Deborah Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters - A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World

Mr Mantell’s political views are not stated; however, as a radical Whig, it seems likely that he associated with the campaigning Thomas Paine, well known reformer and also an inhabitant of Lewes. Paine was a keen debater at the Headstrong Club which met at the White Hart in the High Street. He openly challenged the value of the British monarchy at a time when the Revolution raged in France, he denounced cruelty to the poor, demanded the abolition of the slave trade, and later wrote The Rights of Man.

After two years with Mr Button, Gideon was sent away for a period of private study with his uncle, a Baptist minister, who had founded a ‘Dissenting Academy for Boys’ near Swindon. When he returned to Lewes at the age of fifteen, with the assistance of the leader of the local Whig party who was impressed by his diligence Gideon was apprenticed to a local surgeon, James Moore. On his father’s death in 1807 money was found for him, in the last year of his ‘bondage’ as apprentice, to study in London and ‘walk the hospitals’.

At seventeen, Mantell went to London to study medicine, carrying a bag full of fossils collected from the chalk hills of Sussex. These curios, somewhat unnecessary for a student doctor, were nonetheless of such importance to Mantell that he had found room for his ‘extensive collection’ on the stagecoach to London. But if he was hoping for an opportunity that would allow him to immediately develop a career in geology he was soon to be disappointed. There were, as yet, no academic posts in the subject, and his father’s Methodism and his educational background precluded him from university.

The main forum for geologists was in the scientific societies springing up in the metropolis such as the Geological Society and the longer-established Royal Society. But they were largely for gentlemen of rank and wealth, and gaining membership cost time and money. Of these, the Royal Society was the most famous; its Council had provided instructions for Captain Cook’s voyage of discovery and advised the government on scientific matters such as the best form of lightning conductors for buildings. The membership list read like the entries of the fashionable new guide to Society, Debrett. Lords, knights and men who ‘from their fortunes it might be desirable to retain as patrons of science’ dominated the list of Fellows. A shoemaker’s son, however brilliant, was largely invisible to this scientific community. But while in London, a chance meeting was to set Gideon Mantell on his future course.

In 1811, the year Mary Anning’s brother found the skull of the Ichthyosaurus, a distinguished doctor, James Parkinson, published the final volume of his studies on geology, Organic Remains of a Former World. Mantell may have been drawn to Parkinson because, like his father, he was a man of conscience, interested in reform. Parkinson had published such inflammatory pamphlets as While the Honest Poor are wanting Bread and Revolution without Bloodshed, advocating universal suffrage. He had even come dangerously close to transportation to Australia in 1794, when he was arrested for an alleged connection with the ‘Pop Gun Plot’ to assassinate King George III with a poisoned dart while he was at the opera. He was exonerated from treason, but after this incident he restricted his political interests to social reforms, to improving conditions for pauper children, and to treatments for the insane in asylums. James Parkinson is now better remembered as the doctor who first defined ‘Parkinson’s disease’, the degenerative illness marked by shaking and tremors.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, though, Parkinson was equally well known as a geologist. Along with William Buckland and George Greenough, he was one of the founder members of the Geological Society and had embarked on a detailed survey of everything known about the ‘Ante-Diluvian World’. To Mantell in the Lewes library eagerly taking in the descriptions of the entire vegetable and animal fossil kingdom, Parkinson’s work was an inspiration. Putting aside any scruples about imposing on such an eminent gentleman, he made an appointment to visit Parkinson in Hoxton Square, Shoreditch, in East London.

His nervousness at seeking ‘the pleasure and the privilege’ of such an acquaintance was soon dispelled by James Parkinson’s ‘mild, courteous manner’, Mantell wrote, and the enthusiasm with which he ‘explained to me the principal objects in his cabinets and pointed out every source of information on fossil remains’. Parkinson had assiduously gathered details of Georges Cuvier’s studies in Paris and could tell Mantell of his famous discoveries: the giant extinct mammals, the mastodon, Megatherium and mammoth, and ancient species of crocodiles found around Honfleur and Le Havre. Cuvier believed that the fossil bones of crocodiles came from limestone beds of ‘very high antiquity … considerably older than those which contain the bones of quadrupeds’.

Parkinson had been greatly influenced by the pioneering work of the surveyor William Smith. Whereas Werner, in Saxony, identified rocks principally on the basis of their mineral composition, Smith had recognised that fossils could be used to help identify the beds. In his publication of 1811 Parkinson was careful to classify fossils according to the strata in which they were found; each layer of rock with its entombed fossils was for him a ‘former world’ which held the secrets of the history of the globe.

Parkinson, like Buckland, was intrigued by the conflict between geology and religion and was resolved ‘to shrink from no question … however repugnant to popular opinion’. He concluded that the account of Moses in the Bible ‘is confirmed in every respect, except as to the age of the world, and the distance of time between the completion of different parts of Creation’. Although there was no way of proving the earth’s antiquity, he acknowledged that the formation of the globe and the creation of life ‘must have been the work of a vast length of time’. Following an idea first raised by scholars in the eighteenth century, he reasoned that if the word ‘day’ in Genesis was used ‘to designate indefinite periods in which particular parts of the great work of Creation was accomplished, no difficulty will then remain’.

Parkinson fired the young Mantell with his romantic description of ‘former worlds’ buried in the rock. Each stratum enveloped evidence of a vanished existence, and the geologist could ‘begin to fathom the different revolutions which had swept over the earth in ages antecedent to all human record or tradition’. Parkinson wrote: ‘even the enormous chains of mountains which seem to load the surface of the earth are vast monuments in which these remains of former ages are entombed … they are hourly suffering those changes by which after thousands of years they become the chief constituent parts of gems; the limestone which forms the humble cottage of the peasant, or the marble which adorns the splendid palace of the Prince.’ The mountains, the hills and the land beneath their feet: all these were vast tombs more astounding than the pyramids.

It was through meetings with men like Parkinson that Mantell’s ambitions began to take shape. It was, he thought, the role of the scientist ‘to unveil God’s secrets … and unravel the mysteries of the beautiful world through which he was destined to pass’. James Parkinson had found time for geology while practising as a doctor. Mantell, too, would carry on his childhood dream. He would devote every spare minute to exploring these ancient memorials to a buried past that had existed, it seemed, before Adam. When he returned home to Sussex, he planned to make a systematic study of the strata and fossils of the county, a subject which he viewed as ‘replete with interest and instruction’. This married together his fascination with the subject and his desire to make a name for himself that might bring back honour to his family name.