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

the next stage they would become so. In layers of coal—a fully consolidated rock, though born from peat and lignite in turn—Hooke noted that there were leaf-, tree-, and other shell-like remains to be found that were as wholly coal-like, coal-colored, and self-evidently coal as coal itself. Could it perhaps be, he wondered, that great pressure, great heat, or complex physicochemical reactions had transformed the once organic remains into minerals, just as the mud had been transformed into peat, the peat into lignite, and the lignite into the solid black rock-mineral called coal? Could not a slow and uniform process, which had been so visible in the making of coal itself, work its mysterious magic on the life forms that had been present at the origin, turn them into stone, and make them into fossils?
    Most scientists of the time still dismissed such ideas as laughable. What event, they asked tangentially, could possibly have swept these remains to where they were now found? Could Noah’s great flood (which was then implicitly and almost universally believed, as it would be for the better part of another century) have been so violent and so massive as to wash shells up onto mountaintops—where, it had to be admitted, they had been found? Could these creatures have been swept onto the land at the moment of Creation?
    No to both, said the seers of the day: Noah’s flood was said in Genesis to have been a short and placid affair, and as for Creation—since it was widely accepted that the land was created before life—it would be impossible for any organic remains to be infiltrated deep inside the newly created rocks because there was no life in existence to be so inserted.
    In addition it had not escaped the notice of some collectors that many of the figured stones they found represented animals and plants that did not seem currently to exist. This suggested, in other words, that if indeed the stones were relics, they were relics of living creatures that were no longer around and had since become extinct. Since extinction was an impossible, unthinkable event in any divinely created cosmos, then this notion too was invalid, inappropriate, and wholly wrong.
     
    A nd yet, as the eighteenth century opened, so these long-held beliefs and prejudices were confronted with increasing vigor by counterargument, by solidly mounted challenges to the dogmas and received wisdoms and ecclesiastical imperatives of old, and, most important, by evidence.
    The ideas of Steno and Hooke, however hostile their initial reception by the Church, however flaccid their initial acceptance by the public, began slowly to take root. At about the same time there came a vague, inexpressibly gossamer-fragile thought that there might be some kind of link between two of the conceptsthat were an implicit part of the fossil collector’s system of belief. People began to wonder if these stones might actually be the relics of living things, and placed where they were found by no less an agency than what they liked to call the Noachian Deluge—Noah’s flood.
    Perhaps somehow the flood could be implicated in shifting these objects, even to where they now existed in the rocks of high mountain ranges and on the Oxfordshire meadows. Perhaps somehow this same flood could also be implicated in the process that created the objects in the first place. Perhaps the rocks and all that lay inside them—the Chedworth Buns, the pundibs, the oyster shells, the fern leaves, and the crystal corals, fish skulls, and lizard bones—had all somehow been precipitated or had crystallized themselves from the fluid of a universal, flood-created sea. Perhaps, if such things were demonstrably true, then maybe, just maybe, the matter of intense puzzlement that had already confused untold generations of naturalists—What were fossils and why were they found where they were?—might be solved.
    The flood, in short, was to be the eighteenth-century answer to everything. Noah was now the