The World that Changed the Map

摘要

The late 18th and early 19th centuries were geology's so-called 'heroic age'. According to the received view, this period saw theorists like James Hutton, Abraham Gottlob Werner, and later Charles Lyell transform the previously existing loose assortment of vague and speculative ideas about the Earth into recognizably modern geology, a leading example of science for its time. No less important in this era, though, was William Smith's discovery that the fossils unique to a given stratigraphical layer could be used to identify other rocks of the same age, even when they were widely separated geographically. This made possible the creation and stabilization of geochronological categories, such as 'Devonian', 'Silurian', and 'Jurassic', allowing fossiliferous strata found anywhere to be assigned to their proper place in the global timescale of Earth history. Geological surveys began to cover the globe, especially in North America and in British-ruled territories, providing data for the most visible and alluring outcome of this new science: the geological map. Indeed, Simon Winchester's recent popular account even called William Smith's cartographic achievement 'the map that changed the world' (Winchester, 2001).