The Map That Changed the World (40 page)

*
As well as being a great city planner: He razed the old Bedford House in central London and in its place created Russell Square and Tavistock Square, the former being one of the capital’s largest.

†
In
Annals of Agriculture
.

*
As the illustration on Back Matter: Epilogue suggests, there are nine basic divisions of geologic time. The division of greatest chronological extent is that known as the eon—of which there are commonly thought to be four, and of which the most recent is the Phanerozoic. This particular Eon is then divided into four eras (the Mesozoic) some of which are divided into suberas; the eras into periods (the Jurassic) and in a few cases subperiods, and the periods into epochs (the Lias). Below this—divisions that may be only five or ten million years in extent, a blink of a geological eye—are a vast number of stages (the Toarcian); and below this, named after the dominant identifying fossils that are to be found only in that particular portion of time, if the rocks and thus the conditions of deposition are of a certain kind, are the hundreds of geological zones. Below there are divisions of mere tens of thousands of years—and thus there are thousands of them—known as subzones (or, by some, as teilzones or epiboles). The rocks below the very top of the East Cliff at Dorset’s West Bay—the one in which I found the smooth and barely coiled ammonite—are of the Mesozoic era, of the Jurassic period, of the Liassic epoch, and of the Toarcian stage. The identification of the ammonite itself, as we shall see, determines the exact geological zone.

*
I had come back largely on the advice of a man I had met in the village of Chideock, where I was staying. He was called Denys Brunsden, and he was known by the locals simply as someone who was interested in the local geology. He turned out to be an internationally renowned expert in the physics of landslips, was summoned by countries all over the world—and, when I told him the subject of my interest, dashed out to his study and returned with his most recent award: It came from the Geological Society of London, had engraving of figures digging a canal, and turned out to be the millennial medal for contributions to geology, no less than the recently named William Smith Award. I took this coincidence as a most favorable augury for the rest of the journey.

*
The Middle Jurassic is known also as the Dogger epoch; and the Upper Jurassic, the Malm. The terms, more widely used in Europe and United States, are now internationally recognized, though this classification—all falling within the overlapping jurisdictions of academia and government—is subject to interminably long squabbles.

*
Uniquely in the world, the British Isles manage to display rocks from very nearly every single one of the geological epochs, from the oldest, the Precambrian and the Cambrian (from 1,000 to 570 million years ago) to those of the Pleistocene, which began as recently as 1.65 million years ago. Only the Miocene, which stretched from 20 to 5 million years ago, and during which the first hominidlike creatures appeared, is less than wholly represented. The remarkable appearance of well-nigh all ages and types of rock in the British Isles can tempt the belief that it is right and proper that the science of geology was born in Britain, and further adds emotional claim to William Smith being its most natural father.

*
This is a Middle Inferior Oolite horizon characterized by the presence of countless small hard nodules of iron-rich concretion: The local quarriers thought they looked like snuffboxes, and called them so.

*
And known to their North American counterparts as jawbreakers.

*
The active ingredient of Fuller’s Earth is a so-called expansive clay mineral, montmorillonite, which is a phyllosilicate in that it is made up of parallel sheets of silica between which water and other minerals can be accommodated, so as to give it detergentlike qualities. The mineral is distinctively pink and named for the French town in which it is found in abundance. It occurs in rocks as a decay product of volcanic rocks—suggesting that the Middle Jurassic in which it is found was a time when older, igneous rocks were being worn down by the action of water.

*
A very similar thin-bedded roofing limestone is to be found sixty miles farther north, in Rutland, where it is known as the Collyweston slate. But the Collyweston manifestly does
not
belong to the same horizon, despite its similarity: Its fossils (and here is William Smith’s discovery being put to work) show it to be Inferior Oolite in age, whereas the presence in the Stonesfield Slate of the oyster
Ostrea acuminata
and the similar bivalve
Trigonia impresa
—as well as an impressive range of fossil vertebrates—show that it belongs to the Great Oolite, and is thus five million years younger.

*
Spoiled in places, though, and usually by the military. The Americans have satellite stations at Fylingdales, and their soldiers listen from deep inside this outpost of the Jurassic, where they are surrounded by the fossil remnants of the earliest kinds of life, to the chatterings and secrets of our infinitely more modern creations.

*
By dressing this way and dealing with the more landed of his clients, Smith was risking much: Dissenters were notoriously ill regarded by the older conservatives. Sydney Smith, the essayist and wit whose writings probably most accurately catch the mood of his namesake’s time, wrote in 1807 that “when a country squire hears of an ape, his first feeling is to give it nuts and apples; when he hears of a Dissenter his immediate impulse is to commit it to County Jail, to shave its head, to alter its customary food, and to have it privately whipped.”

*
Banks established the expedition to ship breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the British possessions in the Caribbean, to use as cheap food for estate workers. He also first brought the mango to Britain, from Bengal.

*
A Crown-owned property offered by the monarch as a lifetime residence to an individual who has performed great service to the nation generally or to the Crown particularly.

*
Dylan Thomas is buried at Laugharne, where Smith built the embankments: One of his finer early poems was
The Map of Love
.

*
Observations on the Utility, Form and Management of Water Meadows, and the draining and irrigating of peat bogs, with an account of Prisley Bog, and other extraordinary improvements, conducted for His Grace the Duke of Bedford, Thomas William Coke MP and others; by William Smith, engineer and mineralogist
, printed in Norwich and published in London by Longman and distributed by booksellers in 1806, with 121 pages and two folding plates, can fairly be considered Smith’s first major published work. It made precious little money for anyone.

*
Fifteen of the plates were for the map itself and a sixteenth reserved for a small bonus, a geological cross-section of the country from London to Snowdon, showing the strata inclined at an angle exaggerated to underline the phenomenon.

*
The society left it up to the winner whether to take the money or a medal. For the eternally impoverished William Smith, it was no contest.

*
It was probably shortly after this meeting that William Smith actually married; his wife, Mary Ann, far from helping him socially, became in very many ways a considerable burden.

*
His diplomatic invisibility was, we must suppose, of his own choosing.

*
It is one of the more curious aspects of this story that, notwithstanding all the help he gave Greenough, Farey was not awarded membership in the society either. So Smith was wrong in suggesting, enviously, that he had an honorary membership: In fact he had none at all.

*
Recently discovered correspondence shows that between 1801 and 1804 he helped to build an extraordinary mill on the River Yeo in Somerset. It had an immense underground wheel fed by water that traveled along a twelve-hundred-foot-long tunnel. Smith visited the farm in 1805 to inspect the mill’s workings and, not unreasonably, to collect payment.

†
Smith engaged for many years in a lively correspondence with the famous Cornish steam-engine maker Richard Trevithick, about using his pumps for the various coal mines in which Smith was working; and he was involved in the breaking of a huge underground obstruction in the Thames, where tunnelers were working at Blackwall. His range of interests was prodigious.

*
His obituary suggests that, Cambridge or not, he was not averse to cunning: In order to obtain one particularly celebrated specimen, his obituarist notes that he “bribed the
waiwode
of Athens, purchased the statue and obtained a
firman
.”

†
Greenough had been made the society’s president in 1811, the term
chairman
then being allowed to lapse.

*
James Sowerby is quite possibly the only scientist to have both a flower and a whale named after him.

*
In his diary for 1804 Smith gives the post-chaise fares when he and an assistant journeyed through Yorkshire—Hull to Weighton (of the Jurassic’s notable
Market Weighton Axis
, q.v): £1.5s.11d; Weighton to York: 11s.9d; York to Tadcaster, 9s.4d; Tadcaster to Spofforth, 16s.9d; Spofforth to Leeds, £1. 8s.6d—a total of £4.12s.3d outlaid, before a penny piece was spent on hotel rooms, guides, or food.

*
John Phillips—who later went on to write the only full-length biography of his uncle—was born on Christmas Day 1800 to Smith’s sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, John Phillips, an excise man. The boy was just seven when his father died; when his mother died six months later the boy was taken in by his uncle John. By 1813, though, William Smith, despite his straitened circumstances, was already paying John’s fees at boarding school, and by 1815 he agreed to look after him full-time. The boy was fascinated with geology—Benjamin Richardson of Bath had helped instill the fascination—and within days Smith’s diary records his nephew hard at work: “23 November, with JP arranging shells according to Linneus…. 6 February Making out Cornbrash and Forest Marble Fossils with JP….”

*
Huskisson had the mournful distinction in 1830 of being the first man killed by a railway locomotive. He was elderly and, being accident prone, was lame from a dislocated ankle when he attended the formal opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway: He was unable to get out of the way when the engine, the
Dart
, bore down on him.

†
Memorandum.

‡
As it was then; the Natural History Museum, one of its divisions, would later be built some miles west of the main museum headquarters in Bloomsbury.

*
The words were triple-underscored in the original.

*
Warner was a friend despite his having copied Smith’s first circular geological map of Bath for a publication of his own.

*
In Southwark there were as many as a dozen prisons; and although Dickens made the Marshalsea and the King’s Bench infamous, the one Southwark jail that truly infiltrated the English language, and gave it an eponym, was the one destroyed in the Gordon Riots of 1780—the Clink.

*
Had it been a Sunday, he could not, by law, have been taken—a situation which gave rise to the phrase “a Sunday man,” meaning someone who could only ever go out and about on a Sunday, for fear of arrest at any other time.

*
This was the same John Rennie who had hired Smith in 1793, at the beginning of the survey of the Somerset Coal Canal.

*
By coincidence Thomas Bowdler’s edition of Shakespeare, expurgated for the sake of public decency, appeared in 1818. The eponym thus derived was first used in 1836.

*
The go-between was John Farey.

*
“Ladies” were offered the same series for only fifteen shillings, a discount designed to lure them from their sewing rooms.

*
A baronetcy was the most junior hereditary entitlement—the appellation “Sir” being handed down, according to the principles of male primogeniture, indefinitely. But it did not mean that the title holder had been ennobled: One had to become a baron to be called “Lord” and to sit in the upper house of Parliament; the ranks of viscount, earl, marquess, and duke then rose in stellar fashion, one above another. Above dukes were only princes of the blood royal; below baronets, mere knights and then the rest, known sniffily as “gentlemen.”

*
A projection device that helps artists by throwing a reflected image of an object directly onto a sheet of paper, from which it can be drawn.

*
For much of its history the Medal has been struck from palladium, the silvery metal that Wollaston discovered and named after a passing asteroid. But as the Society’s demands have occasionally exhausted supplies, gold—as in Smith’s case—has had to be used instead.

*
Phillips himself was awarded the Wollaston Medal in 1845. Buckland got it in 1848, Sedgwick in 1851, Fitton in 1852—and Charles Darwin, whose work on the origin of species owes much to geology, and a very great deal to Smith, won the Wollaston Medal in 1859. The one early geologist never considered was George Bellas Greenough.

*
Townsend had died in 1816; but Benjamin Richardson was very much alive, and wrote from his vicarage at Farleigh Hungerford to say of Smith that he was “happy to hear the Geological Society proposes to pay a deserved compliment to his merits, to which I most gratefully bear a willing testimony.”