The first president of the Geological Society was George Bellas Greenough, a well-travelled and wealthy bachelor of twenty-nine who had briefly been at Eton and Cambridge and who had seen not only Napoleon (in a visit to Paris during the peace of Amiens in 1802) but also the summits of Mont Blanc, Vesuvius and Etna. Greenough, who lived in a large Italianate mansion in Regent’s Park not far from London Zoo, had just been made a fellow of the Royal Society as well as a Member of Parliament for the archetypal ‘rotten borough’ of Gatton in Surrey – a constituency notorious for having had at one time only one eligible voter. A former military man, he was a lawyer who had undertaken long geological tours with William Buckland in Britain and Ireland and who was a friend of Davy. He also had that geologist’s essential: private means.
In 1819 Greenough published A First Examination of the Principles of Geology and then, in six sheets, his Geological Map of England and Wales, achieved with the help of the society’s members who contributed details of rocks and strata and also with the results of his own long research begun as early as 1808. With more cartographic data than William Smith had been able to provide – and borrowing shamelessly from Smith (whose map he had seen in 1808 while it was in progress) – Greenough’s map rapidly superseded Smith’s in influence and sales. In 1865, after Smith’s death, the Geological Society agreed that Greenough’s map would in future be acknowledged as having been done ‘by G. B. Greenough, Esq. FRS (on the basis of the original map of Wm. Smith, 1815)’.2
Indeed, many at the time felt that Greenough had stolen Smith’s work. Greenough himself virtually acknowledged as much in a statement of apology for having appeared to be ‘trespassing upon ground which I knew of right of pre-occupancy, his’.3 The two maps resembled each other, he said, because both were correct and ‘it is impossible that the views, the opportunities and the reasonings of two persons engaged on the same subject should be invariably the same’.4 He sent Smith a copy of his map, which reached him in Yorkshire where he had retreated to escape from his accumulated troubles – money woes and a wife who was losing her mind.
Another reason why the Geological Society looked at Smith with some suspicion (according to the society’s historian Hugh Torrens) was that Smith was a theoretician. Smith’s map was based firmly on his personal opinion that each of the strata of the earth’s crust was characterised by its own distinctive fossils and by their ordered sequence. This conviction led to the kind of theorising and controversy that the new society was trying to avoid.
Smith would never be invited to join the Geological Society: the group was entirely out of his class. Later, when the society moved to new premises at Somerset House, Roderick Murchison, from his perspective as a member and wealthy landowner, found himself looking down on ‘many of the Johnny Raws who come to SH’.5 Even if he had considered joining, William Smith would have found the initial admission fee of six guineas prohibitive, not to mention the annual contribution of three guineas. He was beset with debt. Selling his geological collection to the British Museum in two lots – in 1816 and 1818 – did not save him. In 1819 he was committed to King’s Bench Prison in Southwark for nearly ten weeks. The Geological Society did nothing to help him – in contrast to its gift of £1,000 to the wealthy Greenough, to enable him to complete his own map, which went on to sell very well.
A distinguished early member of the GeolSoc was the president of the Royal Society himself, Sir Joseph Banks, who was also director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Joining the new geological group, Banks tried to persuade it to become a subordinate of the Royal Society. He failed. When after a year he saw the Geological Society taking on the aspect of an autonomous learned society, with a library and collections of its own, he confronted Greenough head on:
BANKS: So you intend to withdraw yourself wholly from the Royal Society, do you?
GREENOUGH: How so Sir Joseph?
BANKS: In regard to papers.
GREENOUGH: So far from it.6
Banks’s concern was that the Geological Society would attract papers which would otherwise have been presented to the Royal Society and published in its Transactions. Greenough assured Banks that should the Geological Society ever receive a paper the Royal Society wanted, the Royal would have prior claim and his own society would hand the paper over to the senior society for publication in its own journal.
Unpersuaded, Banks immediately resigned from the geological upstart. So did Davy and two other FRSes. The Royal Society was supreme. Such was its reputation that when Davy was in Paris in 1813 with Napoleon’s encouragement, at a dinner hosted in his honour by the Société Philosophique, a toast was drunk to the Royal Society rather than to the King of England. Greenough himself, however, did not resign from the geologists’ club. He and some others managed to play both sides of the street – retaining memberships in both the Royal and Geological societies, Greenough remaining a Member of Parliament as well.
Banks’s anxiety was not misplaced. The growing interest in fossil bones was shifting from the older to the newer scientific society. The geologists themselves were changing their focus as the younger members who joined were more interested in the newer fossiliferous rocks than the ancient hard rocks that held no trace of life.
The Geological Society was known for its lively and heated arguments, quite unlike anything ever seen at the staid Royal Society. There, after a paper was read, all would sit in dignified silence. At the GeolSoc, on the other hand, after someone presented a paper, boisterous arguments would often break out – usually but not always good-tempered. The meetings provided a spectator sport, with members bringing guests to watch the fun. The society met twice a month in a room lit by gaslight (another technical innovation) with reptile jawbones and skulls spread out on the table around which the listeners sat on benches as if in the House of Commons.
The parliamentary comparison struck the mathematician and philosopher Charles Babbage (originator of the concept of the computer), who was a frequent guest. He wrote that the meetings possessed ‘all the freshness, the vigour, and the ardour of youth in the pursuit of a youthful science’. To him, the society had succeeded ‘in its unusual experiment of having an oral discussion of the papers read at its meetings. To say of these discussions that they are very entertaining is the least part of the praise which is due to them.’7 His compliment was outdone by J. S. Lockhart, the editor of the new Quarterly Review, who came along to enjoy the spectacle. ‘Though I don’t care much for geology,’ Lockhart famously observed, ‘I do like to see the fellows fight.’8 Following the discussions, or fights, all dined together.
The Geological Society continued to grow, reaching a membership of 400 by 1818. In 1811 the society acquired its most amusing and soon-to-be most influential member, William Buckland of Oxford. It was he who in 1819 introduced Charles Lyell, who had been one of his students, to the society.
In step with the work of Cuvier in Paris, the Geological Society gradually shifted its principal focus from rocks to fossils. Soon the society adopted a constitution, then set up a library, and most important to its members, established a collection of rocks and fossils. Dr William Babington, one of the physicians among them, gave them a cabinet in which to hold the treasures. The society’s popularity required a move to Bedford Street, north of the Strand, where the society remained from 1816 to 1828.
It was at Bedford Street, on 20 February 1824, that a dramatic occurrence took place. The young Reverend William Conybeare, a distinguished early geologist and fossil analyst, planned to discuss a near-complete skeleton of a huge marine reptile that had been recently dug out of the rocks at Lyme Regis in Devon. Conybeare was then rector of Sully in South Wales but lived across the Severn in Bristol, and started work on the extinct marine reptiles along local shorelines. For his important investigation of these fossils he was elected to the Royal Society in 1819.
The dramatic skeleton about which he was to speak had been discovered by the fossil-hunter Mary Anning on the evening of 10 December 1823;
but it was Conybeare who gave it the Latin tag plesiosaur, meaning ‘near to reptile’. The name stuck, as Conybeare was acknowledged master of knowledge about the ancient creature. The skeleton had an extraordinarily long neck – thirty-five vertebrae, unlike the usual three to eight.
In Paris, Cuvier heard a description of the find and did not believe it. He wrote to Conybeare suggesting that the skeleton might be a hoax (a phenomenon not unknown to fossil collectors at the time). The great French comparative anatomist could not accept the possibility of a reptile with thirty-five vertebrae in its neck. Conybeare was enraged.
Buckland, about to assume the presidency of the Geological Society, persuaded Conybeare to ship the long-necked reptile skeleton to London and to discuss it at the society’s next meeting. But shipping was no simple task. Conybeare reached London before his fossil did. His presentation had to be delayed because the skeleton, embedded in a huge slab of rock, was on board a vessel which became stuck in the English Channel for ten days. When at last the huge package arrived at the society’s headquarters, he faced the task of carrying it upstairs to the first-floor meeting room. With ten workmen, he spent a whole day trying to haul the slab up, but without success.9 The bony trophy was left to rest in a dingy passage outside and the geologists were forced to peer at it by candlelight.
Conybeare at least had the satisfaction of delivering to the meeting his paper, ‘Notice on the Discovery of an Almost Perfect Skeleton of the Plesiosaurus’.10 A good audience had assembled in anticipation of the great news about to be revealed. Gideon Mantell was there – appropriately as the bones about to be described were from Sussex, his part of the country, where he had made his own giant bone discovery which he would present to the society in a few months’ time. His friend Lyell was there too, with two guests.
No one was disappointed. Conybeare described ‘the most monstrous creature ever discovered’ and explained that, thanks to its excellent preservation in the chalk for thousands of years, the bones were almost in their original state. ‘To the head of the Lizard, it united the teeth of the Crocodile, a neck of enormous length, resembling the body of a Serpent; a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped, the ribs of a Chameleon, and the paddles of a Whale.’11 There were ninety joints in the backbone (the large number of vertebrae which had aroused Cuvier’s scepticism) – greater than that of any other animal. ‘That it was aquatic,’ Conybeare declared, ‘is evident from the form of the paddles.’12
Conybeare had written his paper in collaboration with Henry De la Beche, a geologist and brilliant draughtsman who contributed a beautiful anatomically detailed sketch of the plesiosaur’s head. The fossil’s bones had been found flattened, but De la Beche’s sketch reconstituted the head with its glaring eye socket; it also alphabetised the many components. The powerful drawing made sure that Conybeare’s discovery was known about in Paris.
De la Beche himself could not attend the presentation. However, the graphic words Conybeare used in his talk are illustrated in the sketch that became De la Beche’s most famous artwork – Duria Antiquior (‘More Ancient Dorset’). The plesiosaur’s head, said Conybeare, was ‘remarkably small’ compared to that of the Ichthyosaurus itself: ‘its long neck must have impeded its progress through the water; presenting a striking contrast to the organisation which so admirably fits the Ichthyosaurus to cut through the waves’. Thus it ‘swam upon or near the surface, arching back its long neck like the swan, and occasionally darting it down at the fish which happened to float within its reach. It may have lurked in shoal water along the coast, concealed among the sea weed, finding a secure retreat from the assaults of dangerous enemies.’13
Next, Conybeare handed the floor to the flamboyant William Buckland, who was making his first address as president and was waiting to announce a great discovery of his own. In fact, Buckland’s beast was even greater: a Megalosaurus – now known to have been a dinosaur. Buckland did not make too little of it, recreating for the members an imagined scene, which involved half-starved scavenging hyenas emerging from caves to help themselves to water rats in a lake nearby.
Lyell was discomfited, confiding to Mantell: ‘Buckland in his usual style enlarged on the marvel with such a strange mixture of the humorous and the serious, that we cd. none of us discern how far he believed himself what he said.’14 Conybeare wrote to reassure De la Beche that their plesiosaur presentation had not come up short: ‘I made my beast roar almost as loud as Buckland’s hyenas.’15
By 1825 the Geological Society became royal in all but name when King George IV granted it a royal charter. At that point the society might have appended the ‘royal’ prefix to its name. However, in its eagerness to avoid offending the great Royal Society, and to discourage further resignations from its ranks or – a more alarming possibility – a complaint to the Privy Council, which would have involved great expense, the GeolSoc decided not to use the grand adjective. Even so, its members called themselves ‘fellows’ and were entitled to put after their names the initials FGSL (Fellow of the Geological Society of London).
The purpose of the society, as George IV recognised (or was told to recognise), was ‘Investigating the Mineral Structure of the Earth’.16 That objective was quite different from exploration of the globe. Exploring was the province of geography, a mission soon to be undertaken by the Royal Geographical Society, founded five years later in 1830, with a strong emphasis on expeditions and discovery in the countries of the British Empire.
By 1824 the Geological Society had a new Geological Dining Club, the original one having lapsed. At the first meeting, thirty fellows were listed of whom twenty-four were members also of another club, the Athenaeum, formed in 1824 and located nearby. The Dining Club’s members were limited to forty – a group which took over the de facto running of the society.
By then the Geological and the Royal Society were neighbours. In 1828, thanks to the intervention of the home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, who secured the consent of the lords commissioners of the Treasury, the Geological Society was allowed to move to Somerset House on the Strand, into rooms offered rent free by the Royal Society, as it did not need them. The GeolSoc’s new premises overlooked the new Waterloo Bridge opened in 18 June 1817, at the western end of Somerset House. The house, an imposing structure made of granite, had three great arches where boats and barges could land. (In the early years of Somerset House, before the Thames Embankment was built, water lapped upon its south wing.) The society’s rooms were duly refurbished by the neo-classical architect Decimus Burton (a GeolSoc member) at a cost of £683.4s.1½d. (over £50,000 today). Lyell pronounced himself very pleased with what he saw as ‘our magnificent apartment’.17 The first meeting was held there on 7 November 1828.
The glamour of geology, brightened by its increasingly distinguished members, made it feel a social step up simply to be on the GeolSoc roster. In time it came to include Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School; Sir Robert Peel when he was later prime minister; the King of the Belgians, the Crown Prince of Denmark and the Archduke of Austria.
Women were not allowed to be members of GeolSoc. It was hardly an issue, as no one considered that they should be. Not until 1870 would they be admitted to British universities and not to London gentlemen’s clubs until well into the twentieth century. That women of the early nineteenth century were clearly interested in science is proven by photographs taken at the Royal Institution lectures which show a great number of women present. When the British Association for the Advancement of Science, formed in 1831, rejected the idea of women as members, Buckland advised Murchison: ‘Everyone agrees that, if the meeting is to be of scientific utility, ladies ought not to attend the reading of papers and especially at Oxford as it would at once turn the thing into a sort of Albemarle-dilettante-meeting, instead of a serious philosophical union of working men.’18
Among the GeolSoc’s members, several – notably Roderick Murchison and Charles Lyell – drew great benefit from well-educated childless
wives who liked geology and were good at classifying, sketching, labelling specimens, and occasionally translating. In addition, Charlotte Murchison (unkindly described by Benjamin Disraeli as the ‘silent wife’ of ‘a stiff geological prig’) inherited great wealth which enabled the Murchisons to establish their intellectual salon in Belgravia – ‘one of the hospital scientific centres of London’, according to Geikie. Mary Horner, meanwhile, had waited patiently through a year-long engagement to Charles Lyell, supporting his theories and writing as he struggled to finish his masterpiece. He had met her through her father, the Scottish geologist Leonard Horner, another GeolSoc member. Mary was an accomplished linguist and helped Charles in his travels, not least by sketching and classifying the specimens he found. After marrying in July 1832 they enjoyed a geological honeymoon, touring Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France – the first of many geological voyages they would take together. They would have no children – a fact that may have helped them form such an effective working partnership.
One of the most heated arguments involving the Geological Society – later known as ‘the Great Devonian Controversy’ – erupted in 1834. It arose over plant fossils found in Devon in a lower stratum than those in which fossils were usually observed. The discoverer was Henry De la Beche, who was preparing, for a fee, a geological survey of Devon for the Ordnance Geological Survey. (Formed in 1791 to map Great Britain on a systematic scale, this group later became the British Geological Survey, a research and advisory service still active today.) While surveying, De la Beche had found plant fossils within a stratum far below the Carboniferous coal-containing formations. The leafy patterns lay within the gritty greywacke in Werner’s German designation, which was classified as a ‘Transition’ rock. To accompany his contention, De la Beche collected the best specimens he could, but they were poorly preserved. They lay on the table as his note was read out at the GeolSoc. An impassioned discussion began.
Reading the Rocks Page 6
