The Lost World of James Smithson
Page 16
Like all chemists of his age, Smithson used his own body extensively as an instrument for experimentation. When faced with an unidentified substance, an eighteenth-century chemist drew first from his own physical arsenal, relying upon tests of touch, smell, and taste. Perhaps the best-known body-altering experiments of the era were those that Thomas Beddoes and Humphry Davy conducted with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, at their Pneumatic Institution in Bristol in the late 1790s. The St. Thomas' Hospital doctor George Fordyce, together with Joseph Banks, Charles Blagden, and others, conducted experiments in 1775 on human physiology in the face of extreme heat. Crammed into Fordyce's tiny experimental chamber, fully clothed, they measured how long they could expose themselves to temperatures of 150, and then 160 degrees. As the day wore on they stoked the cast-iron stove so hot that all but one of the primitive mercury thermometers eventually broke, their ivory cases buckling in the 200-degree-plus heat.56 Smithson, when he began his experiments on tabasheer, employed all his senses to make a preliminary description of this foreign matter. He explained that it "could not be broken by pressure between the fingers; but by the teeth it was easily reduced to powder. On first chewing it felt gritty, but soon ground to impalpable particles. Applied to the tongue, it adhered to it by capillary attraction. It had a disagreeable taste, something like that of magnesia." Another of the parcels, when heated, "emitted a smell something like tobacco ashes, but not the kind of perfume discovered in that [specimen originating] from Hyderabad." Smithson's research throughout his life was littered with such observations. Analysis that depended on the senses—"No foetid animal smell was perceived during the combustion'57—provided essential clues for the identification of substances.
Such methods imposed a harsh price on the health of the practitioners. A quick survey of Smithson's friends provides ample evidence of the perilous demands of life in the laboratory. The French chemist Pierre-Louis Dulong lost an eye and two fingers in the discovery of "le chlorure d'azote" (the explosive nitrogen trichloride). Humphry Davy following up on Dulong's experiments triggered a similar explosion, sending a shard of glass slashing through his cornea; he was lucky not to have lost the eye completely. Likewise Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was nearly blinded in his laboratory experimenting with caustic potash (potassium hydroxide), an accident which after a long period of suffering eventually caused his death. And the pharmacist-chemist Bertrand Pelletier was badly burned during his experiments with phosphorus after his clothes caught fire.58 Smithson had a fairly delicate constitution to begin with, and it was not long before his chosen vocation began to take its toll.
It is likely that Smithson, as an inquisitive chemist, often self-medicated. For eighteenth-century scientists the body was another vessel to tinker with, a container of chemical events. Among the items in the Smithson Collection at the Smithsonian Archives is a "receipt book" filled with recipes for treatments such as Cox's Hive Syrup (which caused "Vomiting, Purging & Sweating'), Dr. Clarke's and Justice Bayley's Dinner Pills, an unguent for Hemorrhoids, and an Italian "Mistura per Gonorrhea."59 Smithson's annotations in his cookbooks and his publication on "an improved method of making coffee" make clear that he commonly applied his laboratory talents in other arenas as well. He stayed abreast of all the latest medical ideas, becoming a fan, for example, of Brunonianism, the cultish theory of excitability that swept through Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Brunonianism was the brainchild of Edinburgh medical man John Brown, who alleged that all diseases were due to an imbalance of nervous system energy and could be treated either by chemical stimulation or by depletion through purging or blood-letting. To one witty contemporary it was the idea that "human bodies are like lighted tapers in a constant state of Combustion," and he joked that "if this be true, Jesus how I pity the poor sweet Princess Royal! What a long time that large, fat, lubberly Husband of hers, the Duke of Wirtemberg, will take in consuming!"60 Smithson, who probably tinkered at length with regulating his own system, unabashedly offered advice on medical issues to his friends. "I hope that you have found that I was right; that the formidable part of disorders, of which you complained when I waited on you last," he told Lady Holland, "was not quite as grave and real as you seemed then to apprehend, & that you have long since lost sight of all the black spots."61
By the autumn of 1791 Smithson was so ill that he had very nearly lost his hearing.62 He could not face another winter like the two that had preceded it. In 1789, with the thermometer reading eleven below zero, the Thames had completely frozen. A frost fair had been erected on the ice beyond London Bridge, and newspapers trumpeted tales of gaiety, but many lost their lives in the cold.63 A year later the river had flooded well beyond any previous known heights. Solicitors had been ferried to their appointments at the law courts in little boats atop the engorged river. Millenarians feared that the apocalyptic weather patterns were retribution for the growing political tumult. That winter had seen, Adam Walker told a friend, "the most variable weather ever known in this variable Island: Thunder Lightning, Rain, frost & wind, have taken place every 24 hours for the above time. … Much mischief has been done to the land & sea, & great alarms still possess the People."64
Smithson settled on a sojourn to the Continent to heal himself. The fresh air of the Mediterranean offered a time-honored cure for bronchial infections and other ailments. As part of his recuperation, he would probably have intended to devote a year or more to taking in the pleasures and antiquities of Europe. Such a trip, a Grand Tour, was a rite of passage for young English men of rank, an essential component of their gentlemanly education. And for one like Smithson so focused on his pretensions to the aristocracy, the Grand Tour would have provided him an appropriately cultured patina, as well as exposure to the best circles in Europe.
Smithson may well have planned to travel with his half-sister, Philadelphia Percy, another of the duke's illegitimate offspring. She was also ill, weak with consumption, and headed for the sunny south of France "for the recovery of her health" in the fall of 1791. Perhaps they set off together; it's not possible to know for certain. The journey ended in tragedy, however, with her death en route to Southampton to cross the Channel. She was buried at Westminster Abbéy at the end of November. Her casket was adorned with white feathers and white silk, symbols of chastity and purity, and it was laid to rest in a vault not far from that of her father, the Duke of Northumberland. Smithson's other half-sister Dorothy, when she died a few years later, while he was still abroad, was also buried at Westminster Abbéy.65
Smithson remained close to their unacknowledged mother, Margaret Marriott, his entire life. At the time of her death in 1827, she entrusted Smithson with much of the childhood ephemera of these two girls, including their portraits, charging him in essence to be the guardian of their memory. And in her will Margaret Marriott carefully specified the details for her own funeral and burial. She wished her service to be celebrated exactly as those of Philadelphia and Dorothy had been performed, with the exception only that "Black feathers and Silk instead of White" be used. Most especially she desired to be interred in Westminster Abbéy in the same vault with her "beloved" girls. The request would not be granted.66
Smithson, when he left finally for the Continent, enfeebled and unwell, probably also went with a heavy heart.
SIX
Grand Tour, 1791-1797
I. Paris
I consider a nation with a king as a man who takes a lion as a guard-dog—if he knocks out his teeth he renders him useless, while if he leaves the lion his teeth the lion eats him.
—Smithson to Davies Giddy, May 1792
SMITHSON RETURNED TO the narrow streets clustered in the shadow of the Abbey of St. Germain, taking lodgings at the Hotel du Piarc-Royal, just around the corner from where he had stayed with Charles Greville three years earlier. The weather was fresh and "exceedingly mild." The soft thin light of a gentle winter invigorated him, and he soon changed his plans in order to stay through to the spring. "I find myself better than in L
ondon," Smithson told Greville, "and have entirely recovered my hearing which I had nearly lost since several months."1
The setting was the same, but the Revolution had utterly transformed everyday life. The Church, deemed to be in conflict with the new ideals of a nation dedicated to liberty, was rapidly being dismantled. New civic rituals replaced religious tradition. Monastic vows were ended, and men of the cloth forced to swear on the new constitution. Sainte Genevieve, the church of Paris' patron saint, had been transformed into the Pantheon, a temple to the martyrs of the Revolution and the civic heroes of the country; thousands had crowded the streets when Voltaire's remains were paraded up the cobbled hill in July 1791 to be interred there. "The church is now here quite unacknowledged by the state," Smithson wrote home, "and is indeed allowed to exist only till they have leisure to give it the final death-stroke."2
A year after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the abolition of feudalism, the National Assembly in August 1790 had eliminated the wearing of all decorations based on birth. The city that had long been the center of a hierarchy visibly promulgated through fashion—the lavish colors, the expensive lace, the latest cuts, the quality of cloth and the amount of adornment—suddenly began to shun distinction. Those in official positions donned tricolor sashes, a signal attribute that was easily removable. The tricolor cockade, worn by everyone in sympathy with the Revolution, quickly became popular among the English visitors as well. "Mr. Davis, high sheriff for Dorsetshire, left this town today," Smithson wrote to Davies Giddy, who had recently been appointed high sheriff for Cornwall, "and takes with him, it seems, a quantity of tricolor ribbon to deck his men with the French national cockades, and I do not think this example unworthy of imitation by those whose principles lead them to consider with indifference and contempt the frowns of the court party, to whom, doubtless, the mixture of red, white, and blue is an object of horror."3
The nobility as a class was abolished, too. Titles, the word "de" as part of one's name, liveries, and all armorial bearings were banned. The Due de Lauzan renounced all his privileges to become Citoyen-General Biron. The Due d'Orleans rechristened himself Philippe Egalite. Primogeniture was abolished. There was talk, too, of abandoning the distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy. "Offspring of a sentimental union are sacred by nature," declared the ex-monk Chabot in 1793. Cambaceres also saw the distinction "as a vestige of ignorance and superstition."4 These discussions had a profound resonance for Smithson. Here finally he was witnessing the rebirth of a nation predicated on the idea that the circumstances of birth should not dictate one's path in life. "What kind of office," asked Tom Paine, "must that be in a government which requires for its execution neither experience nor ability, that may be abandoned to the desperate chance of birth, that may be filled by an idiot, a madman, a tyrant, with equal effect as by the good, the virtuous, and the wise?"5 The King, who had humiliated himself with his attempted flight dressed as a valet in the summer of 1791, was in Smithson's eyes "a contemptible encumbrance." He hoped that "other nations at the time of their reforms" would also rid themselves of their monarchs.6
The National Assembly had finally succeeded in drafting a constitution in September 1791, and equality was now the theme of the future. Smithson had entered into a world where the crisis of identity that had gripped his childhood no longer ruled. He was filled with the language of enraptured republicans, the Dissenters who had joined the corresponding societies back in England and the radical Whig aristocratic followers of Charles James Fox, who had declared in the spring of 1791 that the French Revolution was "much the greatest event … that ever happened in the world."7 The events in France "will compel great changes in every part of the globe," Smithson wrote to Greville back in London. James Watt, Jr., the son of the Lunar Society member and steam engine improver, who was also in Paris in 1792, likewise spoke of the import French actions had, "not merely for the liberty of their country, but for the defence of the liberties of mankind."8
James Watt, Jr., was traveling with Thomas Cooper, a member, like Smithson, of the Coffee House Philosophical Society. The two men presented a message to the people of France from the Constitutional Society of Manchester, one of many groups that had sprung up in England in support of the Revolution and principles of liberty; they expressed their desire to help build the foundations for "the Empire of Peace, and the happiness of Mankind." In April 1792 the two men were some of the stars of a triumphal parade in Paris, the largest civil ceremony the new regime had yet seen.9 Their actions were widely publicized, and Edmund Burke condemned Watt and Cooper and other English Jacobins in Parliament. Fury at revolutionary sympathizers led to the passage of the Traitorous Correspondence Act of 1793, and trials for treason and sedition in London in 1794. Watt managed to return safely to work in England, but Cooper emigrated to the United States, as his mentor Joseph Priestley did soon thereafter. Decades later, from South Carolina, he would advise the U.S. Congress on the disposition of the Smithson bequest.10
Smithson, like these radicalized chemists and the Dissenting intellectuals who were their inspiration, wholeheartedly embraced the Revolution and its power to stand as a model for the rest of the world. Just as the radical Dissenting minister Richard Price had rejoiced "to see a diffusion of knowledge, which has undermined superstition and error … and nations panting for liberty," so Smithson did not see "what will conquer and restore to ignorance fifteen millions of people resolved upon success or death." A tolerant France, extending "its arm to the native of every latitude, to the sectories of every religion," would quickly outstrip all other countries in its progress. "Other nations can possibly maintain any competition with it," Smithson was convinced, "only by emulating and, if possible, exceeding it in its improvements."11
The abolition of inherited privilege, so exhilarating to Smithson and his fellow English Jacobins, struck fear in the hearts of many. Far off in Italy Vesuvius was enjoying a period of great activity, and the erupting volcano became a fitting metaphor for the events unfolding in Paris, regardless of how one perceived the Revolution. Smithson, thoroughly captivated, regretted missing Vesuvius, but he found consolation in the fact that:
I am here on the brink of the crater of a great volcano, from whence lavas are daily issuing, but whose effects are widely different from those of the other that is laying waste one of the finest countries in the world [and] is threatening with ruin the noblest efforts of human art. While this on the contrary is consolidating the throne of justice and reason, pours its destruction only on erroneous or corrupt institutions, overthrows not fine statues & amphitheatres, but monks and convents.12
For the cautious American ambassador Gouverneur Morris, the metaphorical eruption was distinctly more ominous. "We now stand on a Volcano," he told Jefferson, "we feel it tremble and we hear it roar but how and when and where it will burst and who maybe destroy'd by its Eruptions is beyond the Ken of mortal Foresight to discover."13
The Revolution threw the scientific world of Paris, with its longstanding, highly oiled system of patronage, into chaos. Little attention could be devoted to research. The future of the royally funded Jardin du Roi and Académie des Sciences seemed tenuous at best. In the fall of 1790 the naturalists at the Jardin were permitted by the Assembly to draw up a proposal for their own reform. They envisioned a new Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, a large multi-disciplined research and teaching institute, a great foundation dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge, with salaried professors and a collective approach to decision-making. But the turbulent political situation prevented the proposal from even being heard before 1793. Money allocated for the Jardin became scarce and erratic, and Paris' once cohesive community of scientists grew fractious and competitive. Balthazar-Georges Sage, for example, tried to capture the mineral collections from the Jardin for his own purview over at the Ecole des Mines. Throughout the first eight months of 1792, while Smithson was in Paris, the post of superintendent of the Jardin remained vacant. Many scientists, driven
by the same zeal for the public good that had guided their scientific work, took to the embryonic political system. The Marquis de Condorcet, the permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences, was only the most famous of these. The chemist Antoine Fourcroy and the naturalist the Comte de Lacepédé were others. Berthollet removed himself to his place in the country outside Paris to work in tranquility, as he explained to a friend, but he found himself instead "continually distraught."14
The advance of the Revolution menaced every crown in Europe. They soon banded together to try to restore the French King to his throne, and Paris prepared both to defend itself and to export its message across the Continent. "Immense preparations are making for the war with the Princes," Smithson told Greville at the beginning of 1792. On April 20 that year France declared war on Francis II, King of Bohemia and Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor. By the summer the allied forces had invaded. They routed the French in the first battles, and Paris, threatened and exposed, descended into turmoil. As men went off to the front, the city fearfully turned on its own, looking to rid itself of any internal enemies, the better to fight the enemy advancing. It became increasingly difficult for those, like Smithson, who were identifiably gentlemen to stay in safety, regardless of their Jacobin leanings. The tricolor, long a popular token of revolutionary sympathy, became a compulsory part of one's costume; Arthur Young traveling in France pinned his on too carelessly and it blew off, subjecting him to the challenges and general hostility of a large crowd. A steady emptying of foreigners and French nobility from the city became by the summer a run.
Smithson's Royal Society friends Charles Blagden and Smithson Tennant headed for Switzerland on August 9, 1792—unwittingly the day before the massacre at the Tuileries and the taking of the royal family.15