Rehabilitating Greenough

摘要

George Bellas Greenough has come into a lot of adverse comment in the past few years in a process intended to redress an injustice he is supposed to have done to William Smith and his famous map. That case is made very much with a 21st century sense of social status, which is not entirely appropriate in considering the early 19th century. Be that as it may. it is disquieting that the no-one has seen fit to defend the Geological Society of London's first (and three-times) President who, in his 1819 Mopof the Geology of England & Wales, was acting as the co-ordinator of a work which had been commissioned by the Society itself. Often called 'Greenough's map', this work owes much to his organizing skill, gathering important facts from Fellows of the Society in the country, and gentlemen known to him from his many circles in sciences and the arts. Greenough in fact spent many months travelling, accepting hospitality, gleaning new evidence from temporary exposures and newly opened quarries when country house building was happening throughout England. Ireland and Wales. Acquiring facts in this congenial fashion was equally the habit of Murchison and Lyell, let alone Buckland's trawling of rectories and vicarages to collate the work of men of the cloth into his Bridgwater Treatises. The other vital quality in Greenough was his ability to choose the most competent of assistants. Thus in Thomas Webster he had the best man to draught the lines for the excellent engraving which is a feature of his final maps.