, and Smithson later took him as his guest to the Royal Society meeting and introduced him to Sir Joseph Banks. He attended a "conversitione" [sic] at George Staunton's house, and Staunton took him another night to an evening meeting "at some Gentleman's House in one of the great Squares to meet those distinguished Personages, Tom Paine, Mr. Home Tooke, & Mr. Mackintosh."42 Giddy was the country mouse arrived in the big city, exposed to the exciting life Smithson and Hawkins were living in these revolutionary days. Science and politics were inextricably linked in this world, and it seemed that they lived on the verge of a revolution in every arena imaginable.

  The Revolution had an unintended impact on the course of science, however. The widespread enthusiasm for the changes in France among natural philosophers, especially outside the Establishment Royal Society, in provincial clubs and among Dissenters and other Nonconformists, turned chemistry into a lightning rod for charges of radicalism. Edmund Burke made his famous condemnation of the French Revolution in terms that deliberately invoked the language of chemistry. He railed that "the wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broken loose." And in another tract he warned that "Churches, play-houses, coffee-houses, all alike, are destined to be mingled, and equalized … well sifted, and lixiviated, to crystallize into true democratic, explosive, insurrectionary nitre."43 But chemistry was more than just a metaphor or a rich rhetoric to mine for descriptions of unsettling change and revolution. Burke, in identifying the threat to authority, specifically fingered the chemists, who "bring from the soot of their furnaces dispositions that make them worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes which are the support of the moral world."44 Chemists themselves, as personified by Joseph Priestley, were the real danger. In their pursuit of a world based in reason and science, they were advocating nothing less than the overthrow of English society. It was only a short time before chemistry in the minds of the general public no longer represented simply a source of wonder and popular entertainment. Chemistry in the light of the French Revolution underwent its own transmutation: it became a threat.

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  Joseph Priestley as the radical "Dr. Phlogiston." He stands on a book that reads "BIBLE explained away" while waving burning pamphlets labeled "Political Sermon," his pockets stuffed with tracts on "Gunpowder. "

  Smithson was away on the Continent for much of the 1790s, and thus escaped the very worst of this backlash. He missed the treason trials of 1794 and 1795, where a number of English radicals—what Burke called "the Frenchified faction"—were prosecuted in Parliament under the new sedition laws. Smithson also missed the fleeing of Joseph Priestley and Thomas Cooper and a host of other English Jacobins to America. The ideals of public science articulated by Priestley, and so ardently embraced by Smithson, were dealt a very severe blow during these years. There were other setbacks, too. The ensuing decades of war greatly ham
pered scientific communications. Many governments no longer seemed supportive of or sympathetic to science. Lavoisier lost his head at the guillotine, and dozens of Smithson's colleagues were haplessly captured and imprisoned while trying to carry on with their work—including, eventually, even Smithson himself.

  Towards the end of 1789 Smithson moved house again, to Orchard Street, Portman Square. He was still, in March 1790, according to Charles Blagden, "setting up his library and laboratory." (Smithson's arrival may well have frightened the neighbors—his fellow F.R.S. member Richard Chenevix had a hard time renting a house in Brook Street, on account of his wanting to set up a laboratory in the cellar; people "expected he would blow it u p."45) He was juggling a number of projects simultaneously. With "extracts of spermaceti from liver," he was trying to replicate Antoine Fourcroy's study of the decomposition of animal matter, an experiment he had probably learned about in Paris, where Fourcroy, one of Lavoisier's collaborators, was an extremely popular public lecturer in chemistry.46 And he was examining what he thought to be a specimen of Cumberland red ore of lead, but he became worried that it was factitious or manufactured; he asked Greville if he would check his cabinet's example and "see whether you can find any certain traces of the fingers of nature upon them, for my part I cannot, & begin to be apprehensive that they will turn-out to be products of art."47

  Smithson's growing reputation for meticulous analysis garnered him an important new project at this time, one that led to his first publication. In the spring of 1790 "a remarkable substance called Tabasheer (Tabaxir in the Portuguese) much used in medicine by the oriental physicians" was presented to the Royal Society in a letter from Patrick Russell, an English physician in India. A renowned aphrodisiac, tabasheer was also employed as a poison antidote and an asthma and cough suppresser; Russell even wondered whether its extraordinary capacity for absorption might not make it a possible remedy for smallpox. Seven parcels were laid before the society, each containing a different specimen either collected or purchased by Russell from a variety of locations. Hard and opalescent, tabasheer appeared to form from the watery juice found inside the joints of bamboo. But only some pieces of bamboo contained these little seed-pearl-like concretions, and in some the tabasheer rattled around, while in others it adhered to the side of the cavity. Its use, as Russell recounted in his letter, was extensive throughout Asian cultures, but it was completely unknown in the West. The members of the Royal Society deemed it very worthy of investigation. Blagden was convinced that any discoveries connected to it would "prove likely quite new," as he wrote excitedly in September to Berthollet.48 In July Sir Joseph Banks announced that the specimens of tabasheer were under chemical trial, and "it was much hoped that the results would be communicated to the society." Smithson—either because he volunteered and was accepted, or because he was hand-picked—was the one chosen to investigate the tabasheer. The selection was a telling marker of his excellent reputation already among the scientific elite at the Royal Society. His findings, "An Account of the Tabasheer," appeared a year later, his first publication in the Royal Society's prestigious journal, the Philosophical Transactions.

  Smithson was, already by the age of twenty-five, developing the micro-chemistry experimental method by which he would be known all his life. Working in miniature required a high degree of technical dexterity, and the samples Smithson took from the parcels of tabasheer on which to conduct his experiments were minuscule; he admitted that "the largest of them did not exceed two or three-tenths of an inch cubic." On these tiny specimens Smithson executed hundreds of experiments to try to determine the physical properties of this unknown substance. He cut the pieces up and rubbed them together in the dark to see if they generated electric sparks, and he steeped them in mildly fermented red cabbage, a kind of primitive litmus paper, to test for p H. He subjected them to acids and alkalis and extremes of heat, repeating the experiments under a variety of conditions, using open and closed vessels, exposed to the light or hidden from it. His laboratory must have been sweltering, and filled with noxious fumes from hours of boiling the samples in "pure white marine acid" (hydrochloric acid) and "vitriolic acid" (sulruric acid) or days of letting them stand open to the air in "spirit of wine" (alcohol). Many of the experiments lasted for weeks and some even for months.

  Despite the tabasheer's vegetable origins, Smithson concluded that he had found a mineral substance in the bamboo. Tabasheer appeared to be "perfectly identical with common siliceous earth." The implications, though not part of his publication (Smithson as a true Enlightenment scientist, faithful only to that which could be observed and tested, declined to speculate extensively in print), were tremendously exciting to Smithson's peers. If the organic matter of the bamboo had created the mineral matter of the tabasheer, what might that mean for the origins of the earth? Chemistry looked to be the tool that could elucidate the link and unravel the mystery. The Royal Society, convinced that "farther Analysis of this singular substance may lead to a knowledge of the Composition of flint," was pleased to announce that Smithson had signaled "his intention of resuming the subject at some future period."49

  Smithson's tabasheer paper was very well received, and his name was soon strongly identified with this publication all across Europe. Blagden promptly disseminated the results, reporting the discovery to Kirwan in Ireland and Berthollet in Paris. A notice appeared in the French Journal de Physique in December 1791, and in London the Monthly Review hailed Smithson's experiments as "very judiciously executed."50 The work continued to be referenced in the years that followed. William Thomson promoted Smithson's tabasheer discoveries in his Breve Notizia di un Viaggiatore of 1795. Robert Jameson cited Smithson's work in a paper he delivered before the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh in 1796. In 1803 the Genoa based scientist William Batt was still hailing Smithson as "the chemical Mr. Macie (who analysed the Tabaschrr)," and in 1805 likewise in his lectures on geology at the Royal Institution Humphry Davy referenced the tabasheer discoveries of "Mr. Macie."51

  Smithson's paper also stood as evidence of the strong backing that he enjoyed among the most esteemed men of British science. During the course of his investigations, he had intrigued the Royal Society elite with his analysis of this strange concretion. Henry Cavendish had contributed to the work by conducting experiments on Smithson's behalf to determine tabasheer's specific gravity (its density). Smithson communicated with Joseph Black at exactly this time, and though the letter is lost it may well have concerned his work on tabasheer.52 And at William Pitcairn's country place in Islington (the uncle of Smithson's Royal Society sponsor David Pitcairn), Sir Joseph Banks and other Royal Society luminaries traipsed with Smithson out to the glasshouses that ranged behind the house. They fanned out down the aisles, shaking and rustling the bamboo plants; Banks found one that rattled, a promising indication of the presence of tabasheer. They gathered around as Banks broke it open, Smithson reported, and were astonished to discover "not ordinary Tabasheer, but a solid pebble, about the size of half a pea… so hard as to cut glass!"53

  In the course of just a few years Smithson had established himself as a chemist to watch. He had masterfully orchestrated his arrival in the world of scientific investigation in London. He was cultivating an extensive international network, offering himself up as a correspondent, eagerly taking on new research projects, and acting as a witness and assessor of public experiments. He had joined an elite group of men working in a field that was transforming life as they knew it.

  The career of his close friend William Thomson, in contrast, the man who had helped him so much with his rapid advance, took a precipitous turn. In September 1790 Thomson hurriedly left Oxford under a cloud of scandal. Officials there wished to see him "most publically censured on a charge of suspicion" that he was guilty of "sodomy and other unnatural and detestable practices with a servant boy." The event in question had transpired some four years earlier, around the time of Smithson's last year at Oxford. No real details of the incident exist. Thomson co
nfided to a friend that he was suffering "a most scandalous imputation from an Experiment performed on a man 4 years ago." He argued vainly that his activities had all been conducted in the name of science, but Oxford soon issued its ominous ruling: "et insuper eundem expellimus, bannimus et exterminamus."54 Thomson was stripped of his studentship and his degrees, followed soon thereafter by the loss of his membership in the Royal Society and other societies. Since the time of Henry VIII sodomy was not only illegal in England, it was a crime punishable by death. The only safety lay in exile. Thomson fled from England, never to return. Smithson presumably helped his friend as best he could, perhaps sheltering him in London before he left England for the last time. After traveling the Continent, Thomson settled, appropriately enough, in Italy—a country long alluded to as "the Mother and Nurse of Sodomy," a place where "the Master is oftner intriguing with his Page than a fair Lady."55 Smithson evidently promised Thomson he would see him in Italy before too long. He was headed to Europe soon himself, for some rest and recuperation, physically exhausted after the rigors of his chemical investigations.