The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  In Paris, as Oersted discovered, the scientific community passed their days in scientific conversation and their evenings at parties. Most houses had an evening of the week when they regularly entertained; Georges Cuvier held enormous Saturday Receptions, filled with ministers, scientists, and men of letters, and Lavoisier's widow hosted concerts every fortnight, as well as salons twice a week; Smithson seems to have often hosted gatherings on Wednesdays.44 "Once you are introduced into a home," Oersted explained to his wife, "you can therefore without notice go there such an evening without grievances. You leave again when you want to without ceremony. You may stay for ¼ of an hour or two to three hours, as you like. You may therefore easily, if you want to, visit several parties in one evening."45

  Smithson's home was open to a liberal mix of scientists, philanthropists, reformers, radicals, and eccentrics, based on the calling cards and clipped signatures in the Smithsonian archives and on the inscribed books in his library. The philanthropist Comte Charles-Philibert de Lasteyrie du Saillant was apparently a regular. He had opened the first lithography workshop in France, where the illustrations for many natural history books by Cuvier and others were printed, and he was also a founder or director of the Philanthropic Society, the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, and the Society for Elementary Education.46 The elderly Jens Wolff, who had served in London as Danish consul, gave Smithson a copy of his book Runakefli le Runic Rim-stock, an investigation of the mythological figures depicted on ancient Northern wooden calendar staves. And the Italian political intriguer and firebrand César Airoldi, who had been forced into exile after the Neapolitan Revolution of 1820-21, was another who called on Smithson. He had been a dedicated mineral collector in Sicily in the late 1790s, but he was now immersed in politics, and his efforts to raise money for the cause back home made him the subject of frequent surveillance by the French police.47

  Perhaps the most curious figure known to have been in Smithson's orbit was the young Pierre Henri Joseph Baume, born in Marseilles, the son of a wigmaker freemason who had abandoned his family. Baume was excitable, naive, and somewhat paranoid, but he managed to ingratiate himself into many elite positions—from tour guide for the English explorer John Guillemard (Davies Gilbert's brother-in-law) to secretary to the cosmopolitan Count Castelcicala of the court of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Baume made himself wealthy in the meanwhile, trafficking in state secrets and acting as a debt collector for the Prince Regent. In Paris he found work through a friend whose job was making certificates of loan for the Spanish court. How Baume and Smithson came to know one another is a mystery, but they seem to have met by 1822; it is very likely that Baume was behind Smithson's purchase in 1822 of Spanish stock.48

  Awed by Smithson, Baume soon became something of a disciple. Throughout his life he called himself by a slew of false names, "Bold Honesty," "Mr. Browne," "F. Mason," "John Blunt," and many more. One of these names was F. Steward—the F standing for Faithful, reflecting Baume's self-image as a trusty companion. The initials F. S., however, also stood for yet another of his aliases: Frank Smithson. Late in life Baume came to believe that he was Smithson's illegitimate son. Years after Smithson died, he convinced himself that Smithson had fathered him "through some American connection."49

  Baume's diary offers a revealing window into Smithson's life, both for the actual information he delivers and for the perspective from which he imparted it. Most of the people known to be colleagues or associates of Smithson in Paris were famous, at least in their day; it was their signatures and calling cards that were kept by the next generation as mementoes, as indications of proximity to greatness. Their notes in the Smithsonian archives constitute the major part of what remains as evidence for the texture of Smithson's Parisian existence; it is inevitable that any portrait of that time based on them will emerge as skewed. But Baume, who believed Smithson to be one of the greats, was simply a curious, slightly sycophantic hanger-on, and a wonderfully oddball one at that. His naivete and enthusiasms—his diary is punctuated with hundreds of exclamation marks—put Smithson's views in heightened relief.

  On one afternoon Baume found Smithson enjoying the early eighteenth-century philosopher and satirist Bernard de Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Eager to follow suit, Baume picked it up, as well, but was horrified at Smithson's embrace of the theory "that virtue can lead to Decadence in an Empire; and that Vice can lead to the greatest Prosperity." Mandeville argued that altruism tended to stifle ingenuity and advancement, and that it was vice—greed, envy, and man's hunger for luxury—that stimulated invention and progress. Mandeville's philosophy foreshadowed the Utilitarianism or "greatest happiness principle" fostered by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in the 1820s. Baume, who lived a life of avowed deprivation as part of his effort to benefit others, was one of many who found Mandeville's views an affront to morality and religion.50

  On another visit to Smithson's apartments, Baume recounted that "Smithson showed me a little phial full of Viper's Venom which a scholar had sent him from America which he had collected by making them bite on a piece of glass, onto which they threw their Poison; but in spite of all Smithson's efforts by repeated experiments, he had never been able to reproduce this toxic material!"

  Baume's report is riveting first of all for the news that Smithson did after all have at least one contact in the United States. It is possible that this correspondent was Dr. John Edwards Holbrook, a professor at the Medical College of South Carolina and a leading nineteenth-century herpetologist. Holbrook as a young man had come to know a number of prominent European naturalists while at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in the early 1820s.51 Whoever the mysterious snake-venom correspondent was, Smithson had American colleagues and was engaged with the work being done to examine and catalogue the natural riches of the New World.

  But Baume's diary record is interesting as well for a glimpse of the research Smithson was conducting that was never published. Some two hundred manuscripts came to the United States in the 1830s, only to be lost a few decades later in the Smithsonian fire. Many of the discoveries of Smithson's generation brought accolades by chance or luck; frequently, a colleague had come close to the same conclusion and would have found it shortly, or had already discovered it and neglected to publish. What avenues had Smithson begun to explore, what new directions were contained in his papers? His attempted analysis of snake venom was, and still is, an incredibly ambitious experiment. His research may also have formed part of a larger inquiry into poisons generally. He had recently published a paper on the detection of "very minute quantities of arsenic and mercury," which had proved of great interest to the medical community and was referenced in the Spanish chemist Matthieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfila's landmark to me, Traite de Toxicologie, the work that launched the science of toxicology.52

  From his published work alone it is clear that Smithson's interests and his inquiries ranged over very wide spectra in these last years. In one paper he shared his invention of a small wax lamp, which he found useful when traveling, made in a china cup with a single cotton thread as a wick; in another he divulged the improvements he had made in the economical preparation of coffee and tea. He was an early examiner of the properties of some compounds of the volatile, mysterious fluorine, an element that was not properly isolated until the 1880s, and he also attempted to discern the crystallography of ice. And taking a fragment of the tomb of King Psammis, which he acquired from a man who had accompanied the famed circus strongman Giovanni Belzoni to Egypt, Smithson investigated the composition of the paint colors used by the ancient Egyptians.53

  His last major paper was a refutation of the theories linking the universal deluge and geological history, a subject gripping the scientific community in England. In 1818 the King had endowed a chair of geology at Oxford, and William Buckland, acceding to the position, had delivered a lecture to the university the following year entitled Vindiciae Geologicae; or the Connexion of Geology with
Religion Explained. It was not a lecture that Smithson would have listened to with much patience. Buckland was an adherent of catastrophism, a variant of diluvialism that sought to reconcile the biblical story of creation with the growing scientific evidence that showed the earth to be much older than a few thousand years. The deluge, in this argument, became only the most recent in a series of cataclysmic events that had destroyed the earth, and its varied plant and animal life, many times over.54

  The discovery in 1821 of the Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire, filled with fossil bones, gave Buckland an opportunity to test his theory. He concluded that the cave was the lair of hyenas that had lived in pre-diluvian times, and their bones had been covered in mud deposited by the Flood. In his flamboyant lecture style he painted a richly detailed portrait of prehistoric Yorkshire from his forensic examinations. "The hyaenas, gentlemen, preferred the flesh of elephants, rhinoceros, deer, cows, horses, & c," he told the members of the Geological Society at one dinner, "but sometimes unable to procure these & half starved they used to come out of the narrow entrance of their cave in the evening down to the water's edge of a lake wh.[ich] must once have been there, & so helped themselves to some of the innumerable water-rats in which the lake abounded …"55 The resulting book, Reliquiae Diluvianae, or Observations on the Organic Remains attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge, published in 1823, became a bestseller, and the Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal for discovering firm evidence for the Flood.

  William Buckland entering Kirkdale Cave, a caricature by fellow geologist William Conybeare.

  Granville Penn was another who took a turn at interpreting the finds of the cave. Penn was a biblical literalist, for whom there had only ever been two catastrophic events in the earth's history, the Creation and the Deluge. He believed that the bones in the cave were those of tropical animals swept across the globe and deposited there by the Flood. As the waters drained away, clusters of animals had sunk into the calcareous mud, which had eventually dried and become the Kirkdale limestone, but not before the putrefying bodies had emitted tremendous amounts of gas, pushing the limestone paste outwards to form the Kirkdale Cave.56

  Smithson weighed in decisively with a lengthy analysis of the subject, despite—as he informed the journal—not having actually seen much of Buckland's or Penn's writings. It was nevertheless better to speak out, he felt, "than to risk by silence letting a question settle to rest, while any unsupported assumptions are involved in it." He did not bother to make any great distinctions between the two men's ideas, but simply laid out an elaborate case against the entire idea of the universal deluge. And he enjoyed himself immensely while doing it. He refused to mention the Bible by name, referring to it only as "a book held by a large portion of mankind to have been written from divine inspiration." He then proceeded to query the logic of the reasoning behind the Deluge. If the Flood had left a bed of calcareous mud on England and Germany, he posited, then it must have done so all over the earth. How was it that the settlers at Botany Bay had found no limestone and had been forced to collect shells on the beach in order to make the lime that they so desperately needed to build shelters? And how had Noah and the animals reached dry land again, if all the earth was a thick layer of mire? Did they not sink in the muck? Where had the herbivorous animals found plants to eat? "What a time must have elapsed," Smithson concluded in mock distress, "before Noah could cultivate the vine!"57

  He helpfully tried to come up with a plausible geological explanation for Granville Penn's theory. All the world's volcanoes, if they had not been extinguished in the Deluge, he suggested, must have poured carbonic acid into the ocean in order to bring about conditions to allow for the solidification of the rock in so short a time; but then, he surmised with a sigh, "it is also utterly impossible to believe that the beings in the ark, already not a little inconvenienced for respiration, could withstand the suffocating effluvium."

  On a more serious note, there were two points especially that Smithson knew made his case incontrovertible. One was the "total absence in the fossil world of all human remains, of every vestige of man himself and of his arts." All the millions of men who roamed the earth before the Flood should have been found along with these bones. Evidence of their work and manufactures should have turned up as well; "embalmed within the substance of the diluvian mud, entire cities, with their monuments … would remain. Every limestone quarry should daily present us with some of these most precious of all antiquities, before which those of Italy and Egypt would shrink to nothing." Smithson's second point was that the fossil animals that had been found were clearly not those that existed at the time of the Deluge, as "the multifarious wonders of the ark had for sole object their preservation." If the animals that live today were the ones shepherded onto the ark, he argued, then examples of them too should be found in the earth.

  In "Some Observations on Mr. Penn's Theory Concerning the Formation of the Kirkdale Cave," all Smithson's musings over the question of extinction, the march of time, and man's place in the universe came to the fore—controversies that only intensified in the decades following Smithson's death. The paper was the longest he ever published, and unusual in that it was primarily a refutation of someone else's theory. His comments were nevertheless rooted in a lifetime of restless exploration and information gathering, and they reflected his disdain for the superstitions of religious authority. He buttressed his argument with references to experiments he had conducted over thirty years and to the specific geological character of places all over the world—including the Alps, the Andes, Pompeii, Carlsbad, and the Calabrian shores of Italy. Many of these places Smithson had visited personally, such as the "Stunsfield slate" region near Oxford or the sea at Dumbarton. Others he had studied vicariously, often through the crystals that had entered his cabinet via friends and correspondents, and through the travel accounts he had read.

  Smithson was fascinated with the existence of ancient civilizations and intimations of pre-history. "More than commonly incurious must he be," Smithson wrote, "who would not find delight in stemming the stream of ages, returning to times long past, and beholding the then existing state of things and of men."58 His generation had been the first to extend the age of the earth beyond its biblical conception. He had been only nineteen when he had met James Hutton in Scotland and traveled through the imagination over great expanses of geological time. Here in Paris Georges Cuvier, another catastrophist, had found in the stone quarries of Montmartre, excavated for Napoleon's massive building program, the flora and fauna of multiple lost worlds. From the bones he collected, Cuvier had reconstructed the skeletal forms of strange and exotic beasts that had once walked the earth, turning the globe that had popularly nurtured an Edenic fore-story into an alien place of wild and woolly monsters. The work elevated him as a giant in the public's eyes—though his ever-expanding girth also contributed to his nickname "the Mammoth." Balzac called him nothing less than the "greatest poet of our century" for having "rebuilt cities by means of teeth, peopled anew a thousand forests with all the wonders of zoology thanks to a few chips of coal and rediscovered races of giants in a mammoth's foot."59

  Smithson had an agile mind, and he had spent a lifetime making observations and weighing evidence. He had repeatedly been confronted with rapidly changing realities and huge shifts in scientific understanding, such that he had little trouble envisioning change occurring over periods of millennia, rather than just centuries. In a letter to Lord Holland, written from the Continent during the Napoleonic Wars and musing on the fate of France, he entwined geological time and the development of society:

  The disposition of a nation alters as slowly as the climate of their country, and probably with it. … When the Romans expelled their kings, it was a fierce banditti, grown numerous which rose against its captain, & continued their predatory excursions under several leaders. When the Romans submitted to their Emperors, not only civilization and the afflux of strangers had insensibly produced a new people, but nature herself had
worked towards the change. The volcanic mountains round Rome had probably smouldered down, their forests, their snows, their glaciers, had probably disappeared, the Tiber had ceased to freeze, and the present climate of Rome had succeeded to that of the Alps.60

  Smithson's Kirkdale paper was above all a cogent and passionate defense of a life dedicated to knowledge. This was, ultimately, his reason for speaking up, and in it he made his most powerful articulation of the Enlightenment ethos that had guided his life. "It is in his knowledge that man has found his greatness and his happiness, the high superiority which he holds over the other animals who inhabit the earth with him," he argued. "No ignorance is probably without loss to him, no error without evil …"

  But the brilliant discoveries of Smithson's generation had altered the way that man inhabited the world in more ways than one. Peering out into the sublime vastness of the solar system, imagining a tumble through the abyss of geological time, Smithson and his contemporaries could not help but think, too, of how infinitesimal the moment of their own existence now appeared. To the Romantic soul, how futile seemed the span of an individual life. "We wonder, crushed as we are under so many worlds in ruin," Balzac mused, "what can our glories avail, our hatreds and our loves, and if it is worth living at all if we are to become, for future generations, an imperceptible speck in the past."61 Against this smallness, Smithson and his friends dreamed of posterity. They hungered for fame and for utility, and they hoped for a lasting monument.

  Within the year he headed to London to write his will. He had been back to London at least once before, in 1820, to probate the will of his brother, who had died aged forty-nine—after a particularly brutal winter in Paris, the first time the Seine had frozen in nearly forty years.62 They had buried him at the new cemetery of Pere Lachaise, on the eastern outskirts of Paris, one of the only places available for Protestant burials in France. Dickenson had entrusted his estate to Smithson, rather than his partner Mary Ann, the mother of his son; and he had left instructions for Smithson to provide for Henry James, who was then a teenager in school, "in such manner as shall appear best to my Brother. "63 This Smithson had evidently done, and more as well; sometime between 1822 and 1825 Henry James Dickenson had at Smithson's request changed his name to Henry James Hungerford.64 The name change probably reflected Smithson's decision to leave his fortune to his nephew and to that young man's future heirs. It is logical to assume that this much of the thinking behind his bequest, at least, Smithson discussed with his nephew. In the spring of 1825 he headed back to London to prepare his papers.