Risen from the ashes

Many of us Europeans have visited the Smithsonian Insti- tution in Washington DC, and most of us have not the foggiest idea how it got its name. If quizzed, we should probably hazard a guess that Smithson was some rich old American codger, earlier in vintage than Frick or Pierpont Morgan, who had endowed one of the great museums of the world in the way that Americans do. But if we thought that, we should be wrong. James Smithson, who for 35 of his 66 years was known as Macie, was an Englishman who had never been to America in his life.

He was the son of the first Duke of Northumberland, but illegitimate, and as far as is known he never met his father. One of the many touching facts spotted by his beady-eyed biographer is that in Smithson’s copy of Dr Johnson’s Highland Tour, the passage is scored where the great lexicographer passed an afternoon at Alnwick, ‘and was treated with great civility by the Duke’. When Smithson (still known as Macie) passed through North- umberland, they stayed in Newcastle, with no visits to the ducal castle. They? He was travelling with an illustrious company of European scientists, Barthélemy Jaujas de St Fond, William Thornton and Count Andreani, to see, among other things, the Isle of Staffa, and to collect minerals. For Smithson (1765-1829), one of the youngest ever Fellows of the Royal Society, was a distinguished mineralogist and chemist in those days, a generation before Charles Lyell, when science was beginning to understand how infinitely older this planet was than had been previously guessed, and how its shape and contours had been moulded by volcanic movement. It was a time when vulcanology provided a metaphor for political change. Smithson who, like so many, made the pilgrimage to see the exploding Vesuvius, described himself in revolutionary Paris as ‘on the crater of a great volcano’.