On the literary side of the things I have recently been reading a book that I have found to be absolutely fascinating. ``The Map That Changed The World´´ by Simon Winchester. The story of William Smith and his creation of the very first geological map depicting the delineations of the strata of England,Wales and Scotland. The story it tells is of vast importance historically, as his tireless and dilegent work of a lifetime, in due course, gave birth to the science of Geology. Upturning the fundamental religious beliefs of an entire nation and later the world was no mean feat in the early 1800´s. No doubt my years spent working in minerals exploration have given me a hightened sense of interest in my appraisal of the book but I would think that anyone interested in the cause and effect of such ground breaking thinking and genius could not help but to be amazed and intrigued. There can be no better way to say it than to quote from Simon Winchester´s book directly.
I quote verbatim a section discussing the first realisation by Smith that a map was the thing he most needed to produce, to prove to society his findings and their true worth to science. The author Simon Winchester speaking as himself states,
``I find myself tempted to exclaim, as Thomas Huxley cried out on first reading Darwin: How very stupid not to have thought of that before ! That William Smith was first to do so was a measure of the man´s extraordinary achievement: to see what others could have seen but never did, to set down on paper what others might have suspected, but never felt confident enough to declare.´´
Another quote that gives a sense of the book is in relation to the gathering of data for the map itself.
``It was a work of genius, and at the same time a lonely and potentially soul-destroying project. It was the work of one man, with one idea, bent upon the all-encompassing mission of making a geological map of England and Wales. It was unimaginably difficult, physically as well as intellectually. It required tens of thousands of miles of solitary travel, the close study of more than 50,000 square miles of territory that extended from the tip of Devon to the borders of Scotland, from the Wesh marshes to the coast of Kent. The task required patience, stoicism, the hide of an elephant, the strength of a thousand and the stamina of an ox. It required a certain kind of vision, an uncanny ability to imagine a world possessed of an additional fourth dimension, a dimension that lurked beneath the purely visible surface phenomena of the length, breadth, and height of the countryside, and that, because it had never been seen, all customary cartography ignored. To see such a hidden dimension, to imagine and extrapolate it from the little evidence that could be found, required almost a magician´s mind – as geologists who are good at this sort of thing know only too well today.´´
It really is a cracking good tale of human endeavour against the odds. A bloody ripper !! I do hope you will give it a look. Another of Simon Winchesters books that I have not yet read but am now enthused to do so is ``The Surgeon Of Crowthorne´´, which was also an international best seller as I am sure this shall prove to be as well. Many thanks to Margaret for the wonderful present and to Graeme for all those years of patiently teaching me so much about geology and the world beneath my feet.
