The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Smithson clearly left as well; Walter Johnson's 1844 article noted that Smithson's diaries chronicled various "tours on the continent, of which, one was made from Geneva to Italy, through the Tyrol, in 1792." But when finally did he decide that Paris was no longer such a good place to be? And what of his intention, as he had once told Greville, to visit "those provinces famous for their minerals" in the countryside of France, en route?16

  The places that beckoned were probably the extinct volcanoes of the Auvergne, charted already by Smithson's friend the Abbe Soulavie in his multi-volume work. The basaltic formations of the Velay and the Vivarais, to the east of the Auvergne, which had been explored by the notorious Faujas de St. Fond, were surely high on Smithson's list as well. There was also the scientific court in Dijon, commanded by Guyton de Morveau, one of Lavoisier's collaborators and an intimate correspondent of Smithson's old mentor, Richard Kirwan.

  Hoare's made three payments to the French banking house Perregaux & Co., on August 6, and again on September 4 and 11, repaying advances that had been made to Smithson. These indicate that Smithson was probably still in Paris into September, as the city descended into chaos. The streets resounded with the tolling of the tocsin; a steady drum beat called the men to arms, and alarm guns fired to warn of approaching threats. On August 10 the crowds stormed the Tuileries palace, slaughtering the Swiss Guards and taking the royal family hostage. The first days of September brought the massacres in the Paris prisons, where more than one thousand people, many of them clergymen, were brutally murdered. In the narrow streets by Smithson's hotel the mob surrounded carriages carrying twenty-three priests to the prison at St. Germain. They dragged the white-robed clerics out and slaughtered them, before the massacres moved inside to the prison. After peremptory trials by a "people's court," lasting each about a minute, hundreds of "conspirators and traitors" met their deaths by pike and saber. All night by the light of great bonfires in the courtyard, the bodies mounted. For five days and nights the same scene repeated itself throughout the city—at the convents of the Carmelites, La Force, La Salpetriére, and Bicêtre.17 Smithson's friend the crystallographer Abbe Haüy, who like many clerics had been imprisoned after refusing to swear to the civil constitution, was saved only by the indefatigable petitioning of his student Geoffroy St. Hillaire. A few weeks later, on September 21, the monarchy was abolished. The following day was declared day one of Year I of the Republic. On September 24, Hoare's paid out £200 and change for Ransom & Co. notes, the eighteenth-century equivalent of traveler's checks. These notes were the means by which Smithson traveled when he was not in Paris or Rome—both cities that had a large English community and established bankers focused on that clientele. They would seem to indicate that he was by then on the move.

  Records in Dijon, where Smithson might have stopped to see Guyton de Morveau and the Académie des Sciences there, yield nothing. No trace of Smithson's movements can be found in the archives for the Canton de Vaud or other Swiss repositories that contain passport control documentation. Throughout the summer of 1792 the lakeside towns of Geneva, Lausanne, and Evian continued to serve as a playground for England's wealthy, as they had for many summers prior. William Beckford was there with his four carriages, thirty horses, and a yacht on the lake. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, too, was present, traveling in the area with her mother and her best friend Lady Bess Foster. Edward Gibbon, who had recently completed the final volume of his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, lived nearby in a mansion with a vista over vineyards and the lake to the distant heights of the Savoy. He occasionally came to Georgiana's salons, where there was "much talk about chemistry & mineralogy." The duchess claimed that her "favourites of all favourites [wa]s mineralogy," and a series of scientists traipsed through her parlor to give lectures and demonstrations. Georgiana's exposure to science profoundly changed her, and she told a friend that "she now came to town with very different ideas from her former ones, to see the men of science and eminence."18 (Not all fashionable women were so enamored; Lady Frances Ann Crewe, in Paris before the Revolution, was astounded at all the lectures on offer, and complained, "what, for God's Sake, have we poor women to do with Chimistry or Anatomy or rather what have we, or even the other Sex, to do with five or six sciences at once? It is indeed very extraordinary to observe the Present Rage for both Frivolité and belle Esprit."19)

  Science was a pleasing distraction from the looming political turmoil. In the summer of 1792, as evidence piled up that the Revolution was taking a bloody, anarchic turn, and talk of Britain entering the war swirled through the salons, those enamored of chemistry were gripped by news of "animal electricity." The Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, observing a dissected frog that he had hung on an iron railing—by a pair of brass hooks attached to its spinal cord—twitch wildly, believed he had found proof of an electrical fluid coursing through the nerves of the frog. News of Galvani's experiment, the origin of the verb of galvanize, spread like wildfire, and countless demonstrators began replicating the experiments across Europe. Blagden in Switzerland went to witness "the experiments on nerves by Mr. Schmuck." Lady Webster (later Lady Holland) saw the phenomenon at an elegant dinner in Turin, where the host before the meal "sent for one of the Professors." Usually avidly interested in the latest scientific discoveries, she was appalled by "the cruel experiment upon a frog to prove animal electricity." Smithson must have been among those who witnessed a demonstration, and he probably set about replicating the experiments, as most of his scientific colleagues did, in order to investigate the phenomenon for himself. Blagden, for example, back in his rooms in Geneva, made his frog's legs jump, happily concluding in his diary, "Dr. Schmuck not a charlatan."20

  A secret life force had been unveiled, and Smithson's community quickly began to examine the potential applications of such a discovery. Idealistic medical experimenters like Thomas Beddoes hoped to employ the power of animal electricity "so as to excite a new system of medicine."21 And galvanism seemed to make real the possibility of reanimating a corpse, a notion that captivated the public imagination and ultimately inspired Mary Shelley to Frankenstein in 1817.

  Galvani's theories were quickly challenged by Alessandro Volta, who developed the idea that the reaction originated not with a vital fluid in the nerves of the frog, but rather by the contact of certain dissimilar metals. A fierce controversy ensued, leading ultimately to Volta's invention in 1800 of the first electric battery (pairs of copper or silver and zinc or tin discs separated by pasteboard soaked in water). The battery, or voltaic pile, was found to readily decompose water; and Humphry Davy, in the first years of the new century, turned it into a powerful new experimental tool—successfully isolating a number of elements with the use of an electric current, by breaking down substances that had previously been considered already at their most elemental level. The battery became nothing less than a brand new lens on the nature of matter, a window to the world of the invisible. Davy told Coleridge that his discoveries "seem to lead to the door of the temple of the mysterious god of Life."22

  But for Smithson, in the midst of traveling, the uneasy political situation probably continued to impinge on any opportunities for prolonged scientific research. Switzerland soon lost its sense of a safe haven. William Beckford, moving towards Italy in late 1792, reported that he was "obliged to cross over the lake in a violent hurry, for all Savoy is bedivelled [sic] and bejacobinized, and plundering, ravaging, etc., is going on swimmingly."23 The Duchess of Devonshire's mother was likewise terrified during her travels. "Everything in these countries is in the greatest confusion," she wrote as she passed from Switzerland down into Italy. "The whole road and every Inn full of troops marching to the frontier."24 By the autumn the only way to get to Italy was to pass through the Tyrol. Smithson did just that, as Walter Johnson's perusal of Smithson's diaries in 1844 showed.

  Luigi Galvani's experiments to showcase "animal electricity. "

  Smithson's Tyrolean travel appears not to have been as fretful an
d hurried as most of his countrymen's journeys, however. He probably would have chosen this route even if the perils of wartime had not foisted it upon him, as the scientific communities in Paris and Geneva were abuzz over new discoveries in the southern Alps. Smithson's geologist friend Déodat de Dolomieu had recently determined that these towering white peaks of crystalline stone were not actually marble, as had long been assumed. Although the rock shared the same crystal structure as calcite, it did not react chemically the same way that marble (calcareous earth) should, suggesting that it was an entirely different substance. Dolomieu's findings had stunned Paris, because they called into question the French reliance on crystallography or crystal structure as the primary identification system for minerals. De Saussure's son boldly named this new substance "dolomite," and this region of the Alps became the Dolomites, in honor of Dolomieu's discovery.25 Smithson passing through gathered as many good specimens as he could. Eager to impress all the learned men he was soon to meet, he planned to bestow these novelties, like precious jewels, on the collectors he encountered in his travels.26

  II. Italy

  Bello dev'essere l'acquisto fatto del diamante, ma molto piu bello e quello dell'amicizia del Sre Macie, che e il piu accurato di tutti i chimici che io conosco—dunque coltivatelo, e specialmente per la cristallografia. [Congratulations on getting the diamond, but how much more exquisite is the acquisition of Mr. Macie's friendship! He is the most accurate chemist I know, so be sure to get to know him, especially for crystallography.]

  —William Thomson to Ottaviano Targioni-Tozzetti, 1793

  Smithson's old Oxford friend William Thomson, who had hastily fled England in the autumn of 1790, was now settled at Naples, in the shadow of Vesuvius. Refashioning himself as Guglielmo Thomson, he had successfully inserted himself into the fabric of the community. The whiff of scandal had left him, and the Italians lauded him as "gia di Oxford"—once a lecturer at Oxford. He had secured a position as physician extraordinary to the Pope, and he was hailed as a celebrated doctor in one of the premiere destinations for the recuperating English. No one questioned why he was there. He was a scientist living at the foot of nature's original chemistry set, positioned to be the first to comb through any finds from the mountain, and he was already becoming renowned for his collection of volcanic specimens.27

  Thomson had been waiting for Smithson for nearly two years. When Smithson left England in late 1791 he intended to travel fairly swiftly through France down to Italy. Vesuvius, providing frequent pyrotechnical displays, beckoned, and the gentle Mediterranean air awaited him. Even when Smithson dallied in Paris, finding the weather salubrious and the revolutionary spectacle a cause worthy for delay, his plan remained to get to Naples by the winter of 1792–3. "It is my intention to spend next winter in Italy probably at Naples," Smithson wrote to Charles Greville on New Year's Day 1792, "and of course therefore a letter to your uncle will confer an obligation on me."28 But, as so often happened on the Grand Tour, where itineraries were fluid and travel lasted years, plans did not unfold as expected. Smithson probably did not see Naples until the very end of 1793 or the beginning of 1794, if he got there at all.

  It was July 1793 before Thomson finally received word of Smithson's whereabouts. The news was second hand, coming not from Smithson but rather from Ottaviano Targioni-Tozzetti, the professor of botany at the university in Florence—a letter that indicated Smithson had fallen in with the worthy scienziati in Florence, the men of the Accademia dei Georgofili. Thomson wrote back immediately to Targioni-Tozzetti, enclosing a letter to Smithson. He took another sheet to write to Giovanni Fabbroni, the number two in command at the museum and the most important member of Thomson's circle of colleagues in Florence. "Have you met Macie yet?" he inquired. "You must get to know him."29

  While Thomson busied himself in Naples trying to orchestrate Smithson's reception in Florence, Smithson found himself already welcomed. Here in Tuscany the revolutionary tumult that had waylaid Parisian science had not yet infected the populace. Smithson discovered a thriving community of scientists, a place where he could focus with his colleagues wholly on his scientific work. The late Grand Duke of Tuscany, the philosopher-king Pietro Leopoldo, who had departed for Vienna in 1790 to assume the throne following the death of his brother the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, had been a great patron to science. The Imperial Muséum of Physics and Natural History he had established in 1775 was already the most important scientific research center in the region and one of the largest museums in the world at the time. Located next to the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens, it featured an astronomical observatory equipped with the finest English instruments. The museum also operated a large chemical laboratory, a library, a botanical garden, and an extensive and much-heralded wax model worksho p. Several rooms at the museum were devoted to the display of these anatomical wax figure productions, which were as popular with tourists as they were with the medical students for whom they were created. In velvet-cushioned cases models like Madonnas from a Guido Reni painting-made-flesh reclined, their long hair cascading over shapely shoulders, their waxen stomachs split open, delicately exposing entrails for curious students. An entire room showcased pregnant torsos in various stages of giving birth, a graphic display that riveted Smithson's brother Henry Louis Dickenson when he passed through Italy.30

  The Florentine circle of savants was as collegial as the coffeehouse community that Smithson had left behind in London. Smithson passed long hours in conversation with Ottaviano Targioni-Tozzetti, who shared Smithson's passion for mineralogy. He also breakfasted frequently with Giovanni Fabbroni, a classic Italian exemplar of the late Enlightenment man—a multi-lingual hub of information, pursuing knowledge in numerous branches of science, with correspondents in every major city. Fabbroni, when the museum was first being established in the late 1770s, had made a state-sponsored trip to survey the scientific communities in France and England, during which time he had become friends with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas jefferson; Fabbroni's contemporary biographer even alleged that Jefferson had picked the name Monticello for his estate from a small village near Florence, in homage to Fabbroni.31 Fabbroni had recently been one of those privileged to receive a copy of Notes of Virginia, Jefferson's pungent riposte to the Comte de Button's accusations of the degeneration of species in North America. In it Jefferson described the varied geography and climate of the United States, compared its flora and fauna with that of the Old World, and detailed the variety of native cultures and languages, the mysteries of geological formations, and the discovery of mammoth bones and teeth. The book laid out many of the issues that would dominate American science for the next several generations.32

  The riches and the enormity of America were undoubtedly a topic of fascination in those salons Smithson frequented in Florence. The raw natural abundance of the land, which stood in such stark contrast to Europe, seemed a fitting metaphor for the fertile democratic experiment the United States was undertaking. Fabbroni had told Jefferson that he very much wanted to visit the "happy republic" of America.33 Smithson's curiosity was evident in the marks he made in a two-volume guidebook to North America that he owned. He noted descriptions of "virgin copper … as pure as if it had passed through fire" from an island near Niagara; he commented on the architectural arrangements of slave plantations; and he even marked a logistical detail—as if he were making travel plans for himself—recommending the purchase of one's traveling equipage at Montreal if one intended to journey up the St. Lawrence. Smithson seems to have been particularly fascinated by stories of Native Americans, who were often viewed as America's own Rousseau-like primitives; he underscored the accounts of those men singled out by their desire for education and improvement, like the story of the six-foot-tall "Captain Thomas [Williams, or Te-ho-ra-gwa-ne-gen], a chief of the Cachenonaga natron [Caughnewaga in Quebec]," who spoke French and English and dressed like a white man, but who was not as respected as might have been a chief who had retained the habits of his nation. He al
so marked the story of the Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant, who had become close friends with Smithson's half-brother Lord Percy, with whom he had served in the British Army during the Revolutionary War.34

  To the scientific men of Florence, their city was a near equivalent of America's "happy republic"—a prosperous, peaceful place where science could be successfully pursued. In Florence, furthermore, it was well funded. The Grand Duke, Fabbroni had told Jefferson, had been "the most humane prince in the universe" and Fabbroni had even named his son Pietro Leopoldo in gratitude.35 Florence became something of an oasis for Smithson, too; he based himself here for much of the roughly three years he was in Italy, later finding, in addition to the thriving scientific community, an alluring group of liberty-loving English aristocrats.

  In late 1793, though, after about six months in Florence, he set out towards Rome, on a roundabout itinerary in order to take in Livorno (or Leghorn, as the English called it), where he had heard there was a good mineral dealer. He was determined to continue his scientific tour, despite the rising political panic. The year had seen the guillotining of both the King and subsequently the Queen of France, and France's Revolution was rapidly turning into a world war; Britain had entered the fray in February, and Holland and Spain had followed soon thereafter.

  In late 1793 Livorno, perched on the west coast of Italy, provided a clear vantage from which to survey the frightening progress of the war. The siege of the port town of Toulon, one of several cities in southern France staging counterrevolutionary uprisings throughout the summer, was preoccupying the British consul at Livorno, John Udny; England had gained control of the city in late August without firing a single shot, but was now on the verge of being forced to relinquish it (in a battle that proved one of the first triumphs for a young Corsican brigadier named Napoleon). In Florence Lord Hervey, the fanatically anti-French envoy-extraordinary to the Tuscan court, bullied the Grand Duke to renounce neutrality and eject the French minister and all "suspected Persons, Emissaries, Adherents or Partizans of the Regicide faction" in exchange for British protection of the Tuscan state.36