Overview
This letter, which heralded a paper that Beddoes submitted to the Royal Society, reveals his efforts to contribute to the development of geology. Beddoes was one of the most industrious and effective interpreters of the Plutonist arguments of James Hutton, which were then not widely accepted. He argued against the Neptunist view of rock formation that was the orthodoxy among most theorists of the earth and he made field observations in many parts of England that Hutton had not visited. On the basis of these, he showed that granite and basalt — the rocks at the centre of the dispute between Plutonists and Neptunists — were not explicable by submarine deposition and often appeared to be injected into sedimentary strata.

By this letter to Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), Beddoes was attempting to cultivate a relationship with the most powerful patron of scientific men in Europe. Wealthy and well-connected, Banks advised the King on agricultural matters; he also developed the botanical gardens at Kew. By January 1791, he had been President of the Royal Society for twelve years; in this capacity he decisively influenced which papers were published in the Society’s Transactions and which candidates were admitted to fellowships. He also, a private capacity, encouraged aspirant savants by opening to them his superb collections of botanical specimens, charts, and books, and by inviting them to the informal breakfast conversations he held at his Soho Square house. He found employment for men whom he thought promising and reliable. While Beddoes, as a lecturer in chemistry at Oxford, did not need employment, he did seek the approval of Banks and access to the scientific community represented by the fellowship of the Royal Society and the readers of its journal. He achieved this when the article that this letter heralded was published in the Transactions. However, in 1792, Beddoes was investigated by the Home Office as a person likely to be spreading sedition by his writings and speeches — a fact that did not escape Banks, who knew the official organising the investigation. In 1793 and 1794 Banks withdrew his patronage from Beddoes. He refused the entreaties of James Watt and the Duchess of Devonshire that he should support the nascent Pneumatic Institution having, according to James Watt Jr, seen ‘Beddoes’s cloven Jacobin foot’ (James Watt Jr. to John Ferriar, 19 December 1794, LoB MS 3219/6/7/20-21). Beddoes was never made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and remained alienated from the metropolitan establishment in science and medicine over which Banks presided. Banks, however, was one of the founders of the Pneumatic Institution’s conservative, metropolitan step-child, the Royal Institution, which ‘poached’ Beddoes’s chief chemist, Humphry Davy, in 1801.

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Thomas Beddoes to Joseph Banks, 3 January 1791

Shifnal Shropshire

Jany 3rd 1791

Sir

I presume so much upon your politeness & attention to science that I shall take the liberty of transmitting to you in the course of the present week a paper, in which I have endeavoured from my observations made during the course of several mineralogical excursions compared with those of others, to investigate the origins & assign the proper stations of granite in the mineral kingdom. Should the general views of particular facts render it worthy of a place in the Philosophical Transactions, may I beg the favour of you to give orders that some copies be printed separate & transmitted to me at Oxford.

Two years ago I gave you reason to expect a paper on some very curious effects of long continued heat; and as I have not been able to perform my promise, permit me, Sir, to mention the impediments that have arisen in my way. The laboratory at Oxford has been for a considerable time past undergoing a thorough repair, which I hope will render it one of the best in Europe; in the mean time, I have been prevented from making any experiments, & before I c^d present that paper to the Royal Society, several analyses were necessary. I have likewise from time to time had opportunities to extend my first observations; & the desire of making what I had to offer less imperfect has concurred to produce some of this delay: two or three drawings were necessary to the illustration of part of the description, & I was obliged to have them executed by different hands before they represented the object with sufficient exactness. I shall, however, be certainly able to finish it in a couple of months, & then I will convey it to you, in hopes that you will communicate it to the Society.

I am, Sir

With great respect

Your obedient servant

Thomas Beddoes

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Notes

1. ‘Observations on the Affinity between Basaltes and Granite’, PTRS, 81 (1791), 48-70. This paper developed the Plutonist geology elaborated by James Hutton, in which Beddoes had been interested since (at least) 1787. On 23 October 1790 his Oxford lecture course on ‘certain points of the natural History of the Earth & Atmosphere’ had been announced in Jackson’s Oxford Journal. This course comprised of sixteen lectures and coincided with the reading of the paper to the Royal Society mentioned here. The paper discusses observations made by Beddoes at, or specimens he owned from, the Newcastle area of Staffordshire, from Derbyshire (which he had visited at Erasmus Darwin’s invitation in 1788), from the Wrekin, the Clee Hills, Wenlock, Church Stretton, and the Shifnal and Shrewsbury areas of Shropshire, from the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire, from Welshpool, Dolgellau and Cadair Idris in Wales, from the Giant’s Causeway and Cape Fairhead, Ireland, from the mountain Esterelles in the south of France, and from Dunbar in Scotland. Beddoes had still to visit Cornwall and Devonshire, and did so in August and September 1791.

2. ‘An Account of Some Appearances Attending the Conversion of Cast into Malleable Iron. In a Letter from Thomas Beddoes, M.D. to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. P.R.S.’, PTRS, 81 (1791), 173-81. The paper was transmitted to Banks (1743-1820) because he was the President of the Royal Society. See Thomas Beddoes to Joseph Banks, [before 24 March 1791].