And all this questioning tended to coalesce around one new and barely structured field of study and fascination. Could it perhaps be that geology,* the frail and stripling science that had first been established to inquire into the nature of the earth before and after the Deluge, could it be that geological inquiry might hold the answer? This was a science that, after all, had at least the potential—if it could be divorced from churchly dogma—to at least define and then ask the questions to which answers now seemed so urgently needed.
At the time of Smith’s birth, geology and those few men who called themselves geologists saw it as no part of their duties to inquire more fully, to delve more deeply, into what were still seen as the realms of the Divine. And yet some scientists were beginning to wonder if geology really was to be confined like this—if it was obliged to function only within the framework of faith, and not to challenge it one whit—then was it truly worthy of being called a science at all?
Maybe, though, it could rehabilitate itself. Maybe geology was the one new scientific discipline that, if applied courageously, might be able to help answer the fundamental and unasked questions that were beginning to trouble those tentative, nervous questioners. Perhaps geology could be the key for those who, in the enlightened, wondering spirit of the times, were at last beginning to tap their fingertips on the stout door of received belief?
Many Europeans who found themselves in England in the closing decades of the eighteenth century talked of seeing a country “waking itself from sleep.” Many in England agreed and wondered out loud: Could it be that in shaking and worrying and waking from its sleep the very land itself, by asking at last what exactly was that land, and how it had first come into being—could it be that by doing this they might answer questions that would help lay bare the very core of knowledge?
That was what a few men were at the time beginning to wonder. In turn the wonderment of some of them—a country surveyor here, an Oxford-educated priest there, a fossil-collecting dilettante in this city, a radical-minded landlord in that—would be passed down to the intelligent and inquiring young Oxfordshire lad, who would before long help lay the foundations for a brand-new science that would inquire, quite fearlessly and, eventually, scandalously into the foundations of just about everything. William Smith appeared on the stage at a profoundly interesting moment: He was about to make it even more so.
3
The Mystery of the Chedworth Bun
Dactylioceras tenuicostatum
William Smith’s introduction to the curious magic of geology—at a time when it was still a calling more nestled in myth and mystery than in the rigors of scientific discipline—came about in the most prosaic of ways.
It was presaged by domestic tragedy. When William was just eight years old his father, John, suddenly died. He had been something of a skilled mechanic as well as the village blacksmith, and had caught a chill while working outdoors repairing a piece of farm machinery. It was a devastating blow, financially as well as emotionally.
For the next couple of years, until Ann Smith married again, the boy, along with his two brothers, Daniel and John, and a sister, Elizabeth,* was largely brought up by his uncle (who, confusingly, was called William too), who also farmed locally.
A romantic might well say that William Smith was almost an orphan. To all intents and purposes, with a father dead and a mother apparently more interested in her new husband than in her child, he was. Life on his uncle’s farm, however, does not appear to have struck him as displeasing. And in any case the farm was itself soon to become symbolically very important in his story—principally because it was substantial enough an establishment to include a dairy.
It was customary in the farms of this part of Oxfordshire for the dairymaid who operated the butter scales (in this case, William’s aunt) to use as a pound weight not an artificial metallic object, as one might buy in a market, but one of any number of curious, rather attractive, sometimes flattened and usually almost circular stones that could easily be found in the quarries nearby.
The farmers took these stones for granted—and why not?—they were merely stones of a certain size, one of those very few conveniences of isolated rural life, to be given no more heed than one might give a clod of earth or a muddy pool. But William, who seems to have had a more curious eye than most, saw on the dairy scales objects that were not ordinary at all. He looked carefully at each one, and realized that there were features about these stones that were uncommonly lovely—and had a meaning that no one else seems to have noticed. No one in the dairy, at the very least.
Some features of the pound stones were quite plain to see. Others required a closer look. When viewed from above, the stones appeared to be round, although in fact some of them were not—some had five sides, but sides that were sufficiently chamfered to give the stone, on cursory inspection, a circular appearance. Then again all the pound stones, whether they were actually round or five-sided, were about four inches across. In cross-section the rounded ones were slightly flattened at the top and bottom, so that each stone would sit on the weighing scale without any inclination to roll off. The dairymaids liked this feature: a weighing stone that would stay where it was put.
But whether the stones were flat or indented, round or pentagonal, the Oxfordshire dairymaids found them useful also because they were remarkably uniform in both dimension and mass. Almost all of them weighed in at about twenty-two ounces—which just happened to be what the local dairy managers, in measuring out freshly churned butter for their customers, called a “long pound.”
The five-sided variety was arranged in one of two general kinds of shape, each of which can best be imagined by thinking of an orange, either pressed down flat on a table, or else pressed down on top of a small pebble. Both, in other words, were rounded at the top, but some were totally flat below, while others had a shallow upward indentation at the base.
Oxfordshire pound stones, which the locals still sometimes call Chedworth Buns, are still be found in the plowed fields around Churchill. Close inspection of a good specimen reveals them to be even more complicated than one might suppose. The possession of five sides already suggests some degree of complexity; but in addition their outer surfaces are decorated with a series of quite beautiful filigrees of fine lines and beguiling, elegantly regular patterns.
On the top of each rounded dome, for example, is a small disk, composed of five leaflike plates, which surrounds a tiny circular hole. Down what anyone fondling the stones will surely regard as their rather voluptuously convex sides spread ten ray-like arrangements of what appear to be plates, like armor. The plates are two sizes, large and small—and they are arranged so that one array of the smaller plates alternates with another of the wider plates, five times each. Underneath, at the point where these rays all come together again, like lines of longitude on a globe, there is another hole, quite larger than the one on top. And on some of the five-sided pound stones—but not on the totally round ones—there is a third hole, somewhat elongated and lozenge shaped, which lies halfway down the curved exterior, right in the center of one of the wider, large-plate rays.
Such things had actually first been recognized for what they were—or what they appeared to be—about a century before. It was in Sussex that a local naturalist, wondering about the version of Oxfordshire pound stones that he found in the fields near Brighton, realized that he had seen something very similar-looking that was actually living in the rock pools of his local seashore. Wedged into recesses of the pools he had found scores of almost spherical animals, some of them round, some heart-shaped, all covered with sharp spikes—sea urchins, he knew they were called.
Their protective covering of spikes disguised the exoskeletons beneath. But once in a while the naturalist would find on the beach a dead sea urchin, a specimen that had completely lost its spikes. Such a specimen, naked among the pebbles, displayed its eggshell-white exoskeleton perfectly. And this was the vital point of contact—for although the skeletons that
were to be found on a Sussex beach were hollow, and fragile, and soap-bubble light, in shape and size and markings they were precisely the same as the solid, heavy stones he had found in the fields nearby.
So this amateur scientist promptly deduced what we today would regard as perfectly obvious—that his pound stones were stones, yes, in that they were solid and made of what were evidently mineral materials, but they were also clearly the remains, or at least precise simulacra, of common sea urchins. They were members of the family known as echinoderms, and of the genus known as Echinus, both of which had been named after the Greek and Latin words from which we get urchin, which means “hedgehog.”
The symmetry and beauty of the sea-urchin-shaped stone that lay on the dairymaid’s butter scales evidently caught the young William Smith’s imagination. It is not difficult to imagine him picking it up, turning it over and over in his hand, examining through a glass its intricate patterns of plates, striations, and whorls. He may well have compared it with pictures of modern sea urchins that he found in his textbooks in the village school, and asked questions of his teacher—an eccentric villager named Billy Watts, who seems to have taught his classes while sitting with a cat on each knee, and who was probably not the source of much enlightenment on the subject.
And, most crucially of all, he may have asked himself questions that more disciplined scientists were even then beginning to puzzle over: Just what was a creature of the oceans doing, preserved—so strangely!—as part of a rock? Just how did one solid become so firmly embedded inside another? Just what did such things, such weird phenomena, the encapsulation of objects from the sea deep inside the rocks of Oxfordshire, really mean?
The pound stone, viewed from the side.
Clypeus ploti—a pound stone—viewed from the top.
It was not long before another such object, just as prosaic, just as lovely, attracted his interest.
Scattered all over the fields around Churchill—but of no interest to the dairymaids—were hundreds of small, thumbnail-size objects, almost spherical, and with a vaguely opalescent sheen to them. They, too, had a subtle, magical beauty: On closer examination, when it was possible to see that their skins had an orange-peel-like texture, with thousands of tiny holes regularly arranged over the surface, their loveliness was even more apparent. They looked a little like acorns; or perhaps William, who might have been taken on school trips to some of the many Roman ruins with which Oxfordshire was littered, might have thought they looked a little like Roman oil lamps. The local farmers, who also spotted the similarity of shape, had long called them lamp shells. William called them “pundibs,” and in his diaries written years later recalled using them as marbles, to play games with his schoolmates.
But like the sea urchins, these lamp-shell stones clearly had no logical place among the arid amassments of rock lying beneath the Oxfordshire fields. For these mimic creatures—if that is what they were—likewise belonged to the ocean. Contemporary, living versions, which could also be found on shallow-sloping sands beside the sea and in the estuaries of rivers, were composed of two small shells, the upper one slightly larger than and curving over the lower, with a small hole at the overlapping edge of the upper shell from which a small gelatinous leg protruded to anchor the shell to the ground.
Once in a while, when shallow sea water washed over the tiny animal, a most extraordinary thing happened: The two shells, which were evidently hinged close to the anchor leg, opened slightly, and from between them flicked a long, curled, rubbery tonguelike organ, which waved among the suspended particles in the water, collected some of the edible morsels that stuck to its surfaces, and was then coiled back smartly between the shells, which promptly snapped shut. Following this lightning-quick feast the animal then remained static, evidently digesting and nourishing itself on whatever its remarkable feeding limb had managed to collect.
Today we know only too well exactly what the two objects were that the boy so admired, and that so inspired him. The pound stone, an echinoid, was in all probability a species named Clypeus ploti, the genus name (from the Latin) given because of its round, shieldlike shape, and its species name given in honor of a long-forgotten Oxfordshire geologist called Robert Plot.*
The marbles that William used in schoolyard play were a type of brachiopod, a terebratulid, and most probably, given its roundness and suitability for games, a small and pretty variety known as Lobothyris.
But all this begs the original question: What were such sea creatures doing in the middle of a stretch of unenclosed pasture, a hundred miles from the nearest shoreline and (considering the height of the surrounding land above sea level) a good three hundred vertical feet above it? To answer such questions today is quite simple: The shells are just fossils, once organic but now mineralized relics of a time when the rocks that lie beneath the fields of Oxfordshire were themselves being created, thousands of feet beneath a life-rich tropical sea. But in the late eighteenth century, no such theory had ever been even vaguely imagined. When William Smith was being entranced and captivated by the dairymaids’ pound stones, nothing about fossils was simple, nothing was universally accepted, nothing was obvious at all.
Terebratulids—Lobothyris—used as marbles by William Smith and his school friends.
The entire notion of fossils, in fact—what they were, why they were where they were, what possible deeper meaning was signified by their existence—was quite profoundly different from anything that is imaginable today. When William Smith was growing up, everything about them—whether they were commonly found examples like brachiopods or echinoids, whether ammonites or trilobites, gastropods or graptolites, or teeth or ribs or fragments of coral—was seen in a very different light. Assumptions were made about them and conclusions were drawn from their existence that bear little relation to what is today considered objective reality.
Pythagoras, it is often said, knew well what these mysterious bodies were, two thousand years before anything resembling the modern science of paleontology had begun shuffling out of the shadows. But, Pythagorean foresight aside, the world had long been steeped in a degree of ignorance that seems barely credible today.
Until the beginning of the eighteenth century the objects found inside rocks were known not as fossils—that word had a much more general usage, meaning anything, minerals and crystals included, that had been dug up from the ground. Any item that had been unearthed or discovered lying in a field and that had the look of an animal or a plant about it—an obvious shell, say, or a sea urchin, a leaf, or a piece of branch—was known, cumbrously though perhaps quite reasonably, as a “figured stone.”
A few of these stones were easy to explain—some, like those that happened to have a shape vaguely resembling a human head, or a carrot, or a ship, had almost certainly been shaped accidentally. Tree limbs or animal bones that had never been mineralized and that were merely stuck in mud or in the sand by a riverbed were obviously pieces of modern organic life which had died and become mired in the earth. The figured stones that interested and amazed people in the seventeenth century—and people, aristocrats and members of the leisured classes especially, amassed enormous collections of them, with both the Royal Society and Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum housing them in handsome display cases—were those that were clearly made of mineral material. These were thus definable as stones, and yet they looked uncannily like something that had once been living, or else they mimicked the aforesaid shells, sea urchins, leaves, or pieces of branch.
They obviously could not possibly be such things—that went without saying. To suggest otherwise was either to court ridicule—a once living shell, thrust halfway up a mountain, indeed!—or else to be accused of apostasy or heresy, for tinkering with the ordered faiths of nature. But to gaze at them in astonished rapture—this is what the nobly born of England did three centuries ago, much as later generations gazed in awe at mounted specimens of the coelacanth, or at specimens of rock from the surface of the moon.
No. Such things, s
o awesome and wondrous to behold, could only be explained in one way. Clearly they were unique creations of the Almighty himself—lapides sui generis is the phrase now employed (“stones unto themselves”). They existed for one reason only, and that was to reinforce in humankind’s collective mind the omnipotence and imaginative beneficence of God. He placed the figured stones where they were discovered, using to do so what was termed a vis plastica, a plastic force. He used the force to insert into rocks miraculously perfect simulacra of living things, for the sole purpose of reminding the entire human race that God did indeed move in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. And there, to the enraptured viewers of the stones, was an end to it.
The science that was needed to justify such a belief to skeptics was simple enough. This, after all, was still the time of phlogiston* and the ether, and the firmly held belief that mountains grew like trees, organically, upward and outward. To anyone who imagined such a thing, it did not require too much of a leap of imaginative faith to conclude that mysterious stone objects found in the earth were there either because (a) they had been infused (on heaven’s command) with some kind of petrifying fluid, (b) they had had their nature changed by a kind of juice that emanated from nearby mineral seams, or (c) that the stars had exerted some kind of magnetic or gravitational influence on them from the heavens. And if all these theories failed the rigorous tests of observation, then one could always simply resort to (d), the mysterious ways of God: Collectors would argue that a divine virtue was behind the placing of all fossils, using the word virtue in the old sense, rare now, of meaning “by way of supernatural power.”
Old-fashioned scientific explanation appealed most of all, especially to those who, in post-Restoration England, were trying to make some order out of the chaos they perceived in the world. To the scientists the idea that a stone might grow into the shape of a sea urchin was surely not outlandish at all. If a perfectly symmetrical crystal could grow out of apparently nothing, if a mysterious process of chemistry could make a stalactite or a kidney stone or a coral—a rock that grows—then why could not the same kind of inexplicable and enigmatic natural force make a stone that looked like a shell, or a tree, or, as in the case of the Oxfordshire pound stones, in the shape of a hedgehog, and do so, moreover, deep within the body of a rock?