The Syme Papers Read online

  The following spring, Edward began to busy himself outside the Agropolis, lending a hand at the local schoolhouse near Baltimore. ‘I have decided’, Edward wrote in the consolation of his journal, ‘to break free of this Bubble, and set myself up, on two feet, as a Gentleman Scholar, among a people who cannot mark the Difference.’ The old schoolmaster, Willard Barnes, a veteran of the war and a great believer in the new country, found himself sadly short-handed in the education of its sons. So he took on a young English ‘gentleman’ fresh from Oxford, engaged on some business, some fanning speculation (Barnes never guessed what), who seemed to know his way around a book – not that there were many of them about to be getting on with, now that you mention it. Barnes had two daughters, including a young beauty, famous as far as Richmond and shy as a hedgehog – Anne.

  Edward married her before the year was out, shifted his lodgings from the idyll of communal life, and lived in the attic of old Barnes’s farmhouse, a sprawled, lopsided, barn-like building beside the school, amid ten acres of its own pasturage.

  The character of his new wife is difficult to determine. She wrote little, and the best record we have of the mother of the young geologist, who would set the world on its ears and was already kicking in her womb by the winter of 1793, comes from a rather extraordinary letter Edward wrote to her before their engagement. Willard Barnes appears to have been a strict master and a stricter father – only Edward’s connection to the business of the school seems to have permitted him the company of Willard’s daughter, and eventually won him her hand in marriage. And Anne must have embraced her new husband with something of the blindness of a first passion, for this is what Edward wrote, and he kept no secrets from her, though he promised many to come.

  (There I sat, looking over the gardens of Mackintosh House, the blinds pulled high and the window opened, after a considerable groan and a great scraping of paint, while a file of old papers stood at my side, breathing a dusty cloud into the sunshine; and these tempestuous lives fluttered beneath my hand.)

  My dear Anne …

  Some years ago, and in sore Want of money, after a University career which did not redound entirely to my honour, I fell in with an old college friend, Viscount Burkehead, who offered prospects I could not at the time dismiss entirely from my thoughts. ‘I have recently discovered’, he wrote to me, ‘a tract of Land in the New World, on the banks of the glorious Potomac, offered for Sale; once its limits have been ascertained, its suitability determined, why could it not be prepared, in all circumstances, for a Republic of our own making, in the same manner as you prepare a house for your friends?’ Benedict’s plan, formed partly under the Inspiration of Dr Priestley and the less noble fumes of a draft of Porter, was to establish an ideal community in this new world, a community of equal friends, in which all property, of life and love, was held in common.

  Young as I was, I suspected even then that an old and intractable Leaven in our Nature would effectually frustrate these airy schemes of happiness. And I expect such Dreams will excite in you no more than an innocent Smile, at the extravagance of a youthful and ardent mind. Yet if such only were our folly, doubtless I would yet linger on the Shores of that river among my former Friends. In the course of the first winter, our Common life precipitated a common course, and one of the sisters of our community was laid to bed, with the promise of an Addition to our Venture. I confess myself concerned in her Predicament, and when the child peeped forth at the New World with a blank eye and stopped Heart, much of my own Heart for the Enterprise died with him.

  That I venture at all over these painful Scenes lies in my desire that you should be acquainted with the manner of man who clamours at your Heart. Such I have been; and by the force of Nature, such I shall always be; among the catalogue of my weaknesses shall never be reckoned an Ignorance of them. I offer what I have, a fond though wandering heart; a history tainted more by Folly than Guilt; and a stout, enduring Love for thee, though I am a poor, and erring Lover.

  Believe me, thine,

  Edward Syme

  All that we know of Anne is that she accepted such a curious proposal. Perhaps she hoped to reform him – this has been known. From such a union, and such a father, within a year, came Samuel Highgate Syme, whose own airy schemes, after a century of neglect, would bubble up from the depths of his hollow earth, to fuel the fire of Alfred Wegener’s imagination.

  *

  Perhaps I have overreached myself again, and I must step back. Look around, Pitt, look around, and climb out of your hole for once and quit digging. Professor Bunyon would no doubt warn me to ‘take stock’ at this point, and so, for once, I shall. I shall begin at the beginning, if I can find it. (Of course, there are in fact no beginnings; only pauses and resumptions.)

  In 1915, Alfred Wegener, shot in the neck during a raid in the Great War, returned home to convalesce. In that delicious idleness of a keen, healthy mind and a slack, recovering body, Wegener revisited some earlier speculations regarding what came to be called the theory of continental drift – the notion that a single body of land had split, wrenched apart by separate internal plates, to form the spread of continents familiar to us now. In that year he published a slim paperback on cheap paper titled The Origin of Continents and Oceans. Wegener presented his idea, in the words of Ursula Marvin, ‘not for the first time perhaps but for the first time boldly’. It is this ‘perhaps’ that I had set out to investigate.

  Wegener himself announced his discovery anxious of his influences. In the opening Historical Introduction, he takes pains to point out that the ‘first concept of continental drift first came to me as far back as 1910, when considering the map of the world, under the direct impression produced by the congruence of the coastlines on either side of the Atlantic’. (We shall see Syme lost in that very consideration almost a century before him.) The following fall, a study offering palaeontological support for the idea of a land bridge between Brazil and Africa, convinced Wegener to pursue the matter further; and he first delivered his conclusions on 6 January 1912 (a date distinctly recorded) to the Geological Association in Frankfurt.

  Wegener’s innovations were twofold and both easily named. In the first place, he posited the existence of an earlier, single body of land of which the continents were parts. Second, he named the internal force that split them apart. In The Origin of Continents and Oceans, he carefully dissociates himself from his intellectual forebears, citing one by one those who could lay some claim to either of his discoveries and distancing himself in turn. Of the first innovation: ‘It was pointed out to me in correspondence that Coxworthy, in a book which appeared after 1890, put forward the hypothesis that today’s continents are the disrupted parts of a once-coherent mass. I have had no opportunity to examine the book.’ And of the second: ‘Rotation of the whole crust, whose components were supposed not to alter their relative positions – has already been assumed by several writers (beside many inanities), particularly among our American colleagues’ – and here he appends a footnote – ‘and found support closer to home in Loeffelholz von Colberg and Kreichgauer, among others.’

  He also gives some credit where it is due: ‘I have discovered ideas very similar to my own in a work of F.B. Taylor’s which appeared in 1910.’ Yet he qualifies even this: ‘however, I have received the impression when reading Taylor that his main object was to find a formative principle for the arrangement of the large mountain chains … [and] continental drift in our sense played only a subsidiary role and was given only a very cursory explanation’. In short, Wegener had struck gold, knew he had hit the motherlode, and could not bear the thought that any of the other prospectors, digging the same bend in the river, might have sifted something of similar ore through their brain-pans. (If only I had looked more closely then, the real clue would have shone through the grit he spread around it, but I dug it up in time.) He was staking a claim to an idea so magnificent and simple, he could not quite believe that no one would pinch it from him.

  In fact,
the opposite occurred: no one listened. The world had busied itself about a very different geographical split; and even when the First World War ended and the troops went home, a prejudice against German scholarship, as Faul points out, delayed even further the reception of his ideas. Not until the publication of the third edition, in 1922, and its translation into English and French, did Wegener’s theories enter the public debate, only to receive, at best, a muted support (Faul again). Wegener, like Syme before him, faltered at the starting-post: he could not account for the Prime Mover, the original force that drove the continents apart.

  And so he set forth for Greenland, a fourth and final time, to offer, as Syme had attempted to do, dramatic evidence of the justice of his theories. If only he could prove, demonstrably, that Greenland itself had drifted, almost a furlong, since 1922, no one could doubt him any longer. His mission ended in a more fatal, though no less final, disaster than Syme’s a century before; and he died, in a drift of ice, tracking backwards for supplies.

  Track backwards, Pitt! Go over every step! And there I found him at last, buried in a footnote, the echo of that worry in my ear: Samuel Highgate Syme. Wegener could not abuse his native honesty, and in that catalogue of distinctions he recorded faithfully, in footnote sixty-three (out of all sequence), the exception among his ‘American colleagues’: ‘As far back as 1826,’ Wegener writes, ‘Syme spoke of “segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core”.’ And there we have the critical connection: a split in the crust, and the drift ensuing. But we have come no closer to Syme.

  *

  I must step back now and begin at another beginning; Find the shape, Pitt, I hear Bunyon rumbling, and stick to it. There is a shape, of course; there are too many shapes, and they dissolve into one another and reform, like shards of ice on a bright winter day, or the continents themselves, on their endless drift from unity. Once we belonged to a single shape, but no longer. And so I begin again, or rather, offer another starting-point after an interruption.

  One year before the American Revolution, a young German, Abraham Gottlob Werner, last of a long line of Saxon metalworkers, was called to the new Technical University in Freiberg to teach mineral science. He was just twenty-five. By the time of his death in 1817, he had established the Freiberg Academy as one of the foremost institutions in geological science, and along the way revolutionized our picture of the birth of the world. And for the most part, he had got it entirely wrong.

  Imagine an age in which no Pole has been reached, no sky breached, no ocean fathomed, no earthquake plumbed. By some trick of human nature, mankind had directed its great powers of intellectual enquiry skywards; and the secrets of the stars were solved long before the mysteries of the earth. Galileo had proved at last the centrality of the sun amid the revolutions of the planet; Newton had established the pull of gravity. We are all of us in the gutter, Wilde once said; yet most of us are looking at the stars. The rare man is he who rummages about him in the muck. Werner was that man. With the great problems of the heavens solved, at last we turned our questing down and in, and began to dig. And Werner had his audience.

  By all accounts he was a remarkable teacher. He brought three successive generations into the study of geology, or, as he dubbed his new discipline, geognosy; including, very late in life, the young Friedrich Müller, whom we shall come to in time (almost too late for me). Werner’s excellence lay in the field. He wrote a mineralogy guidebook at the age of twenty-four, which landed him the job in Freiberg in the first place. In it, he established his own categories for identifying rocks: clear, simple, structured. The chief feature of his mind was its lucidity. Unlike Doug Pitt, he had mastered the art of beginnings. He guessed what he could not know and imposed the clear order of his thought upon the world before him. The muddle of matter that would not fit was swept away.

  His was a revolution not of discovery, nor insight, but of order – a classic of German innovation. He convinced not by logic but by clarity. He reduced a confusing jumble of rock and rift, of mines and mountains, into a plain system, ship-shape; all the world seemed present and correct. He tidied up, reduced, cut out what would not fit, and persuaded.

  Werner’s views ran briefly as follows. He accounted for the various formations of rock observable at different layers of landscape as the deposits of a former ocean covering the globe. In fact, most shockingly of all, the globe was an ocean, a ball of water held trembling together like the drop at the end of a tap. Rock precipitated out of this oceanic solution to form the crust of the earth as we now know it. Owing to the fact, Werner argued, that deep waters run still and are thus incapable of inducing precipitates, this original ocean must have fallen and risen (diminished and swelled) to produce the present landscape, each drop in the water level yielding a harvest of rock formations as the accompanying turbulence released basalt from solution.

  His system of classification simply referred each rock to the fall in water that produced it. There were Primitive rocks, formed in the bosom of the original universal ocean; they included granite, mica, clay, porphyry, etc. Next came Transition rocks, layered upon the primitive rocks as the ocean dipped below the crust. These numbered limestone and flint among them, and contained the beginnings of organic remains. Floetz rocks followed, after a brief rise in oceanic levels and the ensuing dip; these were rarely found at a great height, as the universal ocean had subsided below the peaks by this time. Where discrepancies occurred, Werner simply ignored them as discrepancies, and moved on – to Alluvial and Volcanic rocks, variations on the previous three. Five kinds of rock, Werner thought, was a good number to be going on with. The genius of his system was its simplicity. Every discovery could be referred to these original formations, exceptions noted, debated, classified, recorded. But the world, I fear, is run according to the lucid, the Bunyons and Werners, no matter the absurdities they tumble us into.

  Werner was a tiny man, tiny and tidy; bowlegged like a blacksmith, possessing a sharp cleft chin, sharp nose, and sharp wisp of beard, never quite full enough to persuade. He moved with a quivering, restless energy, burning up like the filaments inside a glass bulb, gesturing endlessly, stepping and stopping, with the fever of enthusiasm. He wrote rarely, preferring to talk and influence. There seemed so little to set down; the world was plain enough, after all. Paper had this tricky way of drawing out and leading on, involving him in a thousand complexities, which a simple demonstration, or personal assurance, could pass over in a minute. He lived on in the memories of his students, and their more patient pens; they returned, again and again, to hear him lecture. I cannot help but think of that old line: ‘somehow they were never the same to him/When they were married and brought their wives.’

  He died childless in 1817, lecturing until the end, married only to the college whose rise he had overseen. Yet Werner’s most famous student – his successor at Freiberg, Friedrich Mohs, inventor of degrees of hardness, both geological and psychological – fled at the first opportunity for Vienna and greener pastures; and the Freiberg Academy suffered a long decline through the nineteenth century.

  One notable student remained truer to his master. Werner’s theories have been ably set down by Robert Jameson, the Scottish son of a soap-boiler, who was inspired by the tale of Robinson Crusoe to follow a career in geology, and who journeyed to Freiburg to effect an initiation. Jameson left this testament to Werner’s example and the nature of the discipline the great man left behind him.

  We now come to the consideration of Geognosy, regarding the Internal Structure of the earth, and the peculiar province of the celebrated WERNER.

  At first sight the solid mass of the earth appears to be a confused assemblage of rocky masses piled on each other without order or regularity: to the superficial observer, Nature appears, in the apparently rude matter of the inorganic kingdom, as presenting us only with a picture of chaos.

  Our knowledge of the internal structure of the earth remained a great time very limited and confused. Although observat
ions had been made in very distant countries, and similar rocks discovered in a variety of the most widely distant situations, no successful attempt had been made to generalize these appearances, so as to discover the general structure of the earth, and its mode of formation. The attention of Geology was too much occupied with particular and local appearances, to effect what has been since so fully accomplished by the comprehensive mind of WERNER. (My own sin that – attention too much occupied with particular and local appearances.)

  That illustrious mineralogist, to whom we owe almost every thing that is truly valuable in this important branch of knowledge, after the most arduous and long-continued investigations, conducted with the most consummate address, discovered the general structure of the crust of the globe, and pointed out the true mode of examining and ascertaining those great relations, which it is one of the principal objects of Geognosy to investigate.

  We should form a very false conception of the Wernerian Geognosy were we to believe it to have any resemblance to those monstrosities known under the name of Theories of the Earth. Almost all the compositions of this kind are idle speculations, contrived in the closet, and having no kind of resemblance to any thing in nature. Place one of these speculators in the full storm and terror of the living world, and you will immediately discover the nature of his information. He himself will find that he knows nothing; that he has been wandering in the mazes of error; and that, however ever easily he may have been able to explain the formation of this globe, and of the whole universe from his study window, he cannot, standing upright in the winds of Heaven, give a rational or satisfactory account of a single mountain.