The Discovery of the Prestwich Correspondence

In the summer of 2001, I was enjoying my annual geological jaunt, a time when, by long standing practice, I seek inspiration from the rocks themselves, rather than from the ideas of men. My wanderings took me to Sicily, chiefly in order to see Etna, the greatest of European volcanoes. Whilst there, my great friend Iain Wares offered me the use of his private schooner and thus, in late August, from my base in Palermo, I was able to visit the island home of the legendary Cyclops.

The island may well be known to you for its fantastic hexagonal columns, rising tier upon tier to a height of two hundred feet; to me, even in my advanced years, an irresistible climb. Half way up the peak, on the fourth or fifth tier (I forget which, as I was so out of breath), I stopped to eat my lunch: a swig of Ruffino and a slice of Prosciutto.

The view was “fantastico” and I revelled in the noise of the sea birds. With time on my hands, I casually examined some of the hexagons; Nature pretending to be a draftsman. My hand drifted into a gap between the columns...

I withdrew an old leather pouch, its clasp weathered away. In my solitude, I had thought myself the only person ever to have followed in the footsteps of the one-eyed giant; stunned, I carefully opened the flap to encounter sheaves of yellow crinkly paper. Cautiously I unravelled some of the documents: they were not well preserved, some of the pages were stained with plant juices, while others were translucent with droplets of what I assumed was olive oil; clearly someone else had dined where I sat. Fortunately the language used was English: the style was that of a previous century, but the material discussed immediately grabbed my attention, for it referred to rocks and geology.

I read on into the afternoon, utterly absorbed. In fact I never did make it the top of the island. Gradually the form of the material emerged; what I had encountered was a series of illustrated letters written by a Professor Joseph Prestwich. There were over one hundred short letters, each of which addressed a particular area of geological thought or practice as it was understood late in the nineteenth century. There was no specific dedicatee, Prestwich had apparently written to an audience of beginning students for, in each case, he opens with a general salutation to “Geoneophytes”. The content of each letter varies, but is always focussed on some fundamental concept or problem that might confuse a beginner. The illustrations are beautiful woodcuts, some of which are his own, but others are by well-known contemporaries, such as Darwin, Agassiz, Scrope, Murchison, Sedgewick, Ramsay, Harkness, King, Wallace, Judd, MacCulloch and Archibald Geikie. He also references both of the British Geological Surveys.

Clearly Joseph Prestwich was a well-read and most knowledgeable man: so how come I had not heard of him? A small mystery this, for I do not read as much as I should. A much larger mystery concerns the nature of the intended audience and the location of the documents. Later that night, as Iain and I hung over the rail of his boat, and watched another eruption of the apparently inexhaustible Stromboli, I fancied that the old gods had played a caprice: I was meant to find the Prestwich correspondence and further, to mollify the Fates, I had better do something about it.