Peble of very light brown Colour.” Specimen c.226 (Mason-Ogden #A-8-64), in the Woodwardian Collection. Courtesy Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.
Looking back at you is a stone that looks like nothing so much as a large, heavily lidded human eye. You see it, but it does not see you. This, however, has not stopped at least one person from trying to imagine himself into its place. Viewing it as an enlightened witness to geological time, a silent and opaque relic of momentous events, Woodward more than once mused upon what sights it might have seen, were its eye open one fateful day roughly six thousand years before.
John Woodward was a physician, minor poet, antiquarian, and rock hound. He was a collector of statues, vases, inscriptions, and amulets. But his “great and lasting preoccupation” was his collection of stones.88 At the height of his reputation, he was the professor of physic at Gresham College in London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the foremost figures in the development of geology. Apart from a few published treatises, a handful of vitriolic pamphlet-satires, and a few portrait engravings, what remains of him is now precisely this cabinet—kept in its original order by the terms of his bequest. The cabinet captures nothing less than a design and way of ordering the world; it takes the stuff of the landscape and puts it in a more perfect order—an arrangement according to an idea. And he was, of course, the man who collected and attempted to make sense of this “gritty Peble,” a compact object which nevertheless, for Woodward at least, articulated a vast design. The cabinet and this pebble represent an asymmetrical dialectic now frozen in time, a record of Woodward’s efforts to arrange an explanatory and complete system of the world.
The last work of Woodward’s life was his Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Fossils of England (1728), a half-finished catalogue of his mineralogical collection. Containing, by one count, 9,400 specimens, the collection is a study in variety. Each of its items, Woodward writes, “so much differ[s] from the other, that in the whole there are scarcely any two alike.”89 Nevertheless, among this chaos of objects, the Attempt offers an organizing scheme, and it is here that the collaboration between nature and design emerges. Recognizing that “there are Those who would have the Study of Nature restrain’d wholly to Observations, without ever proceeding further,” Woodward offers this reply:
Assuredly, that Man who should spend his whole Life in amassing together Stone, Timber, and other Materials for Building, without ever aiming at the making an Use, or raising any Fabrick out of them, might well be reputed very fantastic and extravagant. And a like Censure would be his Due, who should be perpetually heaping up of Natural Collections, without Design of building a Structure of Philosophy out of them, or advancing some Propositions that might turn to the Benefit and Advantage of the World. This is in reality the true and only proper End of Collections, of Observations, and Natural History.90
As Woodward understands it, a collection without an organizing “End” threatens to lapse into a mere “heap,” a sort of “extravagance” (a “detour” or “going out of the way,” see Exhibits 10–14). The alternative is to organize a collection around some “Design,” which he calls, after the example of the “Fabrick,” an intentional “Structure of Philosophy,” a connected system of observations and remarks constructed out of the objects he has accrued. Such an ideal structure, a pattern composed in the mind during a life of “amassing,” is at once a “design” itself and what the collector “designs” to build out of the materials of thinking.
Woodward’s architectural figure, however, barely qualifies as a figure; 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