10. An Appeal to the Revolutionary Enemy

No prophet in his own land, “Citizen Saull” approached French savants. At home he had praised the July Revolution (1830), and would celebrate its anniversary yearly. And he introduced French-style funeral orations at radical funerals, as dissidents took over the last rites. He was known on the Continent, as a French-speaking wine importer, and as Robert Owen’s interlocutor in Paris. Unlike elite English geologists, the Parisians were more open to planetary explanations of stratal disposition. Republican geologists put him up for the Société Géologique de France and he was elected in 1834. His Essay on the Coincidence of Astronomical & Geological Phenomena (1836) was accordingly addressed to the Société. At home, marginal astrologers, looking to raise their status, extolled the book, not exactly the support Saull was looking for. Days after his induction into the Société, Saull was sending his coal-seam ferns to the fossil botanist Adolphe Brongniart, who made one a type species, Sigillaria saullii. Such immortalization raised Saul’s stock, and acted as a further imprimatur for his museum