The Greywacke: How a Priest, a Soldier and a School Teacher Uncovered 300 Million Years of History

"The Greywacke is, if you like, a classic history of science book . And it’s really, really fun. Nick Davidson paints a picture of these three Victorian geologists, at a time when many scientists were gentlemen; wealthy men who didn’t need to earn a living. Many, I’m sure, were very bright and enquiring, and wanted to do something other than just… go hunting, or whatever it was rich men did. It was a sort of fashion in the 19th century to try to understand mountains and fossils. The book paints a picture of one of the men, an academic in Cambridge, who got the job because he knew more about the Church than he did about geology—the book is full of passing observations that make you laugh. So he got the Chair in geology and carried on with his fieldwork studying a peculiarity in the formation of mountains in Wales. He was then approached by a member of the gentry, an ex-soldier from a wealthy background who was energetic and good at raising money, and they become unlikely friends and coinvestigators. This friendship is beautifully illustrated—as a scientist, it could happen today, this balance between the rather cerebral, careful, lovely person who has a lot of teaching commitments but maybe is not so skilled at raising money and getting things done, and another who is quite dynamic and powerful, a good talker and good at raising money, but perhaps isn’t quite so bright as the other one. In this case, in the book, the momentous discovery that they made led to a horrible split. It’s extraordinary, the arguments they have, and I don’t want to spoil it. But along the way, it’s a fantastic illustration of the way they lived, and their obsession with geology and the rocks and fossils of Wales. You learn an amazing amount about how it is that people ever discovered tectonic shifts, and other basic elements of geology. I mean, I have no geology background at all, but I learned so much from reading this book, which reads like a historical novel, and really enjoyed it. I haven’t met Nick Davidson, I don’t think he’s a professional geologist, but he clearly understands it and explains it all so well."