The geologist and the mapmaker

William Smith could have used modern bankruptcy law. It would have spared the pioneer of geological science the indignity of a British debtor's prison. Treachery, plagiarism, and his own spendthrift ways had turned well-earned prosperity into debt-ridden professional defeat.

Smith's misfortune makes the point that scientific revolutions sometimes are driven by the struggles of less-than-perfect people. That's worth remembering when we marvel at newly found pre-human fossils in Ethiopia. We take for granted the ability to determine that they come from geological strata more than 5.5 million years old. That skill has been hard won. His biographer says that for Smith to create the science of stratigraphy was "a lonely and potentially soul destroying process." It "required tens of thousands of miles of solitary travel, the close study of more than fifty thousand square miles of [English] territory."

The result for humanity was the first geological map of an entire nation and the creation of a new scientific field. The result for Smith was a slow descent into obscurity as rivals who stole his work also denied him public recognition. In the long run, Smith's story unfolds happily with the award of belated honors, including a royal pension.

Now Simon Winchester, who wrote "The Professor and the Madman" in 1998, is determined to rescue the abused scientist from obscurity. This is a biography both of the man and of the great map, which hit the elite of Smith's day with the mind-altering force of a revelation. (The book's dust jacket is a clever fold-out reproduction of the map.)

Western civilization wouldn't have known what to make of discoveries like the Ethiopian fossils when Smith began working exactly 200 years ago. People took it for granted that what they saw around them was part of the divine creation described by the Bible. Fossil-bearing rock strata were the result of Noah's flood. Smith showed how to read the geological layer cake as a record of our planet's evolution. It extended into a past more remote than any biblical literalist ever imagined. It did not deal directly with biology or confront belief in the divine creation of organic life. But the seeds of that later conflict were sown.

Smith was a rough-hewn man of low birth in a class-conscious society. A penchant for hard work and astute observation made up for a lack of university education. He won his way into higher social circumstances on his merits. He then lost his way for a time largely on his faults - political naiveté and wasteful spending.

The author deals straight-forwardly with the story's soap-opera aspects. But his zeal to restore Smith's place in history colors his judgment of the scientific achievement. Geology is a key part of planetary science. But it is hardly a field that "underpins all knowledge, all understanding." Smith did turn thinking away from religious dogma to science when interpreting the geological record. But it's needless hype to claim that "from now on ... human beings could begin to explore their planet from a different perspective and with an intellectual freedom that would in time permit them to look for and to find astounding things." Many other thinkers contributed to that paradigm shift over the past 500 years.

The author calls his book "an hors d'oeuvre" written in anticipation of a more scholarly account from historian Hugh Torrens at Britain's Keele University. Taken on that level, the book is a good read. Those who want a more incisive treatment can await the main course.

Robert C. Cowen writes about science for the Monitor.