The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester Read Free Book Online

ammonites or trilobites, gastropods or graptolites, or teeth or ribs or fragments of coral—was seen in a very different light. Assumptions were made about them and conclusions were drawn from their existence that bear little relation to what is today considered objective reality.
     
    P ythagoras, it is often said, knew well what these mysterious bodies were, two thousand years before anything resembling the modern science of paleontology had begun shuffling out of the shadows. But, Pythagorean foresight aside, the world had long been steeped in a degree of ignorance that seems barely credible today.
    Until the beginning of the eighteenth century the objects found inside rocks were known not as fossils —that word had a much more general usage, meaning anything, minerals and crystals included, that had been dug up from the ground. Any item that had been unearthed or discovered lying in a field and that had the look of an animal or a plant about it—an obvious shell, say, or a sea urchin, a leaf, or a piece of branch—was known, cumbrously though perhaps quite reasonably, as a “figured stone.”
    A few of these stones were easy to explain—some, like those that happened to have a shape vaguely resembling a human head, or a carrot, or a ship, had almost certainly been shaped accidentally. Tree limbs or animal bones that had never been mineralizedand that were merely stuck in mud or in the sand by a riverbed were obviously pieces of modern organic life which had died and become mired in the earth. The figured stones that interested and amazed people in the seventeenth century—and people, aristocrats and members of the leisured classes especially, amassed enormous collections of them, with both the Royal Society and Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum housing them in handsome display cases—were those that were clearly made of mineral material. These were thus definable as stones, and yet they looked uncannily like something that had once been living, or else they mimicked the aforesaid shells, sea urchins, leaves, or pieces of branch.
    They obviously could not possibly be such things—that went without saying. To suggest otherwise was either to court ridicule—a once living shell, thrust halfway up a mountain, indeed!—or else to be accused of apostasy or heresy, for tinkering with the ordered faiths of nature. But to gaze at them in astonished rapture—this is what the nobly born of England did three centuries ago, much as later generations gazed in awe at mounted specimens of the coelacanth, or at specimens of rock from the surface of the moon.
    No. Such things, so awesome and wondrous to behold, could only be explained in one way. Clearly they were unique creations of the Almighty himself— lapides sui generis is the phrase now employed (“stones unto themselves”). They existed for one reason only, and that was to reinforce in humankind’s collective mind the omnipotence and imaginative beneficence of God. He placed the figured stones where they were discovered, using to do so what was termed a vis plastica , a plastic force. He used the force to insert into rocks miraculously perfect simulacra of living things, for the sole purpose of reminding the entire human race that God did indeed move in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. And there, to the enraptured viewers of the stones, was an end to it.
    The science that was needed to justify such a belief to skeptics was simple enough. This, after all, was still the time of phlogiston * and the ether, and the firmly held belief that mountains grew like trees, organically, upward and outward. To anyone who imagined such a thing, it did not require too much of a leap of imaginative faith to conclude that mysterious stone objects found in the earth were there either because ( a ) they had been infused (on heaven’s command) with some kind of petrifying fluid, ( b ) they had had their nature changed by a kind of juice that emanated from nearby mineral seams, or ( c )