in summoning up a hypothetical “Man” who “spends his whole Life amassing together Stone, Timber, and other Materials for Building,” Woodward could be speaking of his own life, and his own stones, housed in four fall-front walnut cabinets, custom-built for the purpose. Lumber and stone: we might at first say that this is an ecology without nature: the pieces are all there—rocks and stones and trees—but this is clearly a moment in English history where natural resources are the stuff of building.91 Nature, in this instance, emerges as a structural effect; nature is after all the “End” of “natural history,” both purpose and final product. This, too, begins to imply the particularly material imagination Woodward possessed, that of a man whose “Judgment” is founded entirely “upon the … Nature and Properties” of the objects in his collection.92 It was not that he was simply unimaginative, that he could not think of a better metaphor; he was involved in a ruinous pamphlet war with his rival Richard Mead—and his richly vituperative prose signals a mind capable of extraordinary invention. It is, on the contrary, that Woodward thought his way through the materials with which he surrounded himself; he was invested in his cabinet. And so, when one satirical pamphlet suggests that Woodward’s geological treatises had “stood [their] Ground” supported not by “Observations and Reason” but by “Shelves and Brackets,” it happens upon the justifying logic of the book itself.93 Woodward, at least when he is speaking as a geologist, thinks through the materials of his concern; collecting stones ends up not just modeling but performing a set of recognizable cognitive activities. His design was all along a matter of geological practice.
It is, therefore, worth dwelling on Woodward’s description of his collection, especially as his cabinet puts it on display. It is organized by class, beginning with “Earths and Earthy substances,” followed by stones, pebbles, and flint, crystals, salts, metal ores, and finally other minerals mined more deeply from the earth.94 Woodward recorded, wherever possible, the locations and depths of the objects he collected; he requested his donors and correspondents, which he at one time estimated to number around five hundred, to do the same. His instructions to collectors show no particular interest in the time of collection; as far as Woodward was concerned, all these objects were collected almost simultaneously in the geological scheme, anyway. But the emphasis on place and depth was crucial to how he understood geology, and understanding it, went out into the field to witness it. This emphasis is reproduced in the general index to the collection, a synopsis, which, allowing for exceptions, inclusions, and things like marine fossils, is organized according to specific weight, from least to most dense. The same scheme governs the arrangement of stones in his cabinets. Indeed, it organizes the cabinets themselves. His collection of English stones, confined to cabinets A and B, were made to reproduce the cataloguing scheme of stones from earths to ores. Looking at Woodward’s cabinets is like looking at two leaves of a book, recto and verso, repeating from top to bottom, then top to bottom again, Woodward’s geological system. The cabinets manifest, as an organizational scheme, a visual synopsis of nature that is repeated in the index to his Attempt; this is what has been called Woodward’s “synoptic method.”
There is a selecting eye at work here, coordinating with the designer’s hand. Woodward sorts from the mass of dirt and stone the stones that make possible a rigorous set of lines and demarcations, cleaning up the mess of strata that he might have seen in the field. From the beginning, a design is operating, yoked sometimes violently to what Woodward called “nature.” Woodward remarks, for instance, that to make such a “Collection” as his, “requires … an exquisite Judgment, not one in ten [specimens] of the Bodies collected having been admitted,” the rest being “rejected for being defective in something requisite to render them fine Exemplars.” Judgment has a way of anticipating the data upon which it seems to work, altering the ideas received from sensation “without our taking any notice of it.”95 It is a question of repetition. Set before your eyes, Locke suggests, “a round globe of any uniform color”—gold, for instance, or alabaster or jet—and the “idea imprinted on our mind is of a flat circle.” Locke is thinking of course of the model of perception passing through Willis and Hooke; the idea falls upon a flat surface. If it is reconverted into the sphere from which it appears to have come, this is a question of custom—for we, “having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us,” reconvert the flat disk into a sphere. “It is evident,” Locke remarks, “in painting” that this is the general way of perception, rather than its exception; what strikes the eye is only a “plane variously coloured,” but what we experience are “the sensible figures of bodies.”96 In this way, the work of judgment, through repeated use, structures the field of view; the judgment, Locke concludes, “by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes.”97 So, when Woodward’s publisher notes that Woodward’s sorting work is meant to look like no work at all, for it descends from a “thorough Insight into … Nature,” “reducing [it] into a Science,” Locke might remind us that here is habit producing naturalness, a way of seeing concreting itself in a vision.98 The end of natural history is to produce nature as its cause. At work is the hand of the designer; Woodward’s cabinet observably pares back the geological world just as though in a camera obscura, drawing out the lines of its design. What emerges there—what Woodward experiences as emerging—is not Woodward himself but the world’s order and elegance. This is what Woodward calls “nature”; “nature” emerges as the design that may be elicited from an organization of objects as though that design were there already.
Woodward offers his stones as examples of nature—but this is nature cultivated over a long career of seeing the world in a certain way. Woodward’s prose suggests that they are merely examples of the species they may be made to represent, but, all along, the Judgment of Woodward has been lurking there: Woodward’s eye the visive point, silently designing. Woodward was best known not for his collection, exactly, but for a paper he composed shortly after being admitted to the Royal Society, his Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth (1695). The problem taken up by Woodward’s Essay is how to account for layers of rock, when prior theories insist that the Earth and all its inhabitants were created whole in six days of divine labor. Why would the earth not be homogeneous, one perfect sphere as uniform as the word of God? Why would the eye, in gazing at the globe, not be met with a perfect disk, rather than mixed textures and shades, various varieties of landscape? What Woodward proposed was a theory of the biblical Deluge, indeed, a physicalist explanation of the Deluge as a temporary suspension of natural law. Set with the problem of reorganizing a world gone astray, the Creator (Woodward suggests) implemented the simplest and mathematically most elegant solution. He simply suspended gravity for a few days, allowing land and ocean to mix in an unvarying slurry of earth and mud. When gravity was restored, and the excess water drawn off, heaps of rock and earth precipitated out according to their densities.99 The seduction of this theory is that it accounts for strata visible in exposed rock faces. It also explains animal and vegetable inclusions within layers of solid rock. And, finally, it makes intelligible geological wear, which resulted from the “Hurry, Precipitation, and rapid Motion” of the excess water being drawn off.100 As all rivers lead to the sea, so Woodward’s cabinets all tend to this same unfathomable theory of things. The entire visible geological world, according to Woodward’s theory, could thereby be explained by the rapid and violent actions of a few days or even hours, thus coordinating visible geological phenomena with inherited strains of scriptural cosmic history.
This is the best that can be said for Woodward’s system, which was immediately attacked from numerous quarters. John Arbuthnot, among others, took Woodward’s postulate seriously, launching an extended, forcefully reasoned counterargument. But detractors in general preferred the low road of satire; though few offered superior systems, and though Woodward’s system would prove to be an important step toward later understandings of geological strata,101 critics in and out of the Royal Society called Woodward’s theory the “hasty pudding” model of the Deluge, a kitchen metaphor that sinks Woodward’s sublime vision of the liquefied terraqueous globe to a low image of flour, eggs, and suet.102 The Great Deluge was, as one contemporary remarked, “his great beloved catastrophe,”103 just as it was the organizing idea of his
