TRILOBITE PAPERS 8

COMPLETE TRILOBITE PAPERS 8
Now Available on CD-ROM

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A Political Comment from J.W. Salter

Adrian Rushton
British Geological Survey

J.W. Salter (1820-1869), who acted as a British Geological Survey palaeontologist from 1846 to 1863, was the greatest British trilobitologist of the 19th century ("the prince of palaeontologists" according to Bigsby). Secord (1985, From Linnaeus to Darwin... Society for the History of Natural History, London) told the sad tale of his life and death, but it seems to me (as it did to Sam Morris, 1988, in his Palaeontographical Society Monograph review of British trilobites) that Secord did not appreciate the full stature of Salter’s palaeontologcial legacy.

The cartoon below (BGS Archive no. GSM 1/544) is unsigned but has been tentatively attributed to Salter, and the hand-writing, the subject matter and the style of drawing all suggest to me that the attribution is correct. The old Geological Survey registers contain similarly bold and expressive ink sketches by Salter, rapidly executed to illustrate some morphological point; but this is the only whimsical drawing of his that I have seen.

One of Salter’s first Geological Survey contributions was to assist John Phillips in his production of the Geological Survey Memoir (vol. 2, part 1) on Malvern, etc. which appeared in 1848. The cartoon, which was presumably sketched between 1849 and 1852, refers to p. 246 of the Memoir where it says: "in the case of the Dalmanniae one is inclined to suspect, from the rarity of thoracic rings among so many heads and tails, that this species was the favourite food of some coeval zoophagous race".

Salter evidently had Orthoceras brightii in mind. This large Wenlock cephalopod was treated on p. 247 of the Memoir. In the cartoon he shows "Orthoceras Bright-y-eye (or Louis Napoleon)" crunching "Phacops caudatus (or the Reds)". Watching the action is a group of "C. Blumenbachii (a respectable quiet National Guard)".

More earth-shaking in 1848 than the appearance of Phillips’ Memoir were the political revolutions in mainland Europe -- in France, Italy, Germany and Bohemia, and in this cartoon Salter was making a political allegory of Phillips’ observations on predation.

In France the monarchy ended in 1848 with the establishment of the Second Republic. A National Guard was set up to defend it. As I understand it, the Republicans were known as the ‘Reds’ and followed the ideals of the first Commune of the French Revolution. A year or so later, with the Republic in difficulties, Louis Napoleon (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) was voted President and he vowed to be faithful to the Republic. However, it seems that he reneged on his vow, snipping away at the Reds until, in 1852, he was in a strong enough position to declare himself Emperor Napoleon III. In the meantime the ‘respectable quiet National Guard’ remained enrolled and did not interfere.

There is little doubt where Salter’s sympathies lay.

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In 1987 I.M. Kolobova organized the First All-Union School on Trilobites for young paleontologists in the provincial town of Kamenez-Podolsky in the Ukraine. These paleontologists were photographed on the high bank above the Dnestr River.