Notes to The Map that Changed the World

Posted by jns on May 13, 2008

I recently finished reading Simon Winchester’s excellent book, The Map that Changed the World : William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (New York : HarperCollins, 2001, 329 pages). It’s the fascinating story of William Smith (1769—1839) and how he came to draw the first geological map of England (the first in the world, actually), how he came to be mistreated by the Geological Society of London, largely because of his class, the profound influence he had on the just forming science of geology, and how he finally got the recognition he deserved. It’s quite a human and intellectual adventure. My book note is here.

At least my four regular readers will be aware that I have a fascination for footnotes. The author of this book, Simon Winchester, seemed to be a man after my own heart. Here are two charming and informative footnotes from the book.

^*A guinea, equivalent to a pound and a shilling, is a classically British and very informal unit of currency–with neither a coin nor a bill to formalize it–that is still used today (despite Britain’s having adopted decimal currency in 1971) in some circles, such as the buying and selling of racehorses and sheep. There used to be a one-guinea coin, struck from gold from the eponymous nation, but only its name and worth survive, and today the word is only a vague and ephemeral throwback to more casual financial times. [first footnote on page 61]

^†This appears to be the first time that William Smith uses a term deriving from the word strata, the study of which would so dominate his life as to become his nickname: To all nineteenth-century England he would be simply Strata Smite. The OED suggests that the words stratum and strata, meaning a layer or layers of sedimentary rock, became current in England at the end of the seventeenth century; Smith himself was the first to use stratigraphical in 1817; stratification made its first appearance in 1795. [footnote on page 65]