LITMIR.BIZ

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showing the different layers of rock in each region and comparing the fossils within them. Would the layers of rock in England correspond to those in the European rocks? What did the different formations reveal about prehistory?

      With infectious enthusiasm, Buckland also enlisted the support of his long-standing friend, the intellectual Reverend William Conybeare, who had graduated from Oxford just before Buckland, taking a first in classics at Christ Church with effortless ease. The unconventional party also called upon ‘the zealous interest of some ladies of high culture at Penrice Castle, Lady Mary Cole and the Misses Talbots’, and any other like-minded individuals they met along the way. Buckland’s energetic and novel approach, which would not be constrained by centuries of Oxford tradition, was viewed with more than a little suspicion.

      Whereas most gentlemen’s travelling carriages would have been of a certain standard, with an elegantly appointed interior matched, perhaps, by a smartly painted exterior and with discreet uniformed staff in attendance, William Buckland’s carriage provided a very different travelling experience. The sturdy frame was specially strengthened to allow for heavy loads of rocks; the front was fitted with a furnace and implements for assays and analysis of the mineral content of the stone; and there was scarcely room to sit amid the curiosities and fossils heaped into every available space.

      Gossip abounded, too, about Buckland’s other little eccentricities. It was the custom for early geologists to carry out their fieldwork in the full splendour of a gentleman’s suit, with academic robes and even a top-hat. When travelling in the mail, Buckland was not beyond dropping his hat and handkerchief in the road to stop the coach if he spotted an interesting rock. On one occasion he happened to fall asleep on the top of the coach. An old woman, eyeing his bulging pockets with growing interest, eventually couldn’t resist emptying them, only to find to her astonishment that the gentleman, for all his finery, had pockets full of nothing but stones.

      Sometimes Buckland rode a favourite old black mare, usually burdened with heavy bags and hammers. It was said that the mare was so accustomed to her master’s ways that even if a stranger was riding her, she would stop at every quarry and nothing would persuade her to advance until her rider had dismounted and pretended to examine the surrounding stones. Buckland became so expert on the rocks of England that his ‘geological nose’ could even tell him his precise locality. Once, when riding to London with a colleague on a very dark night, they lost their way. To his friend’s astonishment Buckland dismounted and, grabbing a handful of soil, smelled it and declared, ‘Ah Uxbridge!’

      William Conybeare, it seems, was as zealous in his search for fossils as Buckland, and their activities never failed to attract attention. Once on a tour together they entered an inn after a particularly long, wet day on the cliffs, covered in mud and dirt. The two deans had fossil bags filled to bursting and proceeded to empty out the contents. The old woman serving their meal was said to be ‘much puzzled to make out the Deans’ real character’. After eyeing her ravenous customers suspiciously, she exclaimed, ‘Well I never. Fancy two real gentlemen picking up stones! What won’t men do for money!’

      In trying to create a map showing the order of succession of the rock strata of England, Buckland and his friends were greatly influenced by the pioneering work of a surveyor called William Smith. A man of humble birth, Smith lived at the height of the ‘Canal Age’ in the late eighteenth century, when the fields of England were criss-crossed by a network of over two thousand miles of inland waterways. As he surveyed the land for canal building, he had become very familiar with the sequential order of British rock from the chalk down to the coal. He noticed that different strata contained different fossils and that this could be used to help identify some of the layers. Such was his enthusiasm to understand the order of strata that Smith devoted his modest income to travelling all over England. Versions of his geological tables had been on display since the 1790s, and he published his great map A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales in 1815.

      Unfortunately for Smith, George Bellas Greenough, the first President of the Geological Society, had little time for him and his map. When he saw Smith’s tables he was condescending and patronising and yet, it has been argued, with ‘barefaced piracy’ he was able to draw heavily on this work for the benefit of the Society. Undoubtedly Smith’s studies laid the groundwork for Buckland, who between 1814 and 1821 produced no less than eight different charts of the ‘Order of super-imposition of strata in the British Islands’.

      All of this made little impression on the canons and bishops at Oxford. Scholars and religious leaders were alarmed that the sacred evidence of the word of God should be muddied with bits of rock and dirt. ‘Was ever the Word of God, laid so deplorably prostrate at the feet of an infant and precocious science!’ exclaimed George Bugg, author of Scriptural Geology. ‘We want no better guide than Moses,’ wrote George Cumberland to the editor of the popular Monthly Magazine in 1815. ‘If the object of geology be to attain the age of the earth as a planet, it seems an idle proceeding; first because if attained, it would apparently be useless … it can never be attained by the present mode of enquiry; and like the riddle of the Sphinx, would destroy the life of those who failed in solving it, by wearing out the only valuable property they have, viz, their intellects!’

      For years, dons wielding authority through their sermons and sacred texts had successfully kept alternative schools of thought at bay. Among the more traditional scholars there was a real fear that geology would prove to be a ‘dangerous innovation’, and Buckland’s odd activities were watched ‘with an interest not wholly devoid of fear’. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1816, when Buckland took the opportunity to travel with Conybeare and Greenough across Europe, his departure was welcomed by some of the elderly classicists at Oxford. ‘Well Buckland has gone,’ announced one dean with satisfaction. ‘Thank God we will hear no more of this Geology!’ Nothing could have been further from the truth.

      In 1816, Buckland published the first comparative table of the strata of England compared with those of the Continent. Similarities between the rocks of England and Europe were beginning to emerge. Greywacke slates, resembling the continental Transition formations, were found on the borders of England and Wales. Highly stratified layers of sandstone, limestone and conglomerates rich with fossils, like the Secondary formations of Europe, were widespread across England. Tertiary rocks, such as those around Paris, were identified in the London and Hampshire basins. Just as in Europe, these were always in the same order of succession, the oldest being Primary, then Transition, Secondary and Tertiary. As correlations were found between different regions, ‘marker’ rocks were identified. Chalk, for instance, was recognised as the upper limit of Secondary rock throughout Europe.

      Buckland was keen to discover whether this order of succession extended worldwide. He wrote to several noblemen in command of Britain’s growing Empire, such as Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of the British Colonies, enclosing instructions for collecting geological specimens abroad. His appetite for information became insatiable: it was as if the layers of rock that enveloped the globe formed the pages of a history of the earth. But if this was so, what would be written on them? And how did all this fit with the extraordinary ‘crocodile’ found by Mary Anning?

      The first clue to this puzzle lay in a remarkable new approach to interpreting fossils that was being pioneered in Paris by a French naturalist called Georges Cuvier. From a poor but bourgeois family, Cuvier had survived the French Revolution in Normandy, far from the troubles of Paris, where in his letters he had feigned support for the regime for fear of the French police. Once the Reign of Terror had released its grip on Paris and the city became safe again, Cuvier went to the capital and soon secured a post at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. With his striking crop of red hair, bright-blue eyes and somewhat unkempt appearance, it wasn’t long before the ambitious young naturalist had made an impression.

      As Napoleon’s army swept across Europe, spoils from museums and private collections were frequently sent back to Paris. Fossils were also retrieved from the plaster quarries around Paris, and during the course of building canals around the city. The new Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, established by the Republicans in place of the Jardin du Roi, rapidly became the envy of the world. Cuvier began to apply his extensive knowledge of the anatomy of living creatures to try to interpret fossil skeletons

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