more than once calls the “Design” of each of his geological essays—what he intends for them to prove. His collection was likewise the opportunity for a repetitive return to the same ideal image of a world he could never have seen. As Woodward elsewhere notes, evidently without irony, “’tis not easie, when once a man suffers himself to grow fond of a subject, not to be at once far transported.”104 The design is, in this sense, the sketch or convenience that allows a collector like himself “to draw a considerable number of Materials into so narrow a Compass” that they might be contained in a single cabinet or volume.105
It is with this backdrop, the sublime backdrop of the Great Deluge, that Woodward’s pebble swims into significance. Woodward’s collection contains a number of extraordinary objects, but they all point toward the same desideratum—the event of the Great Deluge that organizes the stones in his collection. Among these objects is the pebble (specimen no. 226) that Woodward found in a gravel pit near the “New Buildings by Dover Street, St. James,” the geologically generic “gritty Peble of a very light brown colour.”106 Woodward’s description of the pebble stretches over two paragraphs—the object itself could in fact be wrapped up three or four times in the amount of paper it takes to describe it—but what becomes apparent is that this “ridge” is its most interesting feature. The ridge, Woodward surmises, comes from the relative densities of the different layers of sediment that the stone contains. It is by the concretion of these different materials that a single pebble like this can be made to prove the truth of his theory about sedimentation—different layers exhibited in one stone. Moreover, the pebble proves the second part of his theory, the withdrawal of water that shaped the globe as it now is. Such stones, he notes, “have had their Surfaces ground, and worn”; the ridge is raised because it is harder than the surrounding material, and therefore became less worn in the hurry and precipitation of the recession of the waters.107 Woodward’s most characteristic descriptions follow this pattern—a lengthy description of the object itself followed by a return to the Deluge; geology is a reading of patina, his stones, in the common phrase, being the medals of creation. Specimen no. 226 is therefore symbolic, greater than itself, condensing a much larger “Structure of Philosophy” into something that can be arranged into a system. Woodward’s fantasy, which colors all his work, is that the sublime object of the deluge can be contemplated in the compass of a pebble; his stones materialized an imagination.
All objects in the collection work this way, but this little stone is additionally resonant—is in fact biographically special—because, Woodward records, “’twas the first stone I ever took notice of, or gather’d.”108 It was the first object that caught Woodward’s eye, and it anticipates the arrangement of his whole system. This raises a final, suggestive point. Woodward’s discovery of what would become specimen c.226, the object that sparked his passion, the “first stone [he] ever took notice of,” precedes his first remarks on the geological importance of the Deluge by more than a dozen years. Is it possible that the stone, which looks for all the world like a lidded human eye, noticed Woodward, rather than the other way around? Did the stone call out to Woodward, providing the nugget that crystallized a world? Or, could Woodward ever have wondered what the stone might itself have seen, on that precipitous day, if only its eye were open? Could the stone, in other words, have been the oculus to Woodward’s cabinet, looking out on the vanished vista of the forty days’ flood? Viewed this way, the mute and material pebble, fantasmagoric, provided Woodward with his design, rather than the other way around, itself catching Woodward’s eye and providing a pattern for rejection and exclusion of the “exemplars” of his collection. As Jonathan Richardson reminds us, nothing, properly speaking, is invention; what appears to be invention, even Woodward’s astounding theory, is only an idea once gathered, which turns up again as a pattern.109 The stone forgets itself into an organizational principle. The single element, a principle masquerading as an emblem, condenses a synoptic view—indeed, presents the view as a feature of the arrangement. This marks Woodward’s stone, a serendipitous find if ever there was one, as a special object, the material origin of a world-making idea (see Exhibit 9).
Exhibit 7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward
The single-mindedness of Woodward’s arrangement means that his judgment is everywhere on display. As Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach noted, while being shown Woodward’s collection, one “must listen to his opinion de diluvio et generatione antediluvian et lapidum postdiluvia, till you are sick of it.” He complained of having to listen “ad nauseam” to Woodward’s theories, noting that he “recites whole pages of his writings.” But this is not nearly “the maddest thing of all.” Woodward, this visitor notes, had “many mirrors hanging in every room, in which he constantly contemplates himself.”110 This same visitor was made to wait while Woodward conspicuously “called to his lad” for a dish of hot water and shaved in his presence. This was evidently a repeated ritual, for “more than four foreigners” had previously been likewise “favored with the privilege of looking on” while Woodward performed his toilet in the midst of his collection.111
This ritual posturing strikingly realizes the function of the cabinet, clustered around the idealized and carefully organized projection of Woodward’s own public image; in composing his cabinet, Woodward composes himself, framing an ideological version of himself in a mineralogical history: Woodward’s judicious eye the end and center of his geological design.112 In this sense, Woodward was not eccentric at all. He was, on the contrary, characteristic of his age; this was a culture, Peter de Bolla writes, “suffused with the desire to see oneself and to exchange self-images as a form of social practice.” Much as (in Fréart’s words) “an Artist … paints Himselfe in his Tables,” representing himself “as in so many Mirrours and Glasses,” Woodward’s collection is ultimately, only more obviously than other cabinets, an extended experiment in self-fashioning. Any arrangement contains in this sense an element of self-portraiture.113 Or, put differently, Woodward intended his cabinet as a portrait of nature, but it captures, as though a fossil in strata, Woodward himself. As Sir John Clerk, the Scottish antiquary, said of Woodward, “some of his fossils were very curious, though indeed he himself was the greatest curiosity of the whole collection.”114
While Woodward was alive, the cabinet was a living ecology; he arranged nature according to his design. And, in the way of private collections, the cabinet’s function as a sort of Woodward machine extends after his death. It fossilizes him, as it were. Woodward left his cabinet to Cambridge, along with enough money to provide the first endowed professorship in the physical sciences in Great Britain (and, one scholar notes, perhaps the world).115 Woodward expected its occupant to curate and to expand his collection, to be physically present in it for the purposes of tours at least three days per week, and to give at least four lectures per year on “some one or other of the subjects treated of in my Natural History of the Earth.”116 Take this chair, Woodward commands; lecture on what I lectured on; inherit my ideas as you inherit my stones: this is the thrust of the terms of Woodward’s Will.
7. John Woodward, F.R.S., by an Unknown Hand. CAMSM.P.111. Courtesy Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.
The “Chair of Woodwardian Studies” has a number of peculiar requirements, which, taken together, suggest that Woodward himself recognized the autogenetic function of his cabinet: the cabinet as a mirror reflecting himself. The Woodwardian Fellow was required not to marry, lest “the care of wife and children should take the Lecturer too much from Study.” This is remarkable for a couple of reasons; the first is that it tacitly assumes that all of the Woodwardian Fellows will be men—which a survey of the historical occupants of his chair confirms.117 And, of course, it insists that the person seated in the chair will prefer study to the many pleasures of family.118 These restrictions are, however, additionally remarkable in light of Woodward’s own lifelong bachelorhood, not least because Woodward himself seems to have preferred men.119 In part because
