Reading the Rocks

by Brenda Maddox

  Mantell was born in the same stretch of southeastern England which inspired Conybeare, De la Beche, Buckland and Mary Anning. He appreciated the importance of Anning’s work, especially the ichthyosaur she found in 1811. His own first discovery, when he was a schoolboy, was an ammonite. He saw the rocky spiral-shaped fossil as a ‘petrified serpent’.4 The ammonite was the beginning of what became the admired ‘Mantellian collection’.

  Mantell was a tall, pleasant-looking, slender-faced man, whose dark hair suggested the family’s Norman origin many centuries back. In his hometown of Lewes, the name was pronounced with the accent on the first syllable: ‘Mantle’, as if it were a cloak. Gideon’s father was a shoemaker from a working-class family of Dissenters. Thus as a boy Gideon could not attend Church of England schools and had no hope of university. From the start he knew he had to find a trade. The solution was to become apprentice to the Lewes surgeon James Moore.

  He had formally entered the London geological world in 1813 when he was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, where he had read a paper on a fossil found in the Upper Chalk near Lewes. He consolidated his position in 1814 when he met George Bellas Greenough, the founding president of the Geological Society. In 1816, aged twenty-six, at St Marylebone Church, Mantell wed the young and beautiful Mary Ann Woodhouse, the daughter of one of his first patients. He took her back with him to Lewes for what would turn out to be a stormy marriage.

  Shortly after the birth of their first son, in March 1820, Mantell learned that two years earlier he had been elected a fellow of the Geological Society, but somehow had never been notified of the honour.5 Charles Lyell also entered his life at that time. Rock-hunting in west Sussex in 1821, Lyell was directed by some labourers to ‘a monstrous clever man in Lewes, a doctor’ who knew all about fossils and who dug curios out of the cliffs with which to make medicine, or, as they called it, ‘physic’.6 Mantell was delighted to meet the fine-looking young Scot and the two men sat up until the small hours talking geology. Mantell was impressed by Lyell’s knowledge of rock formations in France and Italy. (They may have discussed Lyell’s conviction that Britain had once been connected to France by a land bridge which, eroded over time by in-flowing currents of the North Sea, gave way to the Straits of Dover7 – a view derived from Werner and Buckland, among others.)

  Mantell’s Fossils of the South Downs announced something that had not been widely realised before: that the beds from the area known as ‘The Weald’ (Old English for ‘forest’), covering roughly the chalk escarpments between the North and South Downs, were of freshwater origin. Lyell so admired the book that he mentioned it in each edition of his Principles of Geology.

  Tilgate Forest near Cuckfield, a west Sussex village on the coach route from Brighton to London, was Mantell’s favoured locality for exploration. It was there in 1825 that he made the most significant discovery of his life. According to a story familiar in the history of geology, it was his wife who made it. Mary Mantell, who illustrated Fossils of the South Downs, was waiting for her husband to return from a medical call when she saw on the roadside a giant tooth embedded in a piece of rock. She was well aware that her husband had been collecting such relics and bones, with the anatomist’s intention of reconstructing them to their original form. Mantell himself went on to find more big teeth at the site, their size indicating that they had come from an extraordinarily large creature. He traced the source to a quarry at Cuckfield which lay in Cretaceous rock, younger than the Jurassic strata in which the Oxford geologist William Buckland’s giant Stonesfield bones had been found.

  The size and the fluted, flattened shape of the teeth told Mantell, a bone expert, that they must come from a land animal. However, none before was known that could chew its food. So Mantell asked Lyell to take one of the teeth with him to Paris to show Cuvier. Cuvier had no clear analysis for the tooth but suggested that perhaps it had come from a rhinoceros, but also that its source might be a different kind of animal, a herbivorous reptile. The clear answer finally came from a young assistant at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London,* who saw in the tooth a striking resemblance to that of an iguana of which he had just assembled the skeleton. Later, comparing more of the fluted teeth, Mantell suggested to Cuvier that the creature was an ancient version of the modern iguana, a gigantic reptile (bigger than Buckland’s Megalosaurus) and, unusually, a herbivore. The teeth were the distinguishing characteristic.

  Proposing the name Iguanosaurus, he announced it in a paper read before the Royal Society in February 1825. Conybeare commented that his discovery was very interesting, ‘but the name you propose Iguanosaurus will not do’.8 Mantell accepted Conybeare’s alternative: Iguanodon – ‘don’ signifying teeth. The name stuck. It was the second dinosaur to be named – Buckland’s Megalosaurus having been the first – and the first herbivore. All other large surviving reptiles, such as crocodiles and anacondas, were carnivores – a fact that made Mantell’s discovery all the more important. By 1829 he knew the importance of his findings.

  It would be many years, however, before the word ‘dinosaur’ took hold. Richard Owen, to whom the term would be credited, was Mantell’s arch-opponent. Owen was then on the staff of the Hunterian Collections of the Royal Society of Surgeons and considered himself an expert on anatomy and bones. Not until 1842, in an article for the journal of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was meeting in Manchester, did Owen establish the order Dinosauria, relying heavily but without acknowledgement on Mantell’s work. The order was intended to cover the Iguanodon and the Megalosaurus, Owen concluding that they walked on their hind legs, with two appendages like small arms higher up.9 In consequence, Buckland dubbed Owen ‘the British Cuvier’ – a designation that ought to have gone to Gideon Mantell.

  In 1827 Mantell published Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex, which is credited with being the earliest book to deal with dinosaur remains, including his own discovery. He moved to more socially prominent Brighton, where King George IV visited every winter, and forsaking medicine for geology, he established a respected geological museum. The king bought four copies of Mantell’s Geology of Sussex. In his book Mantell stressed the enormous size of these extinct creatures: ‘The gigantic Megalosaurus, and yet more gigantic Iguanodon, to whom the groves of palms and arborescent ferns would be mere beds of reeds, must have been of such prodigious magnitude, that the existing animal creation presents us with no objects of comparison.’10

  By 1829 Mantell knew he had made his name with the Iguanodon. Three years later he made another major discovery, again in Tilgate quarry. It was another reptile but one composed of bony plates and spines now recognised as a form of armour. This reptile was clearly of a distinctive kind; Mantell named it Hylaeosaurus, meaning ‘woodland reptile’, and announced his discovery in a paper for the Geological Society.11 Other dinosaur finds for which he is credited are Cetiosaurus, Regnoasaurus, and Pelorosaurus. By now he had a public reputation, not only for his discoveries but for his collection held in his Brighton museum, to which he gave the grand title of ‘Sussex Scientific Museum and Mantellian Museum’. Audiences of hundreds thronged to hear him expound on the life of the prehistoric past.

  Mantell began a correspondence in 1834 with a professor at Yale University, Benjamin Silliman, who had been teaching geology and mineralogy as part of his chemistry course and who had travelled to Britain to study. The consequence was, as Mantell told his journal, he received: ‘A letter from my excellent friend Professor Silliman, announcing that the College (Yale, Newhaven, Connecticut), has conferred upon me the degree of L.L.D. – now as Lord Byron said to Moore, “this is a way of immortality”.’12 Even so, he did not meet Silliman in person until that year.

  In 1838, forced by financial necessity, Mantell sold his Brighton fossil collection to the British Museum for the great sum of £4,000 (more than £300,000 today). According to The Times that December, the loss of the fossils was the cause of ‘great regret to
the citizens of Brighton, to which they have been a most intellectual ornament’.13 With the money Mantell bought a medical practice at Clapham in London. His wife left him, taking their four children with her. One of the two daughters subsequently died; one of his two sons, Walter, emigrated to New Zealand (where, in time, he preserved his father’s papers and journal). His misfortune worsened when his spine was seriously injured in an accident in 1841 when he became entangled in the reins of a carriage carrying him across Clapham Common and he was dragged at speed over rough ground. His back never recovered and he was henceforth often in severe pain.

  Mantell’s later years were soured by the antagonism of the palaeontologist Richard Owen. Owen, a younger man, seemingly jealous of Mantell’s reputation, seems to have lost no opportunity to disparage Mantell, even claiming for himself the discovery of the Iguanodon. In 1845 at the Geological Society, Owen read a paper, contradicting what he had already agreed with Mantell, saying instead that a fossil bone they had discussed was not one of a bird but of a pterodactyl. For geologists, these distinctions held tantamount to theological importance. Mantell was furious at this blatant alteration of the agreed facts. As he raged in his journal: ‘It is deeply to be deplored that this eminent and highly gifted man, can never act with candour or liberality.’

  Mantell’s anger was heightened when the great William Buckland ‘as a matter of course got up and entirely agreed in all Professor Owen stated’.14 Mantell’s own private conclusion was that the question had to be considered open until more reliable data had been obtained.

  Three years later, when he read a paper on belemnites at the Royal Society, Owen once more got to his feet and ‘made a most virulent attack upon me, ridiculing the communication, and stating that it was only fit for a few lines in the “Annals of Natural History”’.15

  Even so, Mantell’s paper on the Iguanodon, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1848, summarising his discoveries on that fossil reptile, won him the Royal Society’s Royal Medal in 1849. It was not the society’s highest honour – that was the Copley Medal – but even so the Royal Medal, sometimes known as the Queen’s Medal, carried great prestige.

  The envious Owen was still up to his tricks in 1850 when he dismayed Mantell (and possibly the rest of his audience at the British Museum) by describing cursorily a paper that he said he had had no time to finish, but then sent to the Athenaeum, which published it immediately. ‘How sad and contemptible!’ Mantell noted.16 Even the usually calm Lyell took against Owen, who had attacked him in a review of Lyell’s ‘Address’ in the Quarterly.

  Mantell is recognised as a great palaeontologist, yet he has been unappreciated as a brilliant reporter of his times. His journal, for example, describes the death of Sir Robert Peel, the former prime minister, on 3 July 1850, after he was thrown from his horse while riding up Constitution Hill. According to Mantell, Peel was ‘picked up senseless; the collar bone was fractured and severe concussion of the brain had taken place’. The horse seems to have fallen on him after he was thrown. Mantell expected him to recover; crowds packed Whitehall Gardens waiting for news. But the news was not good: ‘Sir Robert Peel expired at eleven last night! This is a most deplorable event indeed . . . For several years Sir Robert has shown me every courtesy; invited me to dine with distinguished foreigners and savants; and sent me tickets for his conversaziones. He was the only eminent public man who payed any respect to art and science, apart from public policy.’17

  The following year saw Mantell sharing in the exhilaration of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park (even though Prince Albert had put Mantell’s arch-antagonist, Richard Owen, in charge of the dinosaur exhibits). Mantell’s own health continued to be poor; sciatica left him in pain for which he inhaled chloroform.18

  By then he had moved, without his family, closer into London, to Chester Square in Belgravia, where he saw the bustling crowds heading for the Great Exhibition which covered nearly twenty acres of the park. For the opening, although very ill, Mantell walked with difficulty to Constitution Hill to watch Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and others process in the state carriage. When he finally got to the exhibition itself two days later, ‘the interior surpassed all my expectations. It is quite overpowering. I cannot express the effect it has left upon my mind.’ He also attended Prince Albert’s opening of the Museum of Practical Geology on Jermyn Street (at which De la Beche gave the inaugural lecture).

  Mantell pushed himself repeatedly to attend the exhibition, struggling against the pain in his spine and the press of the crowds – 30,000 on 4 October 1851, and then – with the closing deadline approaching – 97,000. He described seeing ‘in the course of the day nearly 110,000 – one hundred and ten thousand! Vulgar, ignorant, country people: many dirty women with their infants were sitting on the seats giving suck with their breasts uncovered, beneath the lovely female figures of the sculptor. Oh! how I wished I had the power to petrify the living, and animate the marble: perhaps a time will come when this fantasy will be realised, and the human breed be succeeded by finer forms and lovelier features, than the world now dreams of.’19 What also caught his eye, apart from the slovenly crowds, were exhibits of French machinery, Californian gold in quartz rock, and Austrian opal.

  The Great Exhibition ended on Saturday 11 October 1851, with organs playing the national anthem, followed by the peals of bells, gongs ‘and all manner of hideous and crushing sounds . . . no order was observed for the closing scene of the most marvellous display the world ever beheld!’20 The sense of a new world of technical marvels was felt on 13 November when the telegraphic connection between Calais and Dover was completed. Mantell wrote in his journal of ‘messages transmitted across the bottom of the Channel!!!! – by and bye this mode of communication will reach from one pole to the other I have no doubt’.21

  Mantell died the following year, on 10 November 1852, nearly seven years before Darwin spelled out the theory and facts of evolution. Some attribute his death to suicide; others to an overdose of opium taken after falling on the way upstairs and crawling to bed. The theories are not contradictory. He had relied heavily on opiates since his accident. He did not live to see the Crystal Palace re-erected in south London in Sydenham. On New Year’s Eve in 1853 a dinner was held inside what was to be the reconstructed Iguanodon, with Mantell’s nemesis, Owen, at the head of the table.22 Nor was he able to witness Owen’s greatest contribution to British public and scientific life – the establishment in 1881 of the British Museum of Natural History.

  Nonetheless, Mantell ended his life fully aware that what the famous Robert Bakewell, author of An Introduction to Geology, had told him in September 1829, was right: ‘He says I shall ride on the back of my Iguanodon into the temple of Immortality!’23

  So he did. Mantell’s discovery confirmed what Cuvier had suggested earlier. There had been an age of reptiles preceding the age of mammals, and the dinosaurs had walked on land – some (as every child now knows) – like Tyrannosaurus rex, on two feet.

  * The Hunterian Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields held – and holds – a vast collection of skeletons and pickled specimens, assembled by the eminent surgeon John Hunter before his death in 1793. Purchased by the British government in 1799, it was later given to the Royal College of Surgeons. The collection still attracts visitors today.

  9

  CELIBACY GALORE

  With its High Church tradition weaker than Oxford’s, the University of Cambridge advanced rapidly in science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Cambridge’s three-part examination for the bachelor of arts degree, known as ‘the tripos’, was reformed in the 1750s, mathematics became the basis of the new system. It was honoured as a support for the ‘argument from design’. At Oxford, in contrast, the Greek and Latin classics were seen as central; mathematics and physics secondary.

  Early in the Lent term of 1818, the news swept Cambridge that the Reverend John Hailstone, Woodwardian Professor of Geology for thirty years, was proposing to
marry. A job vacancy thus opened. Under the stern provisions of the will of John Woodward, who had endowed the chair in 1728, the holder must be unmarried. Were he subsequently to wed, commanded Woodward from beyond the grave, ‘his election shall be thereby immediately made void, lest the care of a wife and children should take the Lecturer too much from study, and the care of the Lecture’.

  Woodward was a self-made man and amateur geologist whose life was changed in Gloucestershire in the 1720s when he discovered shellfish lodged in solid rock as well as beds of shellfish in ploughed agricultural land. He took these marine fossils to be evidence of Noah’s Flood, in which he was a passionate believer, just as he was convinced that God had sent the Flood to punish the sinful human race and to recreate the earth to be ‘more nearly accommodated to the present frailties of its Inhabitants’. Woodward attributed the source of the Flood to waters rising from beneath the earth’s crust and submerging the entire globe, leaving shells and rock strata as they subsided.

  At his death Woodward left his personal estate and effects to Cambridge University, which had granted him a doctorate in medicine. His astonishing collection of fossils was bequeathed to the university museum. Woodward was one of the early enthusiasts for whom collecting was part of geology’s appeal. Paying others to assist him, he had gathered and catalogued 9,000 specimens which he housed in specially made walnut cases. So proud was he of his fossil collection that in his will he dictated that, for three days a week, the Woodwardian lecturer (who was to be paid £100 a year) should be present at the museum from nine until eleven o’clock in the morning and from two until four in the afternoon, ‘to show the said Fossils gratis, to all curious and intelligent persons as shall desire a view of them for their information and instruction’.1 His instructions did not stop there. The lecturer ‘must be always present when they are shown, and take care that none be mutilated or lost’.