BOOK REVIEW: The Map That Changed The World

by James MacLaren

The Map That Changed The World: William

Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology

Simon Winchester, 2001, Harper Collins Publishers</b>

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.