The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Smithson and his friends knew that they still operated in profound ignorance. The current state of chemical knowledge, as Smithson wrote, consisted "entirely of isolated points thinly scattered like lurid specks on a vast field of darkness…"50 But the air was fragrant with possibility, and they felt themselves to be on the cusp of greatness. They had discovered a life imbued with purpose, founded upon a belief that chemistry could be an engine of improvement and prosperity. Smithson in particular stood out as exceptional; William Thomson proudly broadcast his belief that Smithson was "a valuable character in this country."51 His friends recognized him as a promising member of this new order of philosophers who would lead England to the forefront of the future.

  James Smithson's university career can be split into two distinct halves. During the first years, 1782 to 1784, he was regularly in attendance at Pembroke and presumably under the guiding force of divines such as his tutor Edward Dupré and Pembroke Master William Adams. However irreverent and decadent his life as a wealthy gentleman-commoner might have been, Smithson distinguished himself by acquiring an exceptional store of mineralogical and chemical knowledge and collecting about him the brightest scientific minds at the university, many of them friends he would carry with him as he exuberantly entered into the intellectual ferment of scientific London. For the second half of Smithson's Oxford career, 1785 to 1786, the scene of action moved to London. Smithson was scarcely up at Pembroke during the last two years of his degree. His gaze had turned already to the larger proscenium, to the scientific societies, the coffeehouses, the bookshops and the mineral dealers, the glassblowers, instrument makers, and traveling lecturers—to the spectacle of the most cosmopolitan city in the world.

  The pivot dividing these two halves, the hinge which marked Smithson's entry into manhood and his precocious betrothal to a career in science, was a trip, a very important adventure. In late July 1784 he left Pembroke.

  THREE

  Staffa: The Cathedral of the Sea, 1784

  You must know that the party consisted of 4—Mr. Massie [Smithson], a young English gentleman fond of chemistry at Oxford; Marquis [Count Andreani], an Italian a good sort of man; St. Fonds; & Mr. Thornton, I believe an Irishman. They reached Inverary together, & Massie was advised to wait the return of the others, as he was delicate; but his object was Stafva.

  —Charles Greville to his uncle Sir William

  Hamilton, 1784

  BY THE SUMMER of 1784, balloon mania had swept England. With the Montgolfier brothers' invention in France the previous year, flight—that immortal aspiration of man—had finally been achieved. Hardly a month went by without some new ascent. At Oxford a Mr. Rudge was exhibiting his red and white striped Persian silk balloon; a Frenchman had his Montgolfier model at the Anchor in Cornmarket, and James Sadler had raised enough of a subscription to build a highly decorated one seventy feet in circumference, and to send aloft a little "aerial traveler" (a dog). In London thousands crowded the artillery grounds and public parks to watch this miraculous new contraption rise into the clouds over the city's chimneypots and steeples. Ladies piled their powdered wigs high in balloon-like confections, trussed with swags of silk and tassels. There were parties and poems and even the first mention of a mile-high club—a dare of five guineas on 100 to "Lord C___y" to ascend with a "a female whom, if he is not positively to get with child, they are at least to be agitated into a delirium, and worked up and down among the clouds, till the senses are lost and then—Lord have mercy upon the balloon!"1

  It was chemistry that had made all this possible. "Let Posterity know, and knowing be astonished," read the plaque erected near Hatfield in Hertfordshire to mark where Vincenzo Lunardi's blue silk balloon "Revisited the Earth" after the first manned flight in England, that this "Wondrous Enterprise" had been "successfully achieved by the Powers of Chemistry." Smithson's science was transforming the world. The heavens had been opened up for exploration, in large part thanks to the pioneering work on gases by Britain's own: Black, Cavendish, and Priestley. While the majority of English welcomed balloons as a source of wonder, for Smithson and his crowd they were the product of scientific research and the means to undertake further philosophical experiments—elegant floating laboratories. Scientists embarked on a whole range of new research problems: the best apparatus for making the gas, the quality of the air high in the atmosphere, its temperature and barometric pressure, and "whether the growling of thunder is owing to echoes, or to successive explosions."2 For nineteen-year-old Smithson it was a time of unprecedented optimism. What further barriers could not be surmounted? The possibilities the future held seemed boundless.

  In early August 1784, in a blaze of self-promotion, the French scientist Barthélemy Faujas de St. Fond, who had just published the first book on the Montgolfier brothers' balloon experiments, arrived in London. Traveling with him was a precocious twenty-one-year-old Milanese nobleman named Count Paolo Andreani, who had a few months earlier made the first balloon ascent in Italy, to the approbation of 20,000 of his astonished countrymen. These balloon experts had not come to London in pursuit of daring new aerial exploits, however. Despite all the enthusiasm in the scientific community surrounding this new frontier, Faujas was preparing for a very different kind of voyage of discovery—one that presented an opportunity for Smithson.

  Fingal's Cave, Staffa, from Faujas' A Journey through England and Scotland to the Hebrides in 1784

  Faujas was mounting a geological expedition to the wilds of western Scotland. He wanted to document a volcanic history of Britain, a follow-up to his extensive to me on the extinct volcanoes of France, the verdant conical mountains of the Massif Central, which had only recently been recognized as volcanic. Faujas planned to produce a lavish folio volume describing the natural wonders of England and Scotland, with the third member of his party, a Quaker doctor named William Thornton—an able draftsman who went on to a second career as an architect in the United States—doing the illustrations.3 The culmination of Faujas' trip was to be a visit to the remote Hebridean island of Staffa off the western coast of Scotland. Staffa was home to Fingal's Cave, a remarkable natural wonder that had only been "discovered" in the previous decade by Sir Joseph Banks. Fingal's Cave was a vast vaulted hall of sleek hexagonal columns of basalt, rising to meet in a majestic gothic arch—a more extraordinary sister to the Giant's Causeway in Ireland. When Banks came face to face with the cave for the first time, he exclaimed, "Compared to this what are the cathedrals or the palaces built by man! Mere models of playthings imitations as diminutive as his works will always be when compared to those of nature."4

  A decade after Banks' visit, his account—published in Thomas Pennant's Tour in Scotland (of which Horace Walpole cuttingly said Banks' account was the only part worth reading)—remained the only natural history description of the island. A great debate over the origins of the earth was just beginning to be waged between two camps—the Neptunists and the Plutonists—and Staffa rapidly became a frontline in the controversy. The Neptunists, led by the German geologist Abraham Werner, believed that the earth had once been covered by a single universal ocean and that the crust of the earth had been formed by the sediment left when that chemical-rich body of water had receded. The Plutonists or Vulcanists, on the other hand, led by James Hutton in Edinburgh, saw the earth's formations as the work of an internal fire; they focused on volcanoes as evidence of the combustion inside the earth. Both sides grappled with the mysterious origin of crystalline rocks such as basalt, commonly found throughout the sandstones and limestones of northern Europe. Some, like Nicolas Desmarest in France, finding prismatic formations of basalt in the Auvergne, argued that basalt was in fact volcanic; Richard Kirwan, the Irish chemist soon to become one of Smithson's most important champions in London, believed that the extraordinary folds and forms of such rocks in the British Isles were caused by the great Flood; "Even the columnar basalts at Staffa and the Giant's Causeway, he claimed, were 'rent into pillars' by diluvial blows."5

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p; As the eighteenth century progressed, extinct volcanoes had been discovered from Iceland to Italy. It became clear to scientists that volcanoes were not a modern phenomenon, and nor were they isolated formations. As Smithson, who became a strong proponent of volcanism, wrote, "volcanoes, and their ejections… cease to be local phenomena; they become principal elements in the history of our globe; they connect its present with its former condition; and we have good grounds for supposing, that in their flames are to be read its future destinies."6 Such theories, however, were highly controversial. They challenged the centrality of the concept of the universal ocean and, by association, the biblical deluge. But they also implicitly argued that the globe was much older than had been supposed; the idea that volcanoes had once spewed and roared over the bucolic sites of present-day habitations, like the Habichtswald near Kassel in Hesse, was shocking. At Staffa, as at the Giant's Causeway, there was no visible crater or even volcano-shaped mountain. If basalt was volcanic, where had it come from? Faujas and others believed it to be the product of "a grand subterranean conflagration." William Whitehurst, a Derbyshire geologist, theorized that the volcano that must have existed there had sunk into the ocean; he even suggested that it might have formed part of the lost city of Atlantis.7

  Staffa captivated the men of science, and it remained territory ripe for study. Smithson evidently saw this expedition to Staffa as an opportunity to make his mark. In 1784 his closest mineralogical friends were filled with talk of Staffa. Smithson's Oxford friend William Thomson had already made the hazardous trip on his 1782 tour of western Scotland after completing his studies in Edinburgh. And right at this moment, in the summer of 1784, the collector Charles Greville and his famous volcano-loving uncle Sir William Hamilton were en route for Staffa—though they never had weather good enough to permit them to visit. Greville, who was some fifteen years older than Smithson, seems already to have become fast friends with Smithson by this time, an acquaintance probably fostered through William Thomson. Smithson's family background would have intrigued Greville, as Greville had been a good friend of Smithson's half-brother Algernon Percy (the second son of the Duke of Northumberland) when they were both at university in Edinburgh around the time of Smithson's birth.8

  At nineteen Smithson wanted to be at the forefront of some kind of discovery, to join the community of science by making some important contribution to knowledge. A voyage to study a part of the world as yet untrammeled by European scientists was a bold, classic way of doing so. Sir Joseph Banks had made his reputation in his early twenties taking part in Captain Cook's Endeavour voyage of 1768. His name was forever entwined with the Transit of Venus (and, less decorously, with the conquest of the South Seas women). His triumph had brought him the patronage of George III, the directorship of the botanical gardens at Kew, and eventually a baronetcy and the presidency of the Royal Society. Staffa, while not so very far from civilization, was nevertheless still at the forefront of the unknown; it had yet to be fully documented and described, and its very caves and cliffs seemed to hold a key to the mystery of the origin of the earth.

  First, though, Smithson had to get himself attached to Faujas de St. Fond's expedition, something he managed with the help of William Thomson. On August 12, 1784, Faujas, Count Andreani, and William Thornton, a few weeks before their departure for Scotland, were guests at the Royal Society, England's oldest and most prestigious scientific society. In the hours prior to the meeting, they had been feted at the dinner of the Royal Society Club, held in the Crown and Anchor tavern on the Strand. These convivial dinners were open to an elite group from the Royal Society and their guests. Toasts of port, Madeira, and claret, over mountains of steaming beef, were followed by post-prandial glasses of brandy, rum, and other liqueurs. By the end of this August dinner the men were "all pretty much enlivened," according to Faujas, and they had tripped along past the steeples of St. Clements Danes and St. Mary-le-Strand to the white stone arches of the impressive new Somerset House, just in time for the meeting.

  The meetings of the Royal Society, in contrast, were anything but lively. Under the painted ceiling of the ornately decorated room, the latest scientific work was delivered as if from on high, without the possibility for debate or discussion. Members with their guests sat ranged like school children along narrow straight-backed benches, looking up at the mahogany throne where Sir Joseph Banks in his heavy tricorn hat presided, the secretaries on either side below him. One of the secretaries monotonously read out the papers reporting the latest scientific research; there were no demonstrations or illustrations. Count Andreani nevertheless confided to his diary that it was impossible to find the meetings boring, because the room was overflowing with the most celebrated men of science; he was awestruck scanning the faces of the assembled. Other visitors had much the same impression. The Swedish chemist Berzelius felt "a kind of intoxication" at seeing so many famous personalities gathered under one roof. And the Swiss botanist Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle likewise confessed that although the seances could not have been more lifeless, he was riveted by the opportunity to stargaze.9 Most thrillingly, in this august company it was the guests who were especially honored. Banks' first order of business was to read out the names of the strangers in their midst, followed by the members who had presented them.

  One of the names read out that evening was that of a young man who, like Andreani, would have been wide-eyedly taking in the proceedings for the first time: James Louis Macie. Smithson and Thomson (who was not yet a Fellow either) had succeeded in getting themselves invited.10 At some point, Thomson—whom Faujas later lauded as "a very good naturalist"—managed to present Smithson to Faujas. Faujas readily accepted Smithson, whom he called "a studious young man, who was much attached to mineralogy," as a member of his expedition. They probably conversed in French. Thomson's respect for Smithson's standing as a wealthy gentleman, or perhaps Smithson's projection of himself as such, led Faujas to render Smithson's name Macie as the aristocratic Monsieur de Mecies.11 One imagines it was a mistake that Smithson did not readily correct.

  Smithson surely passed the last days before departure excitedly packing his equipment and collecting information on the personages he might encounter on his travels. He had been based over the summer of 1784 out in West Haugh, in Surrey—in all probability at a place his mother had taken (she rented a series of elegant summer residences along the Thames, most of which were conveniently located across the Thames from the Duke of Northumberland's Syon House).12 William Thomson in those final days busily wrote letters of introduction for Smithson to various acquaintances in Scotland. One such letter, to the distinguished professor of chemistry at Edinburgh, Joseph Black, commenced: "I send you my friend Mr. Macie, who is about to take the same tour that I did two years ago." Thomson went on to praise Smithson's skills in mineralogy; Smithson, he said, enjoyed a "proficiency … already much beyond what I have been able to attain to."13 In addition to all his encouragement and support for the Scotland trip, Thomson also put Smithson forward at this time for membership in a new philosophical club: the Society for Promoting Natural History.

  The Society for Promoting Natural History (SPNH), which met monthly at the Black Bear on Piccadilly, was one of a number of scientific clubs proliferating in the coffeehouses of London towards the end of the century; it offered a new and intensely egalitarian forum for science, with the possibility to congregate and debate, a kind of model of ideal civil society. The SPNH was the brainchild of James Edward Smith, who as a medical student in Edinburgh had started a similar society and who went on in 1788 to found the Linnean Society. It included members far from London, such as the potter and Lunar Society figure Josiah Wedgwood and honorary member John Wheelock, president of Dartmouth College in the United States. This wide-ranging corresponding network lent the effort an imprimatur of selflessness. The gathering became one of men interested in more than economic self-advancement; it became a group committed to the benefit of mankind through the exchange of scientific information
. The order of business was quite formal; members had to be proposed and seconded. William Thomson, who had also been active in the natural history society in Edinburgh, had been unanimously elected in April 1784. At the end of August, as the sun went down on the first full day of Smithson's expedition to Scotland, Thomson nominated Smithson for membership. James Edward Smith seconded him. A month later, at the next meeting, while Smithson was just at that moment departing the Hebrides, he was admitted a member.14

  On the evening of August 29, at six o'clock, Smithson set out on his first scientific tour. His travel was part of a new kind of Enlightenment age tourism, focused on studying the natural riches of the countryside and how these raw materials were being exploited. Whereas a typical traveler heading north might have sought out the minster at York or the picturesque ruins of Fountains Abbey, this group was fixated on geology and topography, and on the new manufactories taking advantage of these resources. England was pioneering the application of technology to industry, and Smithson and his fellow philosophers saw with rising excitement the future such developments could bring. As they passed up through the Midlands to eastern Scotland and then west across the Highlands to the Hebrides, they collected data on the weather, the lay of the land, and the local mineral productions. They took in the haze of smoke from the lime kilns, the clanging forges, and the giant roaring waterwheels powering the new mills and factories. They admired the wares and met with the men, like those who comprised the Lunar Society of Birmingham, who were transforming a region of wild and rocky hills filled with caves and underground streams into the heart of England's nascent industrial economy.15