| This is a book that every geologist,
amateur or professional, should read to find how our subject started.
And for a geologist living in the Bath area there is the added bonus
of finding the details of local knowledge which bring geology to life.
It tells the tale of William Smith and his invention of the
geological map. And Simon Winchester sincerely believes that
geological mapping does change the world. Modern life would not be
possible without the minerals which geology brings us. And more
fundamentally, geology was the subject which enabled society
to break away from the tentacles of received wisdom.
William Smith was a country lad from Oxfordshire who became, somewhat
by chance, a surveyor. Eventually he became involved with the Somerset
Coalfield and, later, with the building of the Somerset Coal Canal. A
pretty ordinary career but William Smith was not an ordinary man. He
had been observing the rocks of the
coalfield, both underground and at the surface and had come to the
conclusion that he could see an order in their sequence. And that the
fossils in the rock would let him tell one stratum from another.
The end result, after years of labour, much of it carried out while he
was employed doing other things, for landowners all over the country,
was that he produced a geological map of England. This map is not very
different from today's map - one could say that the last 200 years of
geological effort have been a refinement of Smiths map, no major
changes to his boundaries have been made!
If that was all that was in the book it would still be a tale worth
telling, but there is far more. The Geological Society of London would
not let the ungentlemanly Smith become a member. And published at a
slightly lower price, a geological map which was, to all intents and
purposes, a copy of his map. This helped send Smith to debtors prison.
Eventually the Geol. Soc. made amends and honoured William Smith as a
founder of geology.
The book is full of interesting detail. Oxfordshire milk-maids used
fossil sea urchins (Clypeus ploti) as weights for the butter scales -
the Chedworth Bun. John Wesley said that Midsomer Norton was so named
because the roads around it were so bad that one could only reach it
in midsummer. The controversy over
which house William Smith actually lived in is rehearsed.
But throughout a love of geology is evident. The beginner will find
much to enlighten him; the professional will find much he may have
forgotten - or never was told. The author is a well known journalist
and author who graduated in geology many years ago. He may never have
practised but he has done geology a great service with this book.
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