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The book has all the usual attributes of a pacy historical read: a self-educated, unrecognised scientist spends years roaming the British countryside, compiling a map of the geological layers beneath the surface, only to have his ideas ripped off and to wind up homeless and penniless in Yorkshire with a wife who is going bonkers. And it gets better: in a bizarre Dickensian twist, Smith finally gets his just accolades when he is recognised by a kindly liberal nobleman and is reintroduced to London society as the geologist par excellence. Of itself, the story would be more than enough recommendation but there is a subtext runnin...
Interesting but flawed biography , 2007-01-10
Simon Winchester tells the largely forgotten story of self-taught geologist William Smith, the father of modern geology. Though the "barely educated lower middle class scholar takes on academic and social establishments and (eventually) wins" formula is not exactly original, the book is pacy enough and the human and scientific interests well balanced enough to keep it an enthralling read.

William Smith was the son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith. His childhood fascination with rocks and fossils led to his employment as a surveyor of mines and builder of canals, and to his discovery that the rocks of his native county lay in strata, always in the same order and always bearing the same unique fossils in each layer. He theorised that this pattern would be replicated throughout Britain, and that the fossils themselves showed that the layers of rocks were layed down at different times. Though to the twenty-first century, this does not sound very revolutionary, to the late eighteenth, before Darwin and when Bishop Ussher's dating of the divine creation of the Earth to 4004 B.C. was still popularly accepted, it was unheard of.

Smith's reputation spread, and soon his professional services were in demand throughout the country, allowing him also to test his geological theories; he astonished his patrons by being able to predict almost on sight whether their lands held coal strata. His plan was to produce a map of the geology of the entire British Isles.

Unfortunately, financial imprudence and lack of social standing, as well as possibly the stigma of an apparently insane wife and the professional jealously of his rivals, damaged Smith's career to such an extent that he was imprisoned for debt. These circumstances are not so well covered by Winchester; I suspect that Smith's diary is by so much the primary source here that he is only able to retell the story Smith himself recorded. The details of the "nymphomaniac" wife, for example, are particularly scanty.

This is unfortunate. For the most part, the book is very lively, easy to read, and Smith's story seems to hold a personal fascination for Winchester. In part, this is explained by a central chapter containing a childhood memoir from the author, on his finding of an ammonite on a Dorset beach; this did, I have to say, sit rather uncomfortably in the middle of Smith's biography; it might just have worked better as a prologue. And the assertion that amateur palaeontology is "no more than the mark of the nerd" is hardly appropriate in such a book! We forgive Winchester his failings though; we are too busy routing for Smith.