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geologists. His Principles of Geology, a work of magnificently cultured summary, announced at last the incompatibility of geologic research with biblical interpretation. The geologists breathed again. And though Lyell – the forerunner of a modern academic, possessed of an excellent breadth of acquaintance, and a mind naturally formed to simplify, reconcile and sum up – never matched in original science the significance of his geologic manifesto, the floodgates had been opened. So true it is that a man of a certain temperament in a certain time can make a name for himself simply by declaring in public what in private everyone else has long known to be fact.
    The work surged forward. Lord Kelvin, freed of biblical constraint, attacked the question of the age of the earth, by measuring the exhaust of power in the burning of the sun. Again, though his conclusions bore not a particle of truth, the fat had reached the fire, and a great heat and crackling of intellectual fervour ensued. We learn by error first what the question is, and then the means for correcting the method of corroboration. Eventually, geologists stumbled upon radioactivity; and learned to measure, by the fury of decay, the age of the earth, and questioned again the manner of its birth and the composition of its core.
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    We now have before us a map of the interior Globe as Sam Syme would have found it, when (as I eventually learned by these strange fits and starts) Syme himself came to blossom and cast his thoughts by a capricious wind to the fertile mind of Alfred Wegener, initiating the great intellectual harvest he brought about.
    America, at this point in its history, stood frozen in a strange perplexity. It possessed a giant treasure of scientific wealth, a landscape rich and various and unexplored, a broadsheet of continent scribbled over and over in geologic fact. And yet, as de Tocqueville remarked as late as 1837: ‘it must be acknowledged that in few of the civilized nations of our time have the sciences made less progress than in the United States’. The young country resembled the Ancient Mariner, surrounded on all sides by water, but incapable of drink.
    Yet such solitude produced in the end the genius of Samuel Syme. And we must remember – as we look more closely at his contributions – the nature of his company. There is a peculiar freshness to the productions of genius in isolation; their minds have not learned the well-travelled grooves of an established culture. Their slightest insight bears the mark of a sudden and new eruption of the understanding. They handle each idea, as it were, with bare hands, unprotected by the thick gloves of familiarity. They make mistakes, naturally; they have never been taught what to dismiss out of hand. Yet they often venture on questions a more cultivated intellect would shrink from. This above all: they cannot distinguish among their thoughts, nor separate the absurd and the simply commonplace from the miraculous and the inspired. Nor can their countrymen, bound in the conventions of their own mediocrity, recognize the ‘pearls’ among them, worth in lux and veritas all their tribe.
    Nevertheless, there were virtues to the American method. The young republicans, like Pitt himself, were a dogged people, determined to make up in industry what they lacked in insight. There was a new world to be scoured, and the Americans scoured it. In 1809 William Maclure produced the first geologic map in American history, covering the territory east of the Mississippi, and earning him the cartographic honour of being dubbed the William Smith of the United States. Eight years later Parker Cleaveland coloured in the gaps left blank by Maclure, extending the range of geologic examination as far north as Maine.
    Yet the Americans, for the most part, were strangely loath tospeculate on the raw material before them; they trusted their eyes and hands, but not their heads. They prided themselves on being loyal followers of