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

that the stars had exerted some kind of magnetic or gravitational influence on them from the heavens. And if all these theories failed the rigorous tests of observation, then one could always simply resort to ( d ), the mysterious ways of God: Collectors would argue that a divine virtue was behind the placing of all fossils, using the word virtue in the old sense, rare now, of meaning “by way of supernatural power.”
    Old-fashioned scientific explanation appealed most of all, especially to those who, in post-Restoration England, were trying to make some order out of the chaos they perceived in the world. To the scientists the idea that a stone might grow into the shape of a sea urchin was surely not outlandish at all. If a perfectly symmetrical crystal could grow out of apparently nothing, if a mysterious process of chemistry could make a stalactite or a kidney stone or a coral—a rock that grows—then why could not the same kind of inexplicable and enigmatic natural force make a stone that looked like a shell, or a tree, or, as in the case of the Oxfordshire pound stones, in the shape of a hedgehog, and do so, moreover, deep within the body of a rock?
    However, there was more to it than this. Even if the theoretical processes behind the formation of such figured stones were correctly guessed by these seventeenth-century philosophers, there was a host of additional unanswered questions: How did these figured stones get to all the places where they were found? Why did some kinds of rocks—those in wild moors of Devon, or in the mountains of North Wales, or the high hills of Shropshire—have almost no such stones buried within them, while other kinds, such as those that made the hills of Devon or were found in the quarries of Oxfordshire or the coalfields of Northumberland, possessed them in enormous numbers?
    Why, as an early naturalist named John Rawthmell noticed in the 1730s, did most of these curious figured stones crop up inside those rocks that were to be found in a rough line that stretched in a northeasterly direction clear across England, from the cliffs of Dorset and via the Cotswold hills in the south, up through Leicestershire to Yorkshire and the great cliffs in the coast near Whitby? * And as corollary to this thought—if God was behind their distribution, why were the stones not left scattered around everywhere, to be found uniformly and randomly, like the stars?
    It had been towards the end of the seventeenth century that the first very few and very bold observers raised (albeit timidly) the ultimate heretical thought: the possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, these objects actually were what collectors and scientists and countrymen had long been loath to consider admitting—the organic remains of the very creatures that they looked like.
    It was men like Nicolaus Steno, a Dane, and Robert Hooke, a Briton, who blazed the trail: To them the unsayable became the irrefutable—these fossil stones, they were certain, had indeedonce been living creatures. * Hooke argued his case particularly logically and meticulously. He identified three stages that could be witnessed on all sides, which he said demonstrated the three stages in the formation of a typical fossil.
    In the first stage, wholly unpetrified bones, shells, and vegetable remains were to be found in beds of mud, peat, and moss. The rock around them was unformed, the fossils within still almost as organic as when they had been alive.
    Then, second, in lignites and brown coals—the sedimentary beds that were not properly rocks but were slightly more solid and consolidated than mud and peat—there were bones, shells, and parts of trees and leaves that had been somehow changed . These specimens, which by now could perhaps formally be called fossils, had been half petrified. In their present-day resting place inside layers of half-formed rock, they too were half formed, being neither wholly organic, as when they were alive, nor yet wholly stone.
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