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BOOK REVIEW: The Map That Changed The World
The Map That Changed The World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology
Simon Winchester, 2001, Harper Collins Publishers
What a wonderfully obscure and informative piece of work! Who among us has ever given the least thought to the business by which our modern appreciation of the lithic organization of our home planet came into being? Or the thunderous effect that the understanding of the Earth’s full age has had upon the purveyors of revealed wisdom, cant and dogma, and other flummery espoused by fundamentalist nitwits the like of James Ussher and all who have preceded and followed him? Precious few of us, I’m sure.
That this tale is woven from the life history of but a single man, living in England during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, is remarkable in the extreme. And, even more remarkably, the tale twists and turns like some kind of melodramatic morality play. There are good guys and bad guys aplenty.
Had I not read this book, I would have been sorely taxed to believe the outrageous details of William Smith’s life and work.
Who the hell is William Smith ANYWAY?
Simon Winchester does a perfectly marvelous job of telling us who, exactly, this William Smith was.
This book is thoroughly British from top to bottom, and if you’re not familiar with haunts the like of Kilmersdon, Chew Stoke, Dunkerton, Tucking Mill, and a host of other delightfully weird place names, then you’d best crack out the maps and teach yourself a bit of rural English geography. Nothing but good can come of what you learn.
Sprinkled among the weird place names are a host of characters with Dickensian monikers. A Mrs. Kitten here. A Mr. Barne Barne there. An Adelard of Bath off in the far distance. All real people, and all more or less directly involved with the fortunes of William Smith, and so the fortunes of the birthing of modern geology and all that flows inevitably therefrom.
Smith was born low in a time of high snobbery. This was a crippling handicap in ways that you and I, children of a far more egalitarian epoch, can only dimly appreciate. For William Smith, the insults, injury, and wrongs were all too easy to appreciate, falling out of the sky and on to his exposed pelt as they did. Despite it all, through dint of heroic exertions, he managed to lay open, for all to see, the mysteries of the underworld above which we all go about our daily business. All of us excepting folks like coal miners, who play a seminal role in this tale.
Smith stumbled upon a discovery that, for its day, was as explosive as plutonium and he started out on his road by going underground where the coal seams were. Along the way he surveyed, dug canals, drained land, traveled for thousands of miles across an unmotorized landscape, dealt with lords, lairds, and the occasional prime minister along with his far less high born fellowmen, and generally operated at a prodigious physical and mental pace. Despite his brushes with the high and mighty (or perhaps because of them), he also saw the inside of debtor’s prison, was foreclosed upon, had all his worldly possessions confiscated and sold off to pay his debts, saw his own work brazenly stolen and used by others for their own gain, and after a long and illustrious career inventing the business of stratigraphy, found himself ignored, completely unappreciated, and otherwise cast off from society like a crumpled bit of rubbish.
And yet, in spite of it all, the story has a fairy tale ending. In his old age, Smith was finally rediscovered by those for whom he invented their craft, and at long last showered with the honor which had been rightly his the whole time. His final years were happy ones, rich with the attentions of a stellar assortment of his countrymen and comfortably financed by a special pension, granted by King William IV.
I haven’t told the slightest of the tale. You really should read this book. You’ll learn a thing or two about subjects you didn’t even know you had an interest in.
William Smith’s Great Map shelters behind pale blue curtains in a certain building in London. If you’re in the neighborhood, give it a look.
A lifetime resident (despite having travelled all over the damn place at one time or another) of Central Florida, James MacLaren took a four-year degree in death thrills riding giant waves on the North Shore back in the 70's. Wound up in the inconvenience store following a lay off from the Cape, where he was involved with the construction of the Space Shuttle launch pads, among other things. Father of best son in the world.
