The Syme Papers Read Free

would we assess a judge who based his decision on part of the available data only?
    Let us begin with the circumstantial evidence, then, and judge the truth as we may. For Wegener, our honourable defendant, has long been dead, frozen in his sleeping sack between the upright sticks of his skis thrust in the ice of Greenland to mark his resting-place. A last venture, to prove beyond doubt that the continents shift beneath us, measured in the drift of Greenland, proved only fatal in the end. A miscalculation, common as a neglected gas-tank, forced the adventurer to turn back – too late in the event. He cannot answer us now. And who can say, if he stood before us, that even he could account for the accumulation of fact and theory, history and observation, precedents and prescience, that erupted at last in so powerful a revolution of ideas? As William Swainson remarked in 1834, ‘the revolutions of science are almost as frequent, and often more extraordinary, than those of political institutions’ (though our story will touch on those as well before the end).
    These are the circumstances. ALFRED LOTHAR WEGENER was born on 1 November 1880, the fifth child of the theologian and linguist Franz Richard Wegener, whose brother Peter, inventor and magician (the black sheep of a family of priests), plays some role in this story (as we shall see) and bequeathed, among other things, a sense of adventure to his nephew. Alfred grew up in a tall, squeezed house on Friedrichsgracht in Berlin, overlooking the canal. The small boy must have grown used to the illusion, looking out of his bedroom window, of the world shifting by him, quite unfussed, through the still waters.
    The Wegener family was well known in its way. Alfred’s great-grandfather had been a companion of Alexander von Humboldt (the famous explorer) at the University of Frankfurt a century before. An older cousin starred on the stages of Berlin – making aparticular sensation in an adaptation of Werther, whose yellow-trousered costume found its way into the Wegener household, to be trotted out in the amateur theatricals performed by Alfred and his brother Kurt. It was above all an intellectual household and bore the character of Alfred’s father: a pious, yet liberal and curious man, consultant to the Kaiser on religious matters, and a keen botanist and gentleman scientist on the side. He cultivated an extensive library, in which the young Alfred used to while away the wet days after school.
    Unfortunately, the Wegener home was bombed during Allied raids in 1942. The windows and walls collapsed into the canals, and most of the books that were not drowned with them perished in the fires that followed. We can now no longer wander through the leathery gloom that excited the young scientist, nor trace the infant steps of his education. But one book did survive the fire and water (an interesting escape, between Pluto and Neptune!): a heavy, copper-bound ledger, recording in the father’s meticulous hand the date and entry of every volume in his prized collection.
    This book was retrieved by the scientist’s nephew (Dr Erich Wegener), who occupied the family home during the war. He carried it with him after ‘the tumult and the shouting died’ – a strange, a heavy burden, a reminder of the gentility of his grandfather’s house. The book travelled with Erich to England in 1949, upon his marriage to a young English nurse who served with the Allied forces in the clear-up of Berlin. The family adopted her name, Bilston, to mediate anti-German feeling; and a Dr Eric Bilston maintained a small but prosperous family practice in the neighbourhood of Tunbridge Wells until his death in 1972. Thereupon his puzzled English children donated the heavy tome to the British Library, a record of their famous great-uncle Alfred, mostly unintelligible: lists of foreign titles and strange names and long-ago dates.
    And this I turned to, one hot, desperate day last June, clutching the heavy