The Syme Papers Read online

  Indeed, our researches on the surface of the earth often lead us among the grandest and most sublime works of nature; and amid Alpine groups, the geognosist is, as it were, conducted nearer to the scene of those great operations, which it is his business to explore. In the midst of such scenes, he feels his mind invigorated; the magnitude of the appearances before him extinguishes all the little and contracted notions he may have formed from books. And he learns that it is only by visiting and studying these stupendous works that he can form an adequate conception of the crust of the globe, and of its mode of formation; unless, of course, he turns to that true prophet of the Mountain Top, Abraham Gottlob Werner.

  We always praise the mind that leads us out of chaos, no matter the route taken, nor the country reached. But Werner, of course, had his disagreements. His greatest rival to the title of the Father of Modern Geology was another Scot, Dr James Hutton, a dour, meticulous, incomprehensible man, whose theories required an interpreter in his own tongue to be understood. That interpreter was a man named Playfair – if only we all had such interpreters, Dr Bunyon notwithstanding – a lucid, elegant writer whose simplifications allowed Hutton’s theory to challenge even the order of Werner’s categories. But I am an old obscurantist, a stickler for sticky phrases and muddy texts, and turn for once to the original, Hutton’s perhaps mockingly titled Theory of the Earth.

  Hutton’s genius lay in his understanding of accumulation. He sensed that the process of life involves an almost endless series of revisions, the making and unmaking and remaking of Matter, which itself is the result of an age of minor transformations. He declared that it was ‘in vain to look for anything higher in the origin of the earth than the continuation of some earlier process; the result, therefore, of our present inquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’.

  He argued that the earth’s crust was the product of sedimentation transfused by heat into new matter. He placed great faith in the strength of fire, a faith he felt no need to justify by experiment. The world around us, he argued, has overflowed from a great furnace, a continual power, an endless shifting. The rocks we see bear the brunt of their fusion. We come burning hither, caught in the fire of some transformation; he simply recorded the process, as accurately as he could. He had little interest in marking the genesis of anything – contenting himself with an account of how everything had undergone some modification. He acknowledged no beginnings and no ends, only the steadiness of change. By some trick of fate his masterpiece, The Theory of the Earth, survived him unfinished. Playfair unaccountably never tidied up the remains; and only a century later were those dormant manuscripts, beginning characteristically on chapter four, offered to the public.

  These two between them divided the field. The NEPTUNISTS followed Werner and placed their faith in the sea. The PLUTONISTS drew their authority from Hutton and believed in fire. The clergy distrusted Hutton. He took no account of the Bible; and his theories surrendered little space for the suddenness of Divine Creation. His world took shape in an endless moiling and broiling and left no breath for the lightness of instant Light. The Neptunists, for their part, ridiculed his faith in fire. Jameson declared simply (always the virtue of their kind!):

  The spheroidal figure of the earth is a proof of its original fluidity. This important conclusion was never disputed; the only question has been, Whether this fluidity was the effect of Fire or Water.

  Rocks which have been formed or altered by the action of Heat are most distinctly different from those that constitute the great mass of the crust of the globe; consequently this fluidity cannot be attributed to the agency of heat.

  The Church favoured Werner; and the muddle left behind by Hutton’s obscurities dissuaded interest. Jameson’s eloquence also had its effect. He founded the Wernerian Society and became himself a respected teacher, numbering among his students both Robert Stephenson, perfecter of the locomotive, and Charles Darwin, who needs no elucidation. Hutton, always patient with earthly processes, bided his time.

  Eventually, in 1830 another Scotsman, Charles Lyell, declared the hand of the geologists. His Principles of Geology, a work of magnificently cultured summary, announced at last the incompatibility of geologic research with biblical interpretation. The geologists breathed again. And though Lyell – the forerunner of a modern academic, possessed of an excellent breadth of acquaintance, and a mind naturally formed to simplify, reconcile and sum up – never matched in original science the significance of his geologic manifesto, the floodgates had been opened. So true it is that a man of a certain temperament in a certain time can make a name for himself simply by declaring in public what in private everyone else has long known to be fact.

  The work surged forward. Lord Kelvin, freed of biblical constraint, attacked the question of the age of the earth, by measuring the exhaust of power in the burning of the sun. Again, though his conclusions bore not a particle of truth, the fat had reached the fire, and a great heat and crackling of intellectual fervour ensued. We learn by error first what the question is, and then the means for correcting the method of corroboration. Eventually, geologists stumbled upon radioactivity; and learned to measure, by the fury of decay, the age of the earth, and questioned again the manner of its birth and the composition of its core.

  *

  We now have before us a map of the interior Globe as Sam Syme would have found it, when (as I eventually learned by these strange fits and starts) Syme himself came to blossom and cast his thoughts by a capricious wind to the fertile mind of Alfred Wegener, initiating the great intellectual harvest he brought about.

  America, at this point in its history, stood frozen in a strange perplexity. It possessed a giant treasure of scientific wealth, a landscape rich and various and unexplored, a broadsheet of continent scribbled over and over in geologic fact. And yet, as de Tocqueville remarked as late as 1837: ‘it must be acknowledged that in few of the civilized nations of our time have the sciences made less progress than in the United States’. The young country resembled the Ancient Mariner, surrounded on all sides by water, but incapable of drink.

  Yet such solitude produced in the end the genius of Samuel Syme. And we must remember – as we look more closely at his contributions – the nature of his company. There is a peculiar freshness to the productions of genius in isolation; their minds have not learned the well-travelled grooves of an established culture. Their slightest insight bears the mark of a sudden and new eruption of the understanding. They handle each idea, as it were, with bare hands, unprotected by the thick gloves of familiarity. They make mistakes, naturally; they have never been taught what to dismiss out of hand. Yet they often venture on questions a more cultivated intellect would shrink from. This above all: they cannot distinguish among their thoughts, nor separate the absurd and the simply commonplace from the miraculous and the inspired. Nor can their countrymen, bound in the conventions of their own mediocrity, recognize the ‘pearls’ among them, worth in lux and veritas all their tribe.

  Nevertheless, there were virtues to the American method. The young republicans, like Pitt himself, were a dogged people, determined to make up in industry what they lacked in insight. There was a new world to be scoured, and the Americans scoured it. In 1809 William Maclure produced the first geologic map in American history, covering the territory east of the Mississippi, and earning him the cartographic honour of being dubbed the William Smith of the United States. Eight years later Parker Cleaveland coloured in the gaps left blank by Maclure, extending the range of geologic examination as far north as Maine.

  Yet the Americans, for the most part, were strangely loath to speculate on the raw material before them; they trusted their eyes and hands, but not their heads. They prided themselves on being loyal followers of Bacon and Newton; they spurned, in Newton’s words, ‘hypothesis as the ignis fatuus by which we are led astray’. (Sam, for his part, was a great, drunken follower of all lights, from sudden flares, to abiding constellations.) They eschewed con
clusions (so they said), declaring that nothing could be assumed beyond the sum of the phenomena until an adequate first cause became palpable to their understanding.

  They compiled fantastic lists; the list was the height of their ambition, the pinnacle of pure science. The great cataloguer of the American landscape, F.E. Loomis, personally established, over the course of a lifetime, a map of magnetic readings, covering the entire Potomac watershed, testing each result (a laborious process, involving cold hands and muddy knees) over a hundred and fifty times. He published these ‘maps’ every decade or so, correcting the measurements in the intervening years, and refining his methods, until he hoped by the end to have established, once and for all, the perfect list – complete, indisputable, unerring – the final monument of his scientific fame. (By a single sleight of thought, Syme transformed this dry book of numbers into a keyhole, opening on to the very heart of the earth’s core. But his theories fell on deaf ears, until Wegener heard the echo of their reverberations.)

  ‘At the present day‚’ declared Edward Everett, lecturer in geology at William and Mary (‘the ninny of Virginny’, as Syme tagged him), in 1823, ‘as is well known, the Baconian philosophy has become synonymous with the true philosophy.’ And yet some very odd notions were propounded under its flag. Dr John Esten Cooke, convinced that he reported nothing but the plain facts, determined that all sickness stemmed from an excess of blood, and that a healthy human body should contain no more than two pints of the liquid to ‘moisten’ the internal organs. On taking cold one day, to prove a point, he promptly bled himself to death – neither the first nor the most tragic example in this story of a man who died according to his theories.

  Despite these shortcomings, the business of geology flourished in America. Construction of the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, establishing Buffalo as a port city; and the young geologist Amos Eaton was hired to survey the exposed strata. Americans dug for coal, for iron and for gold; and they paid even amateurs in the ‘new science’ to map out the land. Syme himself earned a tidy wage exploring the hills of Virginia for ‘bitumen’ deposits before deciding on a theoretical career. He invented the ‘fluvial lantern’, so important to his later work, in order to test the soil for carbon traces; and even constructed the first seismograph, to detect instabilities in the strata (evidence, he believed, of leaking iron in the crust) long before Robert Mallet explored the physics of earth-tremors in the 1850s.

  The new science offered great scope to an ambitious mind, regardless of education. When ‘Sober’ Ben Silliman graduated with a degree in Law from Yale in 1802 (despite kicking a football into the Bishop’s yard one late night), the president of the college – Dr Dwight, a friend of General Silliman, the young man’s father – approached him with a curious offer.

  I recall, [Sober Ben recorded in his memoirs, sixty years later,] one hot-house morning in July, when I was surprised from an idle hour under the college elms, by the steps of my father’s old friend, President Dwight, a figure who had always filled me with equal degrees of admiration and terror. Dr Dwight was a great bear of a man, nearly six feet in height, owning hands that could pluck watermelons from the vine. His voice, however, by some quirk of divine humour, was as soft and simpering as a woman’s, and seemed to trickle out of his mouth in a faint stream. ‘Ben,’ he whispered to me, stretching his great hand forth, ‘I have a proposition for you. The Corporation have agreed; it wants only your approval. They have elected you the first Professor of Chemistry and Geology in the history of the college. How’s that strike ye now?’ he added, cradling his thumbs and grinning broadly.

  I felt as if a great weight had descended on my shoulders, and struck the wind from me. ‘Sir,’ I said at last, ‘you have mistook me, I’m afraid. I have not so much as overturned a stone nor trawled a stream since boyhood. I am engaged to the law.’

  ‘The law don’t want you, Ben,’ he replied. ‘Oh come now, we’ve lawyers enough already. You may get on there, but you won’t shine. The country needs Science. In the profession I proffer to you, there will be no rival. The field will be all your own. Look about you man,’ and he gestured East and West towards the red rocks bordering the fair Elm city, ‘Treasure, nothing but Treasure, ripe for the digging. It’s a public service, Ben, a duty; a chance to link your name to the reputation of our country and pull it up with you.’

  When I persisted speechless, he took me gently by the arm and leaned forward. ‘Ben,’ he whispered, ‘as to the Science of it, I’m not particular. We’re not in any hurry; take two years and look around you, get the lie of the land. Come back and begin your course of instruction; never underrate, Ben, the ignorance of students. Give it thought, a night or so. Damn this heat.’

  And so we emerged from under the shade of those noble elms, and I retired, thoughtful and pensive, to my chamber. And in the morning arose, to begin a career I had not dreamed of till the previous day.

  After a two-year stint in Philadelphia, where he pursued the best American education in the sciences to be had at the time, and drank, by all accounts (his own included), more ‘porter and strong beer’ than was quite in keeping with his nickname, he was both ‘on a fair way to gout’ and ready to begin his lectures in New Haven. And so, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, Ben Silliman opened the study of Chemistry and Geology to the grand old institution of Yale College.

  It is astonishing how much of American geology passed through the hands, in one way or another, of Sober Ben Silliman in the sixty years to come, a lesson, perhaps, in nothing else than the extent to which history is made by connections of acquaintance. (Take the lesson to heart, Pitt, and fear these men at the nub of the web, these Sillimans and Bunyons.) From Edward Hitchcock, a former assistant, who became Professor of Science at Amherst College; to Chester Dewey, later of Williams College; to Amos Eaton, the great theoretical geologist, imprisoned for fraud, and later released, by special interdiction of the Governor of New York, to found the Rensselaer School of Geologic Study, for the education, among other things, of the Governor’s son; to Samuel Highgate Syme himself, though their connection was surprisingly brief, and in the end bitter.

  Apart from the influence of his personal instruction, Silliman exercised an enormous power over American geology through the journal he founded in 1818 and conducted until his death in 1864: The American Journal of Science (see overleaf).

  *

  This was not the first public forum for American science – being preceded by, among others, the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the New York Medical Repository – but it became the most important, owing to the breadth of Silliman’s interests. He had created a journal that, after a few lean early years, not only supported itself, but did so through its popular appeal. Though Silliman published the only public account of Syme’s theories I have discovered (apart from a certain novel, a protracted spoof I will come to later), his essay ‘The Theory of Concentric Spheres’ in 1818, the two fell out over the ‘democratic dilution’ of Silliman’s journal – a split that persuaded Syme to try his own hand at a geologic journal, the famous New Platonist, discovered a century later in the library of Alfred Wegener.

  For the time has come for me to talk of Samuel Highgate Syme himself. To return to Mackintosh House, on a much cloudier, thicker day, amid the clutter of the little office overlooking the ponds; and to open at last that precious album, Records of My Son.

  There were letters, of course, tied in ribbon, and wedged into the pocket of the heavy book. Among them, little Samuel’s earliest experiment in penmanship, 7 July 1799. ‘Pleas to receiv me, Annie says, and my Mother particklerly begs you for a dozzen Eggs – I can bring them long myself – for a great Cake, in honour of my sister’s birthday, being one. Excus this, Aunt Bethy, seeing its my first.’ The long-ago summer day returns to me; the boy, proud and perplexed over his great creation (a three-line letter), refusing to speak, lest it dim the effect, taps his foot impatiently on
the porch, while Aunt Bethy reads it, commends it, flits inside to fetch what’s required. And for the space of a minute the boy stands alone, in sudden terror at the path he sees before him now, manhood upon him (the trial of penmanship being past), the inevitable progress towards honour and accomplishment weighing on his heart, tearing him from these familiar scenes – the space of garden in front of his grandfather’s farmhouse, the dust rising from the road. And then his aunt returns, with the delicate burden muffled in cloth in a basket, and Sam races back into the anonymous summer day towards the prospect of a ‘great Cake’.

  Sam’s sister, baby Barbara (soon nicknamed Bubbles in all the family chatter), was born in the small house on Terence Lane to which the young schoolmaster, Edward, had brought his bride after a year of marriage and parsimony in her father’s house. There Sam grew up. The window above his bed opened on to a thick high field, sloping downhill to the beck that trickled at the bottom, through mud and dead leaf in winter and in sudden breakneck burst after a summer rain. This was Sam’s haven, his consolation from the stormy scenes of his parents’ curious union, as another letter, this time in Annie’s hand, revealed.

  Dear Beth, – I write in haste only to relieve you; the silly boy is found – please assure our Father – he is sound and fit and only very sleepy, and moreover, that I myself am happy and easy, now we have recovered him. It was an awful night, as you know, full of rain and crash (though thankfully for my boy, quite warm and thick). Sam overheard some foolish dispute between his father and myself, raised by necessity over the clamour of the storm, and took fright at the violence of the voices, never mind the mildness of the words. We heard the clatter of his window, and never thought twice, till I ventured in to kiss him at last, and found the empty bed.