The Syme Papers (4 page)

He also gives some credit where it is due: ‘I have discovered ideas very similar to my own in a work of F.B. Taylor’s which appeared in 1910.’ Yet he qualifies even this: ‘however, I have received the impression when reading Taylor that his main object was to find a formative principle for the arrangement of the large mountain chains … [and] continental drift in our sense played only a subsidiary role and was given only a very cursory explanation’.
In short, Wegener had struck gold, knew he had hit the motherlode, and could not bear the thought that any of the other prospectors, digging the same bend in the river, might have sifted something of similar ore through their brain-pans. (If only I had looked more closely then, the real clue would have shone through the grit he spread around it, but I dug it up in time.) He was staking a claim to an idea so magnificent and simple, he could not quite believe that no one would pinch it from him.

In fact, the opposite occurred: no one listened. The world had busied itself about a very different geographical split; and even when the First World War ended and the troops went home, a prejudice against German scholarship, as Faul points out, delayed even further the reception of his ideas. Not until the publication of the third edition, in 1922, and its translation into English and French, did Wegener’s theories enter the public debate, only to receive, at best, a muted support (Faul again). Wegener, like Syme before him, faltered at the starting-post: he could not account for the Prime Mover, the original force that drove the continents apart.

And so he set forth for Greenland, a fourth and final time, to offer, as Syme had attempted to do, dramatic evidence of the justice of his theories. If only he could prove, demonstrably, that Greenland itself had drifted, almost a furlong, since 1922, no one could doubt him any longer. His mission ended in a more
fatal,
though no less
final,
disaster than Syme’s a century before; and he died, in a drift of ice, tracking backwards for supplies.

Track backwards, Pitt! Go over every step! And there I found him at last, buried in a footnote, the echo of that worry in my ear: Samuel Highgate Syme. Wegener could not abuse his native honesty, and in that catalogue of distinctions he recorded faithfully, in footnote sixty-three (out of all sequence), the exception among his ‘American colleagues’: ‘As far back as 1826,’ Wegener writes, ‘Syme spoke of “segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core”.’ And there we have the critical connection: a split in the crust, and the drift ensuing. But we have come no closer to Syme.

I must step back now and begin at another beginning;
Find the
shape, Pitt,
I hear Bunyon rumbling,
and stick to it.
There is a shape, of course; there are too many shapes, and they dissolve into one another and reform, like shards of ice on a bright winter day, or the continents themselves, on their endless drift from unity. Once we belonged to a single shape, but no longer. And so I begin again, or rather, offer another starting-point after an interruption.

One year before the American Revolution, a young German, Abraham Gottlob Werner, last of a long line of Saxon metalworkers, was called to the new Technical University in Freiberg to teach mineral science. He was just twenty-five. By the time of his death in 1817, he had established the Freiberg Academy as one of the foremost institutions in geological science, and along the way revolutionized our picture of the birth of the world. And for the most part, he had got it entirely wrong.

Imagine an age in which no Pole has been reached, no sky breached, no ocean fathomed, no earthquake plumbed. By some trick of human nature, mankind had directed its great powers of intellectual enquiry skywards; and the secrets of the stars were solved long before the mysteries of the earth. Galileo had proved at last the centrality of the sun amid the revolutions of the planet; Newton had established the pull of gravity. We are all of us in the gutter, Wilde once said; yet
most
of us are looking at the stars. The rare man is he who rummages about him in the muck. Werner was that man. With the great problems of the heavens solved, at last we turned our questing down and in, and began to dig. And Werner had his audience.

By all accounts he was a remarkable teacher. He brought three successive generations into the study of geology, or, as he dubbed his new discipline, geognosy; including, very late in life, the young Friedrich Müller, whom we shall come to in time (almost too late for me). Werner’s excellence lay in the field. He wrote a mineralogy guidebook at the age of twenty-four, which landed him the job in Freiberg in the first place. In it, he established his own categories for identifying rocks: clear, simple, structured. The chief feature of his mind was its
lucidity.
Unlike
Doug Pitt, he had mastered the art of beginnings. He guessed what he could not know and imposed the clear order of his thought upon the world before him. The muddle of matter that would not fit was swept away.

His was a revolution not of discovery, nor insight, but of order – a classic of German innovation. He convinced not by logic but by clarity. He reduced a confusing jumble of rock and rift, of mines and mountains, into a plain system, ship-shape; all the world seemed present and correct. He
tidied up,
reduced, cut out what would not fit, and persuaded.

Werner’s views ran briefly as follows. He accounted for the various formations of rock observable at different layers of landscape as the deposits of a former ocean covering the globe. In fact, most shockingly of all,
the globe was an ocean,
a ball of water held trembling together like the drop at the end of a tap. Rock precipitated out of this oceanic solution to form the crust of the earth as we now know it. Owing to the fact, Werner argued, that deep waters run
still
and are thus incapable of inducing precipitates, this original ocean must have fallen and risen (diminished and swelled) to produce the present landscape, each drop in the water level yielding a harvest of rock formations as the accompanying turbulence released basalt from solution.

His system of classification simply referred each rock to the fall in water that produced it. There were
Primitive
rocks, formed in the bosom of the original universal ocean; they included granite, mica, clay, porphyry, etc. Next came
Transition
rocks, layered upon the primitive rocks as the ocean dipped below the crust. These numbered limestone and flint among them, and contained the beginnings of organic remains.
Floetz
rocks followed, after a brief rise in oceanic levels and the ensuing dip; these were rarely found at a great height, as the universal ocean had subsided below the peaks by this time. Where discrepancies occurred, Werner simply ignored them
as discrepancies,
and moved on – to
Alluvial
and
Volcanic
rocks, variations on the previous three. Five kinds of rock, Werner thought, was a good number to be going on with. The genius of his system was its simplicity. Every discovery
could be referred to these original formations, exceptions noted, debated, classified,
recorded.
But the world, I fear, is run according to the lucid, the Bunyons and Werners, no matter the absurdities they tumble us into.

Werner was a tiny man, tiny and tidy; bowlegged like a blacksmith, possessing a sharp cleft chin, sharp nose, and sharp wisp of beard, never quite full enough to persuade. He moved with a quivering, restless energy, burning up like the filaments inside a glass bulb, gesturing endlessly, stepping and stopping, with the fever of enthusiasm. He wrote rarely, preferring to
talk
and
influ
ence.
There seemed so little to set down; the world was plain enough, after all. Paper had this tricky way of drawing out and leading on, involving him in a thousand complexities, which a simple demonstration, or personal assurance, could pass over in a minute. He lived on in the memories of his students, and their more patient pens; they returned, again and again, to hear him lecture. I cannot help but think of that old line: ‘somehow they were never the same to him/When they were married and brought their wives.’

He died childless in 1817, lecturing until the end,
married
only to the college whose rise he had overseen. Yet Werner’s most famous student – his successor at Freiberg, Friedrich Mohs, inventor of degrees of hardness, both geological and psychological – fled at the first opportunity for Vienna and greener pastures; and the Freiberg Academy suffered a long decline through the nineteenth century.

One notable student remained truer to his master. Werner’s theories have been ably set down by Robert Jameson, the Scottish son of a soap-boiler, who was inspired by the tale of Robinson Crusoe to follow a career in geology, and who journeyed to Freiburg to effect an initiation. Jameson left this testament to Werner’s example and the nature of the discipline the great man left behind him.

We always praise the mind that leads us out of
chaos,
no matter the route taken, nor the country reached. But Werner, of course, had his disagreements. His greatest rival to the title of the Father of Modern Geology was another Scot, Dr James Hutton, a dour, meticulous, incomprehensible man, whose theories required an interpreter in his own tongue to be understood. That interpreter was a man named Playfair – if only we all had such interpreters, Dr Bunyon notwithstanding – a lucid, elegant writer whose simplifications allowed Hutton’s theory to challenge even the order of Werner’s categories. But I am an old obscurantist, a stickler for sticky phrases and muddy texts, and turn for once to the original, Hutton’s perhaps mockingly titled
Theory of the Earth.

Hutton’s genius lay in his understanding of
accumulation.
He sensed that the process of life involves an almost endless series of revisions, the making and unmaking and remaking of Matter, which itself is the result of an age of minor transformations. He declared that it was ‘in vain to look for anything higher in the origin
of the earth than the
continuation of some
earlier process;
the result, therefore, of our present inquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’.

He argued that the earth’s crust was the product of sedimentation transfused by heat into new matter. He placed great faith in the strength of fire, a faith he felt no need to justify by experiment. The world around us, he argued, has overflowed from a great furnace, a continual power, an endless shifting. The rocks we see bear the brunt of their fusion.
We come burning hither, caught in the fire of
some transformation;
he simply recorded the process, as accurately as he could. He had little interest in marking the genesis of
any
thing
 
– contenting himself with an account of how
everything
had undergone some modification. He acknowledged no beginnings and no ends, only the steadiness of change. By some trick of fate his masterpiece,
The Theory of the Earth,
survived him unfinished. Playfair unaccountably never tidied up the remains; and only a century later were those dormant manuscripts, beginning characteristically on chapter four, offered to the public.