Maps, Rocks, and God

I love maps. Any kind of map! I love studying them, I loved drawing them for school projects. Despite my love of maps, I found this book, about the history of the world's first geological map, incredibly boring. Having read Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman two years ago , I thought his latest, The Map That Changed the World: Williams Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, might somehow also capture my attention. Sadly, it did not ...

Maybe the subject matter just didn't appeal to me. The making of the OED fascinated me; the making of a geological map did not. Maybe the historical era just wasn't my favorite. The OED was late-nineteenth century; William Smith was late-eighteenth. Either way, whereas I couldn't put Professor down, I had to force myself to finish Map!

Winchester is no historian -- though he obviously did all the source research. The few times he does actually quote primary texts, it's fascinating! He should've stuck with that format, rather than trying to make a Hollywood story out of a two-decade academic endeavor.

In the back of my mind the entire book, I kept remembering the National Museum in Wales -- how it was almost entirely devoted to generic prehistory and the slow, sloooooow formation of coal. (And how it didn't dawn on me until I was three-fourths of the way through the museum why that was important to Welsh national identity...)

Map's most fascinating snippet, though, had nothing to do with William Smith. It was more Winchester's description of the mediaeval mindset of creationism that existed even during the Age of Enlightenment. In a footnote, Winchester acknowledges that it still exists today (the Scopes Trial didn't end that backward thinking!).

Which, tangentially of course, brings to mind the numerous debates I have had with unpleasant people about mediaeval-vs-modern mindsets, and what exactly defines the early modern period -- the beginnings of colonialism, global interaction and the rise of nations, or the (related) decline of European religiosity.

At any rate, I found the description of a lingering medieaval thought the most compelling, perhaps because it has such a direct correlation to the state of American society and politics today. (Why encourage independent thought and/or intellectual inquiry, if the answer will only ever be that God created everything for some always-elusive reason?)