![]() ![]() Few common folk in the late 18th century gave these objects a second thought, but Smith was unable to take anything geological for granted. These "pound-stones" turned out not to be stones at all, but lithified sea-urchins, nearly all of which weigh in at around 22oz - a long pound, or about enough butter to keep a family going for a fortnight. The curious objects used to counterbalance the butter scales in his uncle's dairy, for example, fascinated him. William Smith, born in 1769 of an Oxfordshire blacksmith, fell in love with all things subterranean at an early age. But the first, published in 1815, was the work of just one remarkable man, and Simon Winchester tells his story in The Map that Changed the World. Not surprisingly, modern geological maps of Britain embody the work of thousands of people. Figuring out what goes where underneath the agricultural carpet is a complex game of join-the-dots, where a road cutting can be a godsend and a cliff face an embarrassment of data. ![]() ![]() And you can't make a geological map just by wandering around with a theodolite, because most geology, in Britain anyway, is buried under barley and sheep. Only the most garish colours will do - scarlet for granite, canary yellow for oolitic limestone and bright green for, well, greensand. Maps produced by geographers are usually dull, accurate affairs, but geology maps are a riot. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |