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been termed the result of the most inconsiderate ignorance!’

      As a backlash developed in response to Buckland’s interpretation of the Flood, other theological scholars challenged the idea that the Flood affected only the surface of the globe. In Moses’ account, ‘all the fountains of the deep’ were opened and the earth’s crust was totally destroyed by a mighty, raging torrent. According to Buckland, the Flood was a rather more modest affair, merely confined to shifting the superficial gravels. It wasn’t long before literalists objected to Buckland’s fundamental premise that geological epochs of immense duration had occurred before the Flood.

      Layers of rock thousands of feet thick were demolished during the Deluge, according to the biblical scholar George Cumberland. ‘The fountains of waters contained in the great depths of the earth were broken up,’ he said. ‘Universal subsidence must have taken place. The operation must have been pretty rapid and immense layers of strata must have formed, filled up with the debris of the broken surface.’ Far from strata forming almost imperceptibly over countless years, there was a ‘sudden production of a thick sequence of rock!’ he claimed. ‘Such a world as ours might very well come forth in all its finished beauty instantaneously.’ The Reverend Young even produced an estimate of the speed of formation of the earth’s crust: ‘Provided there are currents to supply the materials, strata can form at a rate of nine hundred feet in a month!’ he declared.

      George Fairholme captured the sense of outrage at the insolent new science that dared to challenge biblical records: ‘It is not unknown what ungodly avidity is exhibited by infidel philosophers … to distort every fact of science into a sophism against the Scriptures of eternal truth. Of these open scoffers … we have no dread; for the Bible has nothing to lose by being tried, like gold in the hottest crucible,’ he preached. ‘The gates of Hell itself cannot prevail against the word of God.’

      William Buckland, with his blustering self-confidence and tremendous enthusiasm for his ‘noble subterranean science’, tried, as usual, to steer a path through these obstacles. But even his colleagues at the Geological Society questioned some of his evidence. How could he assume that the Flood was global, when gravels were found only in northern latitudes? The more the Reverend Buckland struggled to fit the findings of geology with the Bible, the more anomalies seemed to arise. Was Noah’s Flood transient or prolonged, global or local? Did the waters destroy only superficial layers or the entire earth’s crust? Were animals made extinct in one biblical Flood, or in a series of Cuvierian ‘catastrophes’? Or even, as Lamarck proposed, were species not truly extinct at all, merely transmuted into other creatures?

      With some justification, one Scottish minister, John Flemming, summed up the confusion in a paper in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal: ‘The Geological Deluge, as interpreted by Baron Cuvier and Professor Buckland, [is] inconsistent with the testimony of Moses and the Phenomena of Nature.’ In Oxford, Buckland’s dilemmas were immortalised in a popular satire, Facetiae Diluvianae, in which Buckland met the great prophet Noah and each added to the bewilderment of the other.

      Caught up in the storm at the birth of the new science, it is hardly surprising that the beleaguered Professor Buckland failed to announce the improbable discovery of a forty-foot reptile. However, Georges Cuvier in Paris was getting impatient since he wished to incorporate the information on the Stonesfield reptile in the updated volumes of his Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles. In September 1820, his assistant Joseph Pentland wrote to Buckland from the Muséum National in Paris: ‘Will you send your Stonesfield reptile, or will you publish it yourself?’ Deeply immersed in controversy, Buckland hesitated. A year later, the Reverend Conybeare also referred to the giant carnivorous lizard of Stonesfield in his paper on the Ichthyosaurus, adding ‘it is hoped [that Buckland] may soon communicate the results of his observations to the public’. But he did not. Soon, Pentland wrote once more, urging Buckland to announce the details of his research. Yet again, Buckland did nothing.

      Thus the enormous bones continued to lie in the Ashmolean Museum, carefully prepared and neatly displayed behind the glass cages, an unexplained curiosity. They had become almost invisible by long acceptance, for over a century part of the paraphernalia of the museum alongside the stuffed animals and other objects. For the time being, in Oxford, the question mark they posed over the nature of giant reptilian beasts that had once lived on land was carefully and assiduously not seen.

       4 The Subterranean Forest

      To see a World in a Grain of Sand

      And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

      Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

      And Eternity in an hour.

      William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’

      While William Buckland was preoccupied with grand theories and finding little time to investigate the giant reptile of Stonesfield, Gideon Mantell was rapidly becoming obsessed with the strange fossils emerging from the Weald in Sussex. As he began to prepare his first book, Fossils of the South Downs, during the late autumn of 1821, he wrote, with some excitement, that ‘the relics of a former creation’ that he had uncovered were as ‘extraordinary as any hitherto recorded’.

      Everything about this secret, hidden world, buried beneath the Sussex landscape, seemed bizarre and unpredictable. One persistent puzzle was why the bones of large reptilian creatures should be found with fragments of tropical vegetation. After his first discovery in 1820 of what appeared to be an ancient ‘palm’ entombed in the quarries at Whiteman’s Green, Gideon Mantell tried to find out about tropical botany through his contact Charles Konig, at the British Museum.

      Tropical plants had been known in Britain since Captain Cook, having discovered the east coast of Australia, Java, and Easter Island, returned from his voyage on the Endeavour in 1771. Accompanied by the botanist Joseph Banks, Cook had brought back hundreds of specimens that he had donated to the British Museum. Banks had later persuaded George III to turn Kew Gardens into a botanical research centre, displaying plants from all over the world. From these eighteenth-century explorations the English horticulturalists began to learn more about the hot, wet ecosystems, unmarked by seasons, within which these plants flourished.

      Gideon Mantell set about tracing specialist sources of living tropical plants in order to compare the fossils he uncovered. He was ‘much pleased’ with ‘the unrivalled collection of living palms of Messrs Loddiges of Hackney’, one of the few palm merchants in Georgian Britain. As news of Mantell’s curious finds spread, local people, too, provided unexpected help, such as: ‘the Honourable Mrs Thomas of Ratton, Eastbourne, who presented interesting specimens of the trunks of fossil palms from Antigua’. From these comparisons, Mantell deduced that several of the fossil stems and trunks he was uncovering with the giant animal bones were from ancient tree-ferns. ‘The surface of these fossils is rough, the trunk is nearly cylindrical … They resemble species of arborescent fern, perhaps Dicksonia?’ he speculated. Dicksonia is a contemporary tree-fern that can reach a large size, with a slender stem and huge fronds. Mantell sent fossils to Konig at the British Museum, who confirmed his suspicions: ‘Some tree ferns are very like this with regard to the lozenge-shaped bases of the fronds,’ he replied.

      The largest fossil trunk in Mantell’s collection was fourteen inches in circumference and four feet in length. From the thickness of this trunk and the rudimentary branches it looked as if it had once extended a great deal further and was part of something tall and tree-like, not a little shrub. Mantell compared the measurements of this trunk to those of tree-ferns in New South Wales, which could grow to thirty feet with stems of only a foot in diameter. ‘From the imperfect state in which these [fossils] occur it is evident that the originals attained a very large size,’ he wrote incredulously. Huge tropical plants alongside huge reptilian animals: it was barely believable.

      Yet each trip to Loddiges’ Greenhouses provided more evidence. Mantell soon identified cycads: ‘the impressions of the leaf stalks on the bark bear a great resemblance to those on the stems of Cycas revoluta,’ he wrote. Cycads look similar to short palms,

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