The Map That Changed The World: William Smith And The Birth Of Modern Geology Quotes

"The map that was to become 'the map that changed the world.'"

"The last day of August 1819, a Tuesday, dawned gray, showery, and refreshingly cool in London."

"The crowds outside the Fleet and the King’s Bench prisons on that cool August Tuesday morning... were there to see a spectacle."

"William Smith, the yeoman from Oxfordshire, who, on the very eve of publication, was now being turned away from the marble steps in front of the house in which he had lived and worked for so long."

"He had spent the better part of the last ten weeks in the miseries behind the bars of the King’s Bench."

"William Smith was born into a world of dogma, faith, and certainty."

"The entire process of Creation had taken God the familiar six days."

"The hesitation was deep rooted; it stemmed, at least in part, from the frank reluctance of eighteenth-century men and women to accept that there even was a need to know and wonder at such things."

"Could it perhaps be that geology was the one new scientific discipline that... might be able to help answer the fundamental and unasked questions that were beginning to trouble those tentative, nervous questioners."

"The entire notion of fossils, in fact... 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."

"By the time William Smith left school he was something of a sophisticate."

"His situation must have seemed grim indeed, and the brutality of coincidence can hardly have escaped him."

"He was eighteen, and, informally educated though he may have been, he had a profession and a job."

"The young Smith introduced himself—in his own rather fanciful attempt at an autobiography penned many years later he wrote that he met Webb entirely by chance and asked him some penetrating questions about modern surveying practices."

"In the spring of 1788 he was entrusted with doing his own work."

"He was no great diarist; but once in a while his entries make one wish he had been a better one."

"He finally arrived in Somerset in 1791, on another mission from Edward Webb of Stow."

"The cheers of the crowd echoed in the streets as he marched forward, carrying with him the triumphs and trials of a lifetime."

"The stratification of the stones struck me as something very uncommon."

"I observed a variation of the strata on the same line of level."

"The rock strata are formed like this, the oldest beneath and the youngest on top."

"The eye roved anxiously over the interesting expanse which extended before me."

"From this point the eye roved anxiously over the interesting expanse which extended before me to the Sugarloaf Mountain in Monmouthshire, and embraced all the vicinities of Bath and Bristol; then did a thousand thoughts occur to me respecting the geology of that and the adjacent districts continually under my eye."

"His genius—the unanticipated genius of this uneducated farmer’s son—was that he realized it was not simply a matter of noticing the difference."

"He believed that there would be a pattern out there."

"Everything had a general tendency to the south-east and that there could be none of these beds to the north-west."

"I could make a firm pronouncement about the nature of sedimentary rocks."

"He understood for the first time that geology was a science requiring observations in three dimensions."

"Fossils have long been studied as great curiosities, collected with great pains, treasured with great care and at a great expense, and showed and admired with as much pleasure as a child’s rattle or a hobby-horse is shown and admired by himself and his playfellows, because it is pretty; and this has been done by thousands who have never paid the least regard to that wonderful order and regularity with which Nature has disposed of these singular productions, and assigned to each class its particular stratum."

"A work of public utility which has engaged 12 or 14 years of the best part of a man’s life in the most laborious train of thought and observation ought to close up the past prospect with plenty."

"These doubts were at length removed by more particular attention to the site of the organic fossils which I had long collected."

"The important discovery that Smith made was that certain beds had certain fossils, that they were unique and peculiar to that bed and to that period of time in geologic history."

"It was the base of the Permo-Triassic period of geologic time, and the top of the Carboniferous period. It was and is, in other words, a highly observable, universally recognized, and now internationally agreed moment in the earth’s long and unstoppable history."

"The notion of publishing something still nagged persistently at him like an aching tooth."

"Remote expectations will not satisfy me any longer. I am certainly under no obligation to lay before the public the fruits of my labour and unless I can be satisfied of an adequate reward I cannot think of giving up more of my time."

"The more distantly ahead of me they ranged, the younger and the younger they became—so that those lost in the shimmering haze of the afternoon belonged to whole stages and epochs of geological time that were far more recent than those beside and behind me."

"This smooth-skinned ammonite, the palm-handy stone I had once contemplated skimming across the surface of the Channel, records one long instant of faraway time."

"The fossil that I had once held in my almost-six-year-old hands was one of the most powerful keys that would unlock the secrets of Jurassic time."

"To have discovered one would have been ideal; and yet my memory of that first one remains comfortably powerful enough."

"It was a symbol also of the beguiling magic and mystery of the science of modern geology, and provided a cozy link between the past and the present."

"The early world was a terrifyingly volatile place. It was always mobile, its crustal blocks caught up in violent swirls of ferocious movement."

"Lifelessness, aridity and blistering heat suddenly took the place of all that Carboniferous moisture and fecundity."

"The record of that sudden new explosion of life remains today firmly locked in the limestones and shales and sandstones of the Jurassic."

"The conditions were not exactly similar during the millions of years of England’s Jurassic."

"And if not magical names, then magical appearance: What could be better than the famously extraordinary outcrop?"

"The Middle Jurassic limestones make for a building stone of such gentle loveliness that its Cotswold walls know 'the trick of keeping the lost sunlight of centuries glimmering upon them'."

"And yet it is the weathering, more than the simple durability, that provides the magic of the Cotswold oolites."

"He had discovered in Somerset that the rocks were spread out in historical order, and that their fossils allowed their underground arrangements to be delineated and predicted."

"But when it was done it all proved to be so very good, so revolutionary, so filled with potential for profit and fame that it was stolen, copied, pirated, and the man who had made it overlooked, ignored, and forgotten for years."

"By the time he ran into the difficulties with John Debrett, and was forced to abandon the book he had expected Debrett to publish, he was puzzled to find that this recognition was proving to be more elusive than he expected."

"William Smith will explain the Subject of the Strata at his house, 15 Buckingham Street, the Strand, on this and the following days between the hours of eleven and five, to such gentlemen as choose to subscribe towards the publication of this great national work."

"Time will show that my geological labours are not properly the work of an individual in my humble circumstances, but such as might be generously encouraged as public works."

"The man and his fossils might be imprisoned, but his discoveries could not."

"I so caught the rheumatizm, which was the worst complaint I ever experienced, being six weeks confined to my bed in great pain and the loss of the use of both my legs, though all the time in perfect health and good spirits."

"A man’s hand is constantly draining his pocket, and so pressing for fees were all the lackey attendants…that I used to say a civil answer could scarcely be obtained on the road for less than sixpence."

"When house and land is gone and spent, then Learning is most excellent."

"I never yet have been able to get any information here regarding the Crockerton Clay."

"The two maps agree in many respects, not because the one has been copied from the other, but because both are correct."

"I may observe that... they deal with Mr. Farey, by making [him an] honorary member and neglecting me—purposely, it would seem, the better to suit their sinister views."

"Smith’s map I found so very defective and inaccurate that I was obliged to begin de novo."