Prophet of the Rocks 
Richard Fortey
- The Map that Changed the World: The Tale of William Smith and the Birth of a Science by Simon Winchester
The birth of almost every science has been achieved with the help of a map. Astronomy began by mapping the stars. Anatomy – and modern medicine – is indebted to those flayed bodies laid out with such excruciating clarity in Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica. Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements gave inorganic chemistry its logic: the famous chart, which used to be posted on the wall of every chemistry laboratory like a sacred text, is as much map as matrix. Even today, in physiology laboratories, the brain is being anatomised in terms of the cortical areas responsible for one piece of sensory integration or another: a subtle mapping that has replaced centuries of speculation – a kind of objective phrenology.
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Richard Fortey is a research scientist at the Natural History Museum and visiting professor of palaeobiology at Oxford. The Earth: An Intimate History was shortlisted for the Aventis science writing prize 2005.
Other articles by this contributor:
Shock Lobsters · The Burgess Shale
Most Curious of Seas · Noah’s Flood
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