Master narratives in the history of geology have focused on the discovery of Earth’s deep history around 1800 and have tended to neglect the long-term development of spatial knowledge about strata before the publication of William Smith’s stratigraphic map in 1815. By focusing on geological space rather than geological time, this thesis provides a new account of the sciences of the earth in Britain in the period 1600–1800. Utilising new sources, I reconstruct the practice of four neglected spatial sciences of the earth: coallery, the natural history of mines, the natural history of the Earth, and the natural history of the coal-bearing strata. Collectively, these constituted strata as an object of inquiry by about 1700. Initially, strata were primarily studied on a regional basis, as naturalists described the horizontal continuity and vertical succession of strata in particular regions, such as counties or mining districts. However, by the 1760s, it became possible for naturalists with the means to travel widely to plot the spatial distribution of strata throughout Britain, and this is the proper context in which Smith’s map should be situated.
This new account suggests that indigenous mining expertise was far more significant for the development of British geology than historians have appreciated. Not only did naturalists mainly obtain spatial knowledge about strata from observing mines, but it was mineworkers, and especially coal surveyors, who first recognised the regular distribution of strata. And it was by emulating the methods of the coal surveyors and combining them with natural-historical methods that the overall order of the strata of Britain began to be deciphered in the second half of the eighteenth century. Overall, I argue that the origins of a science of strata in Britain must be located in both natural history and coallery, the forgotten science of the coal surveyors.
