- Winchester, Simon. The Map that Changed
the World. New York: HarperCollins,
2001. ISBN 0-06-093180-9.
- This is the story of William Smith, the son of an
Oxfordshire blacksmith, who, with almost no formal education but
keen powers of observation and deduction, essentially single-handedly
created the modern science of geology in the last years of the 18th and
the beginning of the 19th century, culminating in the 1815 publication
of Smith's masterwork: a large scale map of the stratigraphy of
England, Wales, and part of Scotland, which is virtually identical
to the most modern geological maps. Although fossil collecting was
a passion of the aristocracy in his time, Smith was the first to
observe that particular fossil species were always associated with
the same stratum of rock and hence, conversely, that rock containing
the same population of fossils was the same stratum, wherever it
was found. This permitted him to decode the layering of strata and
their relative ages, and predict where coal and other minerals were
likely to be found, which was a matter of great importance at the
dawn of the industrial revolution. In his long life, in addition
to inventing modern geology (he coined the word “stratigraphical”),
he surveyed mines, built canals, operated a quarry, was the victim
of plagiarism, designed a museum, served time in debtor's prison,
was denied membership in the newly-formed Geological Society of
London due to his humble origins, yet years later was the first
recipient of its highest award, the Wollaston Medal, presented to
him as the “Father of English Geology”. Smith's work transformed
geology from a pastime for fossil collectors and spinners of fanciful
theories to a rigorous empirical science and laid the bedrock (if
you'll excuse the term) for Darwin and the modern picture of the
history of the Earth. The author is very fond of superlatives.
While Smith's discoveries, adventures, and misadventures certainly
merit them, they get a little tedious after a hundred pages or so.
Winchester seems to have been traumatised by his childhood experiences
in a convent boarding-school (chapter 11), and he avails himself of
every possible opportunity to express his disdain for religion, the
religious, and those (the overwhelming majority of learned people in
Smith's time) who believed in the Biblical account of creation and
the flood. This is irrelevant to and a distraction from the story.
Smith's career marked the very beginning of scientific investigation
of natural history; when Smith's great geological map was published
in 1815, Charles Darwin was six years old. Smith never
suffered any kind of religious persecution or opposition to his work,
and several of his colleagues in the dawning days of earth science
were clergymen. Simon Winchester is also the author of The Professor and
the Madman, the story of the Oxford English
Dictionary.
August 2004 