The Syme Papers (5 page)

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 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 conclusions (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
the
ories
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.

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.