The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  Tucking Mill House, nearby, was in fact where William Smith lived.

  Whether it was a wise and prudent decision he would not know for more than twenty years. Yet, as the eighteenth century was coming to a close, Smith had at least all the outward trappings of gentlemanly achievement. He had an excellent job, a group of admiring and influential friends, and now at last he had an elegant house with a small lake, a waterfall, and seventeen acres of well-laid-out grounds.

  He was able to use it as his headquarters—not merely for his work but to house the collection that was now fast becoming central to all his activities, and his employment of which is central to the modern memory of him. Tucking Mill House is where William Smith set aside a room, and had carpenters build for him glass-fronted cabinets, so that he could house, collate, catalog, organize, and display his growing collection, from the rocks around him locally, and from his travels far and wide, of fossils.

  The unique arrangements of fossils, as he had first realized as he emerged from the collieries at High Littleton, were what enabled him to tell one stratum from another. It was the arrangements of fossils that would empower him to predict what was underground where, and to make a map of it all. In all his searches to come, fossils would be the key.

  8

  Notes from the Swan

  Parkinsonia parkinsoni

  In eighteenth-century Britain it was a mark of refinement and impeccable good taste to own and display a collection of fossils. Not only were the objects themselves rare and beautiful, well worthy of display in specially constructed glass cabinets; the simple possession of them hinted at a thirst for knowledge, an awareness of natural philosophy, a sympathetic understanding of the mysterious processes of the earth. And gradually it was from within the world of fossil hunting—a world that would soon be inhabited most prominently by William Smith—that the ideas emerged that would eventually lead Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace to reach their profound conclusions about the origins of species.

  Perhaps for the British boulevardier in the eighteenth century, the interest in fossils was for their beauty and rarity, little more. The items, be they small or large, plant or animal, or merely the mysterious results of the fossil-making “plastic force,” would be displayed with reverence, handled with delicacy, viewed with awe. Collectors of fine jade today are a fair comparison with those of fossils two centuries ago—in that they are proud and protective, given to learning and (usually) the possession of some social standing. The clear and important difference is that the intricacies of objects made of jade are the artifice of human beings, while the strangely beautiful shapes and marks that delineate a fossil are the evidence—if ever in eighteenth-century Britain there was agreement on this matter—of the work of God.

  The Dictionary of National Biography records the occurrence of the plural word fossils 293 times, and 177 prominent men and women from British history are listed as having had an interest in, or more likely a collection of, such treasures. Most of the listed collectors appear to have lived between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Few people whose lives are otherwise worthy of recording seem to have collected fossils before 1700; and as with postage stamps and coins, few contemporary amateur fossilists will admit to a mania for collecting them.

  Indeed the fashion—for that is all it was, a fashion—began to die in mid-Victorian times. The spread of travel and a growing amazement with the outside world suddenly began to make anthropological souvenirs more valued as icons than dirt-encrusted items from earth history. All of a sudden drawing rooms became places to record and show off the material rewards of journeying through space, rather than the dusty and mysterious objects that came from journeying through time. What had hitherto been a signifier of drawing-room decorum seemed overnight to become the pastime of the dull, and then steadily to evolve into what amateur paleontology is now: no more than the mark of the nerd.

  There is much to learn from the DNB about the nature and the habits of onetime fossil collectors. The 177 entries show the typical collector of the time to have had certain outward similarities of background, knowledge, and social standing. Most of them—this being the less sexually enlightened end of the nineteenth century—happened to be men, although by chance it was a young Dorset woman who was perhaps the most famous fossil collector of them all.

  Mary Anning was thirty years younger than William Smith, and there is no record that the pair ever met—but her birthplace and scene of all her paleontological triumphs, the small seaside town of Lyme Regis, evidently interested Smith: In one of his notebooks there is a rough sketch-map of the Lower Jurassic sea-cliffs there, dated 1794—five years before Mary Anning was born.

  Her life was short indeed, even by the standards of the day—and yet the fact that she survived a lightning strike (which killed three adults) when she was a year old always lent locals a suspicion that hers would be an eccentric and furious one. Most of it she spent carefully prying choice specimens of fossil creatures from the Lias cliffs near her home. Her father had taught her something of fossil gathering, since his own business was making the very cabinets in which the well-heeled local collectors would keep their specimens. Her best-known find is the original ichthyosaur, a massive confection of shiny brown bones she first disposed of to the duke of Buckingham, which is now carefully reconstructed in London’s Natural History Museum. She was only twelve when she found it, only twenty-two when she discovered a juvenile specimen of the huge marine reptile later named a plesiosaur,* and not yet thirty when she found a near-perfect specimen of the bird progenitor, the pterodactyl, and sent it off to Oxford.

  A fossil ichthyosaur.

  For a while this untutored young woman made a sizable income, either by selling fossils to visitors—for whom Lyme Regis is still a major tourist center today—or leading would-be collectors to the cliffs to find specimens for themselves. The names of her customers are like a roll call of the leading geologists—of the day—William Conybeare, Sir Henry de la Beche (who lived nearby), Dean William Buckland. But slowly the popular craze for collecting began to wane, and by 1847, when Mary Anning died at the age of forty-eight of breast cancer, she had been all but forgotten and had passed into obscurity.

  De la Beche, who went on to become the first director of the British Geological Survey, drew a fanciful cartoon for her, showing what Dorset might have looked like in the Middle Jurassic, with enormous and rather genial-seeming monsters rising from the steaming deeps. The drawing became rather popular, and Sir Henry made sure that all the proceeds went to Mary, to help this modest heroine of the science as her fortunes began to decline.

  A fossil plesiosaur.

  There was another woman geologist and collector whose name does not figure in the existing DNB, but should.* She was Etheldred Bennett, a great-granddaughter of a seventeenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury. She was born in 1776, and she definitely met William Smith—indeed, gave him a piece of the well-known Tisbury coral, of which she was England’s best-known collector. She made a specialty of exploring the Middle Cretaceous upper greensand in the Vale of Wardour, in Wiltshire: As a relative wrote, “while other ladies of her time were doing needlepoint and chattering over their cups of India tea, she became competent at systematic scientific research, as well as the vigorous fieldwork of fossil hunting.” She had a monograph privately printed: A Catalogue of the Organic Remains of the County of Wilts. All evidence suggests she died a maiden aunt; her family insisted that one of the specimens later placed in her collection, nestled among her sponges and her corals, and thanks presumably to a cooperative undertaker, was her own heart, unbroken but quite petrified—transformed to resemble a stone, as a geologist’s heart perhaps deserves to be.

  Most amateur collectors were comfortably established, for fossil collecting was widely seen as a fashion for gentlemen of leisure. Men like, for example, the redoubtable Sir John St. Aubyn, fifth baronet, sheriff of Cornwall until his death in 1839, a grand master of the Freemasons, and a man who a
ugmented his immense collection of minerals by buying for one hundred pounds the entire fossil collection of the remarkable Richard Greene of Lichfield. Greene, so far as we know, was a like-minded swell who had amassed (to the approval of his friend and relative Samuel Johnson) a houseful of “coins, crucifixes, watches, minerals, orreries, deeds and manuscripts, missals, muskets, and specimens of armour,” as well as hundreds of ancient shells, graptolite etchings, and ammonites made of iron pyrite.

  Then there was, at almost exactly the same time, the East India Company’s naval officer, London banker and magnificently named Searles Valentine Wood the Elder, whose curiosity was first stirred while he was convalescing in Norfolk, but who, once recovered, embarked on a lifelong study of the fossil mollusks to be found in the construction sites of London. He was a member of the little-known body the London Clay Club, and wrote book after book on his enormous collection of fossil bivalves, which he eventually donated to the British Museum. The Natural History Museum in South Kensington, where they rest today, is replete with the evidence of a century’s worth of enthusiasms like Valentine’s—collection after collection, testimony to the value of the amateur scientists who so flourished in this remarkable time in British history.

  Many of the most assiduous fossilists were what used to be called “divines”—a curious happenstance, considering the assault that any intelligent understanding of fossils would later have on divinity’s most firmly held notions, like the Creation and the Flood. The Reverend Thomas Lewis of Ross-on-Wye is characteristic of the type: He is proud enough to offer a self-description—“geologist and antiquary”—rather than to note his formal position as vicar of Bridstow. His name may be forgotten by the curacy, but it is remembered in at least three Silurian fossil species that were named after him, all of them appropriately worthy (as may befit a clergyman) and rather dull.

  Many of the priestly collectors found in fossil hunting a much-needed intellectual stimulus, a relief from the unengaging topics that normally fill a parson’s life. The Reverend George Young, from the Scottish village of Coxiedean, was a theologian attracted to the mysteries of fossils. He had been taught by John Playfair, one of the giants of early academic geology, and he came to prominence in 1819 with his discovery, in Yorkshire, of a gigantic reptile ichthyosaur since identified as Leptopterygius acutirostris.

  Though the find brought the enthusiastic Presbyterian minister some national fame—for a while he was held in almost the same esteem as Mary Anning—it equally confronted him with an interesting challenge, an acute mental and moral dilemma. It forced him to ponder two possibilities that his religious beliefs sternly discountenanced: animal extinction on the one hand (there were no living ichthyosaurs—and so this particular species must have vanished), and animal evolution on the other (the crocodiles and dolphins to which this beast appeared to have been related were much less primitive than this—and so some advances must have taken place over time; the less fit and able must have been weeded out and left behind to die). Consideration of either of these possibilities was a heresy and an anathema to contemporary followers of the Bible, who regarded the great book (as do fundamentalists today) as nothing less than a documentary history of the planet.

  The Reverend Young was forced in consequence to engage in some interesting spiritual gymnastics to come to terms with the problem. He eventually committed his conclusions to paper in 1840 in a book with what might be considered the somewhat contradictory title Scriptural Geology. The science he advanced in it was not overendowed with logic: The ichthyosaur he had found was not extinct, he declared, because a living specimen would probably be found sooner or later: “…when the seas and large rivers of our globe shall have been more fully explored, many animals may be brought to knowledge of the naturalist, which at present are known only in the state of fossils.” (It would have amused Mr. Young greatly had he been alive at Christmas 1938, when the first coelacanth was found on the deck of a trawler newly come ashore in South Africa. He would doubtless have thought this vindicated his otherwise dreamily unscientific view.)

  And as for evolution—Darwin’s theory was not to be outlined for another twenty years, but men like Young, students of the realities of the fossil world, were already moving hesitantly toward the brink:

  Some have alleged…that in tracing the beds upwards we discern among the inclosed bodies a gradual progress from the more rude and simple creatures, to the more perfect and completely organised; as if the Creator’s skill had improved by practice. But for this strange idea there is no foundation: creatures of the most perfect organization occur in the lower beds as well as the higher.

  The Reverend Young could not, however, go any further than this: The forces ranged against him—of custom, history, doctrine, and common acceptance—were just far too formidable.

  My own favorite, though sadly no more than a peripheral player in this story, is Samuel Woodward, a Norfolk collector and almost exact contemporary of Smith’s who worked for all of his forty-eight years in either an insurance office or a bank. He was fascinated by fossils and built up a large collection. He was not nobly born, however, nor could he have been described as a gentleman for whom paleontology was merely an idle pursuit for impressing the neighbors. He was ordinariness personified: His father had been a bombazine weaver, and his own apprenticeship was in the making of camlets.* Smith would probably have liked him: Both were men of modest beginnings, for whom fossils were more a passion, less a pastime for the au courant.

  Yet it was not to be one of these modest men but a number of the more gently born collectors and spiritual figures whose influence was eventually to help place William Smith firmly on the flood tide of history. There was William Cunnington, a man still remembered around Devizes as being the antiquary who excavated most of the ancient long barrows with which the chalk downs of the country are littered. It was Cunnington who introduced Smith to the aforementioned Miss Bennett, who fascinated him with her collection of sponges and corals. The man who would later become the Father of English Geology thus briefly encountered the person who, in some circles at least, is thought of as English Geology’s First Woman if not quite (since she remained unmarried, and was described as “somewhat mannish”) its mother.

  There was the Reverend Richard Warner, a great man for both writing and walking,* but a figure who suffered “severe and reiterated disappointments”—for one of his books was judged a plagiary, another set of volumes was burned by mistake at the printer’s, and someone “dressed up as a gentleman” (or so wrote William Smith) made off with his immense fossil collection by giving him a check that then promptly bounced.

  There was the somewhat happier Reverend Benjamin Richardson, the rector of the Somerset parish of Farleigh Hungerford. There was also Richardson’s longtime friend, the Reverend Joseph Townsend, who was by calling a doctor and a Calvinist minister, then living in Bath, who had been well and expensively educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh. Townsend had traveled widely in Spain, and had brought back hundreds of fossils from the local limestones. He had not, Smith was later to write with relief, drawn any conclusions from his finds, and he was to remark later, and ruefully, “Ah, Smith, were I now to go over to Spain again I should give a very different account of the country.”

  He would do so because, for the first time, William Smith was beginning to take a keenly intelligent interest in not just the rocks in the cuttings of the coal canal, but of the fossils too. And once he had begun to do so, then who better with whom to discuss his discoveries than the local worthies who had amassed collections themselves? His newfound social standing, his now-close friendship with the widowed Lady Jones of Rugborne, his relatively good financial condition, his ownership (even if mortgaged) of a small and pretty estate at Tucking Mill, his brief occupancy of a substantial terraced house in Bath itself—all these features commended the uneducated Smith to learned men like Townsend and Richardson, Cunnington and Warner, and allowed them to play a role in his life that he would later acknowle
dge as of huge importance.

  His work on the canal bed and its continuing line of progress was sometimes more confusing than it should be. Smith had no problem recognizing the differences between most of the strata, true: there was a very obvious difference between the red marl and the coal measures, an equally obvious difference between the spawnlike granules in the limestones of the inferior oolite and the arenaceous beds of the Lias. Yet some of the strata through which the excavators were making progress, particularly the finer-grained sandstones, looked too similar. From time to time it proved very difficult, Smith found, to differentiate one bed from another: In one cutting there may have been a sandstone and in another, half a mile away, there may have been another that looked identical—and yet, to judge from a dip and strike that did not vary between the two outcrops, logic suggested that the two formations were not the same at all, had been laid down at different times, and were in fact separated by hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of feet of vertical distance.