The Map That Changed the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

in those early days much more questioning than there was answering. It was a period more marked by bewilderment than certainty. While most still believed that the Scriptures could comfortably provide answers to all the questions about earthly origin and human purpose, there was a growing and more frequently admitted sense of puzzlement as well—a puzzlement that seems to have been most keenly felt among those scientists and engineers who were observing the natural laws of physics and chemistry, who were working with steam or fashioning iron or digging cuts through cliffs. Among those and others who knew something of the newly formulated laws of science, there was a new mood of questioning that hinted that maybe, just maybe, the old beliefs, rooted in the blind acceptance of churchly teachings, might not have been wholly true.
    A febrile fluttering of questioning began—about what exactly was the world? How had it, and all that was in it, really come about? Was it sacrilege to wonder such a thing? Was it blasphemy to ask? Would lightning strike down anyone who questioned the likelihood of James Ussher’s numbers being correct? Would plague and boils tear at the vitals of anyone who asked out loud just what story might it be that lay buried in the stones beneath our feet?
    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, inthe enlightened, wondering spirit of the times, were at last beginning to tap their fingertips on the stout door of received belief?
     
    M any 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.

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The Mystery of the Chedworth Bun
    Dactylioceras tenuicostatum
    W illiam Smith’s introduction to the curious magic