The Science of Herself (2 page)

A mudslide buried the skull before it could be moved, the creature having raised its enormous head only briefly and then returned to the deep. Tides and storms prevented further searching for almost a year, and it was Mary, aged twelve now, who finally found it again, and also the rest of the skeleton in the cliffs high above.

The event was reported in a local newspaper:

A few days ago, immediately after the late high tide, was discovered, under the cliffs between Lyme Regis and Charmouth, the complete petrifaction of a crocodile, 17 feet in length, in a very perfect state.

This was the first ichthyosaurus ever to be found so complete. The Annings sold it to Henry Hoste Henley, the lord of the manor of Colway. Henley was also their landlord; no competitive bids were entertained. They got £23 for the specimen minus the wages of the workmen who dug it out.

Henley sold it in turn to a collector named William Bullock, and Bullock exhibited it in his Museum of Natural Curiosities in Piccadilly. In 1814, Everard Home, a surgeon and recent Baronet, wrote the first of six papers, all riddled with errors, arguing that the creature's anatomy suggested a closer relationship to fish than to crocodiles. It had a fish's delicate spine, four fin-shaped limbs, and a fish's tail. But the plates in its eyes were more like a bird's. In short, no one had ever seen a creature like it. It remained a mystery that opened into more mysteries, an infinite, unsettling puzzle box. What world did we live in? Whose world did we live in?

In 1819, it was sold again, in auction to Charles Konig of the British Museum, as a “crocodile in a fossil state.” Konig was the first to suggest the name ichthyosaurus or fish lizard.

More papers were written and delivered and debated. Over in France, Georges Cuvier was gaining support for his extinction theory. His research, he said, seemed to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some catastrophe. But many scientists still hoped for an explanation in keeping with biblical dogma. The catastrophe could well have been the biblical flood, except that the animals had all been saved, two by two by two. God would never be so profligate, so wasteful as to make a creature only to lose its kind entirely. The theory of extinction suggested mistakes, or at the very least divine inattention. The church responded to each new theory with increasing alarm.

In any case, these perplexing matters were now comfortably in the hands of rich, and often titled, men. The price of Mary's specimen had risen to £45, and her role in recovering and cleaning it had already been forgotten by everyone outside Lyme Regis.

She was the second Anning girl to be named Mary. The first had died at the age of four, when, her mother having left the room for only a minute, she'd tried to add wood chips to the fire and her clothes had caught. It was Christmastime.

Five months later, her mother gave birth to the second Mary and this Mary also had a perilous childhood. The Annings lived so close to the water that the house often flooded. On one occasion the family had to climb out through an upstairs window to avoid being drowned in their own kitchen.

On another, a family friend, a woman named Elizabeth Haskings, took the baby Mary to nearby Rack Field for a show of horsemanship. The riders wheeled and danced their horses. They wore red vests and red ribbons were threaded through the horses' manes. Half the town had turned out to see them.

Mary lay against Elizabeth, her breath on Elizabeth's neck, one hand clutching her collar. Mary was small for her age, limp in Elizabeth's arms, and damp with her own heat. A wind came up and Elizabeth moved
to the shelter of a nearby elm. The hooves of the horses pounded on the dirt like thunder. The sky opened white and struck, lightning without rain. Elizabeth Haskings was killed instantly along with two fifteen-year-old girls, friends from the village. John Haskings, Elizabeth's widower, wrote later, “The Child was taken from my wifes arms and carried to its parents in appearance dead but they was advised to put it in warm water and by so doing it soon recovered.”

The crowd at Rack Field had followed to the Annings' house and waited outside. When the physician came to tell them that the baby had survived,
a miracle
, he said, the cheering could be heard even over the sound of the surf, all the way down to the Cobb.

Decades later, her nephew wrote that Mary had been born a sickly, listless child, but the lightning bolt turned her bright and lively. Perhaps there was simply no other way to explain a woman of her class and time, intelligent but little educated, no money, and an outcast Dissenter, who taught herself French so as to read Cuvier, followed the shifting theories of pre-Darwinian science with acuity, and had her own ideas about the objects she had found, touched, pried from the rocks, cleaned and polished for presentation. Like the fossils, she defied explanation.

Mary had begun fossil hunting at the age of five. She'd followed her father so tenaciously among the cliffs that
he'd made a pick and hammer especially for her, something to fit her little hands. Back in his workroom, he taught her to chip away the rock, and then to clean and polish the fossil that emerged. Sometimes the work was so delicate it had to be done with a sewing needle. Her father teased her that she was, like any other girl, learning her needlework.

After his death, she roamed the beaches in her odd get-up—filthy clogs, multiple tattered skirts, one on top of the next for warmth, and then a patched cloak flung over the whole. She wore a man's top hat, stuffed with paper and shellacked for protection from falling rocks. Quite thin, but seen from a distance, kitted out for fossil hunting, she resembled a small round hut with a hat for a chimney.

She was not always alone on the beach. In 1812, someone new came to Lyme, a boy with prospects, sixteen years old to Mary's thirteen, and, like Tom Bertram in
Mansfield Park
, heir to a sugar plantation in Jamaica. Austen would have seen the possibilities. The only sure way out of poverty for Mary was to marry up.

She might have been more marriageable if she hadn't made a habit of picking up creatures that washed ashore and dissecting them on the Anning kitchen table. She was not a pretty girl and she had no pretty ways.

The boy's name was Henry De la Beche. Recently booted from military school for insubordination, he'd come to join his mother and her third husband at their
home on Broad Street. There is no record of how he and Mary met, but we can imagine it as Austen might have written it—the older boy, in disgrace, but with the confidence of wealth, education, and good looks. Then Mary, who should have been quiet and deferential in his company, but was not.

At thirteen, she was already the expert on the Blue Lias. People talked later of how sharp her eye was, how she would set her chisel into the cliff at some spot no different from any other spot and, after a few blows, reveal the small skeleton of an ancient fish. If it was fossils Henry wanted, he did best to listen to her, keep in her good graces.

He did want fossils. He was as keen on fossils as a boy could be, given that he didn't need to find them in order to eat. Soon after meeting Mary, he had decided on a career in geology. They were often seen scouring the cliffs after a storm, their heads bent together over some find, their hands touching accidentally as they worked a specimen free. Mary's fingers would be rough and scraped, her nose red from the wind and salt. Mr. Elliot, Anne's father, would have been the first to note that she was seldom out in such weather as would improve her looks.

Sometimes an older woman, Miss Elizabeth Philpot, a noted collector who also lived in Lyme, joined them. But often it was just the two of them, alone in the wind and the water, scrambling about the cliffs.

He did not marry her. At twenty-one, he came into his fortune and used it to travel to sites of geological interest, to meet prominent scholars in the field. He was able, as she was not, to join the prestigious Geological Society of London. He was writing papers by then; one entitled “Memoir on the Genus Ichthyosaurus” consisted mostly of descriptions of Mary's finds.

Mary had continued to uncover skeletons. These, varying greatly in size and with subtle differences, particularly in regard to their teeth, suggested four distinct subspecies of ichthyosaurus. She learned of his marriage to the beautiful Letitia Whyte only after it had occurred. They continued as good friends, the carpenter's daughter and the plantation owner's son, although he was much less often in Lyme now.

By then she had other partners. Her terrier, Tray. Elizabeth Philpot on many occasions. And, when she was only sixteen, an Oxford professor named William Buckland. He had written to her first, asking for the privilege of accompanying her on her hunts. Buckland was a noted eccentric, a jokester, whose rooms at Oxford were filled with birds and mice, guinea pigs, snakes, and frogs. As a young man, he'd vowed to eat his way through the animal kingdom and was infamous for serving mice on toast to unsuspecting guests. The bluebottle fly, he said, was the worst-tasting animal he'd found.

Other geologists—the Anglican clergyman, William Conybeare, and Jean-André De Luc—came often to Lyme Regis during these same years and these
men sought Mary out, young and poor as she was. She listened to them and they to her. She grew accustomed to the company of her betters. The residents of Lyme noticed.

These guests sometimes brought her papers from the various scientific societies. Mary copied these out, including the drawings, which she did very deftly. She read well and had a good hand. She deeply regretted not being able to go to the museums in London to see what could be seen.

She noticed that the men who'd bought the fossils from her were being credited with finding them. In addition to thinking well of herself, she began to feel hard done by. For all the flattering attention, her family's finances had not improved.

At thirteen, a neighbor had given her a book on geology, the first book she'd ever owned, and over the subsequent years, she had read it to tatters, carried on with her dissections, and learned to make her careful drawings, her beautiful, detailed descriptions of the fossils she found. She was becoming impressively learned. She was every inch a scientist.

She was a complete romantic. Fond of poetry, her fourth commonplace book (the first through third are lost) began with Lord Byron's “January 22nd, Missolonghi” copied onto the page.

'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,

Since others it has ceased to move;

Yet though I cannot be beloved,

Still let me love.

Though perhaps she chose this poem not for the rejected melancholy of its opening verses but for its later impulse toward glorious self-sacrifice. Anna Maria Pinney, a wealthy sixteen-year-old who met Mary when Mary was in her thirties and was clearly dazzled, wrote in her diary, “Had she lived in an age of chivalry she might have been a heroine with fearless courage, ardour, and peerless truth and honour.”

Awake! (not Greece—she
is
awake!)

Awake, my Spirit! Think through
whom

Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake