The Map That Changed the World (32 page)

Vernon’s appeal—or was it perhaps Sir John Johnstone’s appeal?—fell on ears that were fully attentive. All agreed that some distinction should be given to Smith: The only question was the timing—the feeling that, given the continuing power and influence of Greenough’s faction, it would be imprudent to make an immediate move. Smith was content, employed, more or less free from financial woes: Matters could wait awhile longer.

But by the time Adam Sedgwick was settled in the chair of the society four years later, it was time to move. All of a sudden, and
at long, long last, the most powerful and influential body of geologists in the world could right the wrongs it had done to Smith during the past quarter century. It would summon the old man down from Yorkshire to London, it would garland him with the greatest honors it had in its power to bestow. Now was the time for the scientific establishment to beg forgiveness, and to offer to William Smith his long-overdue reward for what was officially recognized as one of the most memorable of human achievements.

Aulacostephanoides mutabilis

A
medal shall be struck in fine gold, not exceeding the value of ten guineas, and it shall have on its obverse side the bust to the left and to the right, Wollaston.”

It was just before Christmas 1828 that William Hyde Wollaston died in London at the age of sixty-two. Two weeks earlier he had written a formal letter to the Geological Society, announcing that he was planning to make a bequest of a thousand pounds’ worth of stock, in the hope that an award might be created—the first year’s income would be for making the die—and handed out each year to one individual for his or her research “into the mineral structure of the earth.”

It was in some ways an odd choice. William Wollaston was not a geologist but a chemist, though said by all to be a man blessed with the most acute powers of observation. He could apparently see even the tiniest of flowers while riding on horseback. He invented the camera lucida
*
after noticing something
odd in the crack in his shaving mirror. He was one of the few men who ever noticed a mirage on the river Thames. He was a doctor, an expert on kidney stones and on mineral-based enlargements of the prostate.

He specialized in the chemistry of exotic and precious heavy metals. He discovered palladium and, from its rose-colored salts, refined rhodium. He made a fortune from finding clever new ways of working with platinum.
*
He invented the reflecting goniometer, an instrument that could measure the precise angles between the faces of microscopic-size crystals. And during his lifetime he published no fewer than fifty-six academic papers on “pathology, physiology, chemistry, optics, mineralogy, crystallography, astronomy, electricity, mechanics, and botany,” but made not a single contribution to the science of geology itself. He has, however, a mineral named after him—a calcium silicate called
wollastonite
, which is formed when limestone is crushed hard against another rock.

But his medal, awarded every year since 1831, is without peer in the world of geology: To be a recipient of the Wollaston Medal is to become the equal of a Nobel laureate, in a discipline for which (despite its universal and elemental nature, and in common with mathematics) Alfred Nobel puzzlingly and shamefully left no bequest. The Wollaston is the Oscar of the world of rocks, fought for gamely, campaigned for bitterly, and if awarded, then accepted with the secure knowledge that career and reputation are guaranteed for life.

Yet at the time the medal was struck the science it sought to reward was still very much in its infancy. Physics, chemistry, and medicine had long been fully fledged: When Nobel offered his prizes for excellence in them, they had been around for cen
turies. Wollaston’s bequest, on the other hand, was designed for practitioners of a science that had been totally unknown—at least by the name
geology
—a mere six decades before. And it was a science that, because of bigotry, intolerance, churchly disapproval, and the fundamental assumptions it sought to challenge, suffered more than the usual share of growing pains—pains that were mirrored precisely by the difficult evolution of the Geological Society itself.

Set up when the science was just staggering to its feet, the society was made up initially of men who had more pretense about them than solid achievement. In the outside world, said George Greenough, “the term geology…was little understood.” Few men “beyond the pale of our little coterie” aspired, he said, to become geologists. The early members of the society—or at least, the more powerful among them—were bent more on following field of elegant drawing-room fashion than pursuing and disseminating much rigorous scientific research. Most of them seemed blissfully unaware that there was in fact a very real and a profoundly important science buried within the aimless charms of their fossil and mineral collecting.

So there was a good deal of tension, unanticipated at the time, and yet with hindsight quite understandable, once
the men of real worth—those who recognized that they were in at the beginning of a very real new science—began to rise through the society’s ranks. There was tension in particular once such men began not simply to rise but to overwhelm and displace the smug “little coterie” whose fossil collectors’ dining club it originally was.

In few sciences can there have been such an ugly rivalry. John Phillips, William Smith’s nephew, first came to live full-time in London in 1831 and reported that he found it all vastly amusing, noting in his journal that “the jealousy among the men of science here is wonderful.” Others found it less so. Thomas Webster, who was the curator of the society’s museum, wrote that he was surrounded by “a band of busy, jealous, active and revengeful witlings who have gained and kept their ascendancy partly from contempt, partly from the indolence of others.” George Greenough, who as president of the society was responsible for setting its early temper, had once been held in awe: Now he was being dismissed as merely “a charlatan and a blockhead” others in his various factions were described as “quacks,” “jackals,” and “pilferers.”

Gradually, though, the passions subsided; and by the late 1820s the new elite was in place, to remain unassailably there for many years. Controversies continued to rage, as in any stimulating environment—but thenceforth they tended to be about geological dogma and discovery, much less about money, influence, and class. The academic tone was rising by the day: Sedgwick and Murchison, the two colossi of the discipline, were now firmly in position, battling royally over such technical matters as the succession in the Lower Paleozoic. In place too was perhaps the most colorful and clever of all nineteenth-century geologists, the great showman-scientist who preceded John Phillips as professor at Oxford, Dean William Buckland.

Buckland is perhaps better known today for his antics than his discoveries and beliefs. He had a voracious need to check every
thing. He tried to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom, offering mice in batter and steaks of bison and crocodile to guests at breakfast, but reserving the viler things for himself—he declared that he found mole perfectly horrible, and the only thing worse was that fat English housefly known colloquially as a bluebottle. His sense of taste seems not to have been ruined by such experimentation—he once found his carriage stranded in the nighttime fog somewhere west of London, scooped some earth from the road and tasted it and declared to his companions, with relief, “Gentlemen—Uxbridge!”

He was a great skeptic, particularly where Catholics were concerned. Once, led to a dark stain on the flagstones of an Italian cathedral, which the local prelate insisted was the newly liquefied blood of a well-known martyr, he dropped to his knees, licked the darkened spot, and announced that it was in fact the urine of bats.

But above all he was a fieldworker—a scrabbler-about in meadows, a clamberer, a hammerer. His best-known discovery was of the thousands of broken bones in a cave in North Yorkshire; these he declared to indeed be evidence of the Deluge, the Flood—but since the bones it had swept up into the cave in cold, windy Yorkshire were those of tropical animals—hyenas, elephants, lions—the event had in fact happened many thousands of years ago, when the weather was tropical, and not according to Ussher’s dogmatic timetable.

The six days of Creation were properly to be thought of as Six Ages, he said. Scientific observation had now displayed, without a shadow of doubt, that there was much more to the Bible than could be learned from its strict literal interpretation. The new science of geology, in other words, was now capable of asking—and probably of answering—the truly great questions, the fathomless wonderment about God, the cosmos and humankind. The conclusions to which Buckland, the keenest of all observers, eventually came were to change the relationship
between science and religion for all time. And geology, this brand-new science, with a brand-new society and now a brand-new medal from Wollaston, was the key to the unlocking of thousands of years of fettered and blinkered prejudice.

It was this holy trinity of geology’s new young grandees—Sedgwick, Murchison, and Buckland, none of them older than forty-five—who saw to it that it was William Smith who would be awarded the first-ever of the society’s Wollaston Medals.

No matter that he was not a member of the society and had never been invited to be, or that just nine years beforehand his membership had been blackballed by Greenough’s old guard. No matter that he was lowborn, that he was uneducated, a provincial, a convicted debtor, and that even more contemptible of figures, a practical man. No matter that he had accused some of the more august members of the geological establishment of stealing his work, of cheating him of his due. No matter that a quarter of a century’s worth of ill feeling had accumulated, that factions existed and battled among themselves, and that the kingdom’s entire geological universe had been upset. Now, the wise men decreed, was the time for atonement and reconciliation.

The message had gone out from Sir John Johnstone at Hackness, via Mr. Vernon, to Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, from Murchison to Dean William Buckland, and from Buckland to Adam Sedgwick, who was both Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge and, since 1829, the Geological Society’s president. The debate was brief, the die was cast. A formal resolution was passed at a special meeting of the society’s council, without dissent (despite Greenough’s council membership) on January 11, 1831, both that the first medal be given to Smith, and that he should be granted the proceeds of Wollaston’s so-called Donation Fund, established to provide a modest income to a scientist whose career, through no fault of his own, was—if the double pun may be permitted—on the rocks.

William Smith was at Hackness when he was first given the momentous news, in a letter sent by hand from the society. His excitement and delight are infectious: One can sense the pleasure, the new spring in his step, the feeling of relief and gratitude and of a wrong being righted,
at last
!

“Last night I received Professor Sedgwick’s official letter,” he writes at the end of the month to his nephew—who himself was now well on in his own distinguished career.
*
“He presses me to appear in person at the Society’s Anniversary on the 18
^th
February,” and where he would “go through the form” of being presented with the medal. “The form” was necessary because in fact the medal itself was not finished when time came for the award—but the society went ahead anyway, giving itself up to a state of what for the geological world is very close to rapture.

“At their meeting every countenance glowed with delight,” Smith wrote to his niece,

Old William Smith sounds to have been almost a little tipsy while writing this letter; but disabled by drink or not, he had
clearly remembered to see to it that Sir John Johnstone had been invited, so that the man who had rescued him from rural obscurity was on hand to watch the revels of his elevation to the
corps d’élite
of the nation’s scientists.

And as Adam Sedgwick was to make clear, it was a
corps d’élite
with but one member. The closing paragraphs of his short speech are worth quoting at their high-flown length, not least because they include the one phrase—an injudicious hyperbole, some churlish few will say—that has since marked the memory of William Smith out for all time, and that remains carved on his headstone and in gilt letters on a dozen public memorials.