Reseña de The map that changed the world por Josh

In Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, The Judge, that ominous representation of 19th century hubris, says, "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent... He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth." He goes on to say "The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos."

I doubt Simon Winchester would go as far as the The Judge, but he (and William Smith, the subject of this book) share his view that the natural world is knowable. Everything that exists in nature can be document and understood, through the diligent application of the methods of science. That understanding could (and, more or less, has) make humans "suzerain of the earth."

William Smith was born and raised in West Philadelphia, and on the playground is where he spent most of my days. Chillin' out, maxin', relaxin' all cool. And all shootin' some b-ball outside of the school. But this book, the reader soon discovers, is about a different William Smith entirely - the founder of the modern science of Geology.

The Mr. Smith Winchester is interested in was born in 1768 in Churchill, Oxfordshire - in the south of England. He came from a lower-middling family and was largely self educated.

In 1787 he began work as a geographic surveyor. Surveying was a booming business in England at this time. The Inclosure Act of 1773 enabled large landholders to appropriate common land. This was extremely controversial at the time, since it basically gave the wealthy the power to take what had long been communally held public property for their own private gain. But, as Winchester discusses, it also led to a great increase in the economic output of the land, as private ownership incentivized improvements. The new owners of former public lands sought to extract as much value from their properties as possible, and to do that they needed surveys.

At the same time, the nascent industrial revolution was driving a rapid increase in demand for coal, iron ore, and other resources that could only be found under the ground. The Newcomen steam engine, and its successors, had reduced the risk of flooding, enabling the development of larger mines, and the 'canal mania' of the late 18th century would soon provide a low cost way of moving bulk freight all around the country.

Smith spent many years studying english mines, talking to miners and land owners and tramping around the English countryside. His great insight, which no one seems to have recognized until this time, was the layers of earth that miners dug through were essentially the same everywhere in the country (and he would posit, everywhere on earth). Different varieties of clay, rocks, shale, etc. constituted layers, and this consistency meant that it was possible to create a 3-dimensional map (something that had never been conceived before) of the whole of England.

Minerals weren't the only thing that the newly digging mad English found under their soil though. They also found a lot of fossils, including some that were far too large to be of any animal living in Britain at the time (what would later be called dinosaurs). In a pre-Darwinian world that experts reckoned to be ~6,000 years old, the discovery of these bones was puzzling. Collecting fossils became a popular gentlemanly hobby - it was considered a sign of intellectual sophistication. But since nobody really know anything about what the bones were or how they got to where the collections tended to be a random assemblage, sorted according to superficial similarity.

Smith's recognition of the layers of the earth's crust, and that those layers represented different geological eras, enabled him to give order to these fossils. It suddenly became possible to tell the order in which the fossil creatures had lived (though the approximate number of years that had elapsed since their death would not be discovered until much later). The recognition of rock strata enabled the development of the concept of geological ages (e.g. Jurassic, Triassic, Permian, etc.). This recognition, along with the clear changes in the types and size of fossils found in different layers, would lead Jean-Baptist Lamarck to develop his theory of evolution. This was later to be supplanted by that of Charles Darwin- which replaced his concept of orthogenesis, or a drive towards complexity, with the more violent force of natural selection.

Like all of Winchester's books, The Map That Changed the World is well researched and written. It is narrative history, but not a personal one. The focus is on the rocks, only brief mention is made of Smith's personal life, mostly insofar as it bore on his st