Smith, William | "The Map that Changed the World": A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, 1815

Smith, William

A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with Part of Scotland; exhibiting the Collieries and Mines, the Marshes and Fen Land originally overflowed by the Sea, and the Varieties of Soil according to the Variations in the Substrata, illustrated by the most descriptive names. London: Published by John Cary, August 1, 1815

Atlas folio (554 x 652 mm). Large handcolored engraved wall map on 15 Roman-numbered full sheets, coal-rich areas printed in black aquatint and colored over in gray wash, other colors supplied by hand in watercolor, with an additional full-sheet key map partially handcolored in outline, sheet III (bound first) is the title cartouche, sheet X includes an explanatory color-key, map-sheets neatly mounted on guard; sheet XII with a clean diagonal tear repaired on verso and with lower right corner renewed, small split along platemark on sheet XV, very occasional light foxing and minor marginal soiling. Contemporary calf-backed marbled boards, spine in eight compartments, gilt-lettered in second, marbled endpapers, gilt edges; rebacked preserving original spine, some neat restoration to corners and extremities.

First edition of the first large-scale geological map of any country, “based on the scientific principles discovered by Smith himself” (Joan M. Eyles, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography). This copy is from the second issue, on J. Whatman paper watermarked 1812 (mapsheet VI numbered "No. 38" in manuscript but not signed by Smith), of a total edition of about 400 copies. (The map was issued with a letterpress explanatory Memoir, not present here.) According to Smith's bibliographer, Joan M. Eyles, the map was distributed in five issues: an initial small issue, unnumbered; three sequential signed and numbered issues of one hundred copies each; and a final small issue, unnumbered and unsigned. "After the first copies were prepared, various alterations were made … both in the colouring and the engraved lines, mostly reflecting Smith's increasing knowledge of geology. … [T]hese changes were made gradually" (Eyles, “Bibliography”). 

Fewer than one hundred copies of the map (which, because of its size is usually bound in atlas format) are known to survive. William Smith was a surveyor with the Somerset Coal Canal when, toward the end of the eighteenth century, he recognized that lithologically similar strata could be distinguished by their fossil content. Shortly after, he determined to make a geological map of England and Wales, but it took nearly a decade and a half until his great work was published. “Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales … was undoubtedly a major cartographic and scientific achievement. It represented about 65000 square miles [and] the coloring was designed to indicate not only the surface area of any one geological formation, but, by using a deeper shade along the base of a formation, an attempt was also made to show the beds were superimposed; thus a structural factor was introduced. … [T]he amount of correct detail that Smith recorded is amazing and still impresses modern geologists. A stratigraphical succession of twenty-one sedimentary beds or groups of beds was shown in different colors, and one more color was used for large masses of granite or other crystalline rocks. Different signs were used to indicate mines of tin, lead, and copper; for collieries; and for salt and alum works” (Eyles, DSB).

Despite his standing as the “Founder of Stratigraphical Geology,” Smith was essentially a practical surveyor whose interests were pragmatic agricultural and industrial advancements, not theoretical considerations. Still, his new stratigraphy technique “did more than anything else to turn geology into an historical science. For the example of Smith’s work convinced geologists that the strata in all parts of the Earth's crust belonged in a single common sequence—Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian and so on—and that this sequence was not merely a fact of geography, but reflected the temporal order in which the rocks had been laid down" (Toulmin and Goodfield, The Discovery of Time [University of Chicago, 1982], p. 162).

William Smith's Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales is "the first true geological map of anywhere in the world. It is a map that heralded the beginnings of a whole new science. It is a document that laid the groundwork for the making of great fortunes—in oil, in iron, in coal, and in other countries in diamonds, tin, platinum, and silver—that were won by explorers who used such maps. It is a map that laid the foundations of a field of study that culminated in the work of Charles Darwin. It is a map whose making signified the beginnings of an era not yet over, that has been marked ever since by the excitement and astonishment of scientific discoveries. … It is a map that had an importance, symbolic and real, for the development of one of the great fundamental fields of study—geology—which, arguably like physics and mathematics, is a field of learning and endeavor that underpins all knowledge, all understanding" (Winchester, p. xvi).

REFERENCES

Eyles, “William Smith (1769–1839): A Bibliography,” in Journal of the Society of the Bibliography of Natural History 5 (1969), nos. 12 & 13:7–109; Grolier/Horblit 94; Norman 1957; Printing and the Mind of Man 274; Sparrow, Science 180; Ward & Carozzi 2072; cf. Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); Strata: William Smith's Geological Maps (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

PROVENANCE

Marquess of Hertford (Ragley Hall armorial bookplate, with pressmark Table) — Robert L. B. Tobin (Christie’s New York, 24 May 2002, lot 219; “Property formerly from the Estate of Robert L. B. Tobin, sold to benefit the Tobin Endowment”)