Free The Syme Papers by Benjamin Markovits

calm was born his strange fixation on the ‘theory of concentric spheres’. We have no record of the circumstances that precipitated such an eruption, of the moment of inspiration, of the mounting degrees of his obsession. The essay was published in the March issue of the Journal of American Science; Syme effected his discharge from the army two months later, wandering from the well-trod path before him into such impressionable ground that history still bears the prints of his diversions. I could only guess – hunched over the mottled paper of the Journal, turning the delicate leaves with my ham fists, still strapped, and bound and forbidden the use of a pen – the tyranny of inspiration that drove Syme, from the comfortable progress of a fashionable career to such strange prospects: a life of disappointment and betrayal, and an early, desired death.
    But a century of winds dispersed his theories, until, like a piece of grit (as I hoped to prove), one stuck in the thoughts of Alfred Wegener and produced a pearl. A pearl that eventually cost the German scientist his life, a pearl whose perfect brilliance drove me, another century on, to carve within it and discover the source of the original infection. We are at the mercy of our own inspiration and helpless to prevent the spread of a faith, once started, even in ourselves. Who can say where or when the notion will strike?
    *
    I pursued my researches now at the Newspaper Library in Colindale, a noble Victorian red-brick building in the middle of suburban nowhere – in a loose field protected by a sagging fence, a set of football posts kneeling in the high grass beside apile of cement rubble littered with Coke cans. I sat at the top, looking over the green wasteland, while a single fan, perched in the crack of a tall window, blew the hot air around and around the high room.
    A tall young man with a pinched nose and a racking sneeze pushed the squeaking trolley towards me and lifted out the book of old Baltimore papers, bound together but surprisingly light, as if the news had thinned with age. ‘That’s what we’ve got,’ he said, pinching his pinched nose and twisting it to the side to sniff, ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s what’s left. Try not to smudge it, will you?’ And then, like an ailing Charon, he steered the trolley back to the comfort of the other shore, among the air conditioning and the forgotten papers.
    The pages of the Baltimore Patriot and Mercantile Advertiser (1818–20) were less yellowed with age than cast into the burnished hue of a dusty summer cloud, the paper thick and softening at the edges, and blotched occasionally with a deeper yellow, like the smear of fat or oil. It was slow work, trawling through the advertisements for ‘Cohen’s lottery’ and the offer of a reward for an ‘eloped Negroe – of fine upright carriage, rather thin in figure than otherwise’. There were accounts of the spread of hydrophobia and the death of a young schoolboy; there was the shipping news, arrivals and departures; stories of sea-monsters discovered; records of the sessions in the Senate. More advertisements, for ointments, liniments, potions, pipsissiway (a root that cured cancer). An account of a man reputed to be a hundred and thirty years old, who had seen with his own eyes the coronation of Queen Anne. And then, with a growing palpitation of the heart, and an extra stickiness of the stubborn thumbs, I discovered the following:
    Pactaw – we have been favoured by an account of a remarkable new Science practiced in the humblest of our districts, by our own American Lavoisier, and a southern gentleman at that. The letter comes to us from Mr Topliff, apothecary and post-master in Pactaw, Virginia, via the Richmond Intelligencer.
    ‘There, in the back-room of my shop, attended by a host of the eager and the sceptical, Lt Samuel Syme, lately of Yale College, offered the following remarkable demonstration of the actions of the interior of the