But he lived in a time that hungered for the skills he had mastered: drainage of farmland, construction of canals, and location of minerals. He was also born into a strict class system that inhibited the acceptance of his work (for years he was denied membership in the Geological Society by the perfumed snobs who ran it-and who plagiarized his research). He was born into an England whose churches taught (and whose parishioners believed) the Biblical account of a divine, six-day creation. But he was equipped with a ferocious determination, an insatiable curiosity, an eagerness to muddy his boots and roughen his hands, and-of great importance-a rugged physical constitution that never failed him. As Winchester shows, Smith (an autodidact son of a blacksmith) was the most improbable of candidates to become a scientific giant. It would be a dozen years before he returned to London to receive the honors he had earned for his most lonely and arduous task-constructing a geological map of England and Wales. Winchester ( The Professor and the Madman, 1998, etc.), who studied geology at Oxford, begins at one of the lowest points of Smith’s life: August 21, 1819, the day he emerged from King’s Bench Debtors’ Prison, his life in disarray.
A masterful, felicitous tribute to Smith (1769–1839), the extraordinary ordinary Englishman who conceived, researched, and drew the world’s first geological map.
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