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The Life and Times of a Curiosity-Monger

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The Life and Times of a Curiosity-Monger COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS Like Close, astronomer John MUSEUMS Dvorak hopscotches through eclipses in Mask of the Sun, but this is science his- tory rather than anecdote. The quotes he interweaves reveal the extraordinary The life and times of a pull the events have had on the human imagination. The writer Virginia Woolf, for instance, who had witnessed the 1927 curiosity-monger total solar eclipse in the north of England, wrote of it in her essay ‘The sun and the Henry Nicholls revels in a biography of Enlightenment fish’ the following year: “Show me the collector and Royal Society president Hans Sloane. eclipse, we say to the eye; let us see that strange spectacle again.” It’s a rich chronicle. Dvorak notes, for hat do bloodletting, slavery, instance, how in 1684 Increase Mather, journal editing and a silver penis the president of Harvard College in Cam- protector have in common? The bridge, Massachusetts, delayed the gradu- Weighteenth-century physician, collector and ation ceremony by ten days so that faculty president of the Royal Society Hans Sloane. PHOTOS.COM/GETTY members and students could reach Mar- In Collecting the World, historian James tha’s Vineyard off the state’s south coast Delbourgo charts Sloane’s rags-to-riches to see a total eclipse. (Mather, a Puritan transformation, from his birth in 1660 into minister, was less enlightened about the a family of domestic servants in the north Salem witch trials less than a decade later, of Ireland, to his death in 1753 as one of the refusing to condemn them.) We see how most influential figures in England. Sloane astronomer Edmond Halley predicted the became medic to the rich and famous and eclipse that crossed England in 1715, and used his personal wealth to amass the most gathered public observations to improve celebrated cabinet of curiosities of the age. prediction of the 1724 event that tra- Despite his celebrity in life, Sloane has versed the country to Europe. And we are managed to slip almost into obscurity: his reminded of the part an eclipse played in name lives on mostly in a handful of street Albert Einstein’s and place names, such as London’s Sloane rise to prominence. “A total solar Square. And he remains a shadowy figure in In his 1916 elabora- eclipse is Delbourgo’s book. There is little about what tion of his general the most he looked like, or about his family life — per- theory of relativity, haps because his archives are full of letters to, Einstein had pre- stupendous rather than from, him. But Delbourgo sheds Hans Sloane founded the British Museum. dicted a deviation in sight in magnificent light on Sloane’s larger world, the positions of stars nature.” providing great insight into the evolution of executions is “eerily dispassionate”. near the Sun dur- Britain’s early scientific and global ambitions. When not attending the duke, plantation ing an eclipse; three years later, English At the age of 16, Sloane survived a “violent owners or their slaves, Sloane indulged his astronomer Arthur Eddington success- haemorrhage”, a formative experience from dream of universal knowledge. This resulted fully measured it. which he emerged with intense ambition. in his natural history of the region: a lavish Along with other recent studies — such Moving from Ulster to London in 1679 to folio published in two volumes (in 1707 and as astronomer Tyler Nordgren’s fine Sun study medicine, he developed a talent for 1725), filled with hundreds of detailed, life- Moon Earth (Basic, 2016) and Mark Litt- self-advancement. He exploited the close- sized engravings of local plants, animals mann and Fred Espenak’s excellent and knit Anglo-Irish diaspora to cultivate a con- and curios. The work set a new standard thorough Totality (Oxford, 2017) — these nection with chemist and fellow of the Royal for scientific illustration, from which bota- books should enrich the understanding of Society Robert Boyle, and was introduced to nists such as Carl Linnaeus would benefit. anyone interested in eclipses. They pro- philosopher John Locke, naturalist John Ray Sloane distributed copies like calling cards, vide a worthy shelf-full for those gearing and physician Thomas Sydenham. Within a spreading his work and fame. up for the big US event in August. (I will decade, Sloane had emerged as a prominent There seems no limit to Sloane’s curiosity, be viewing it — on my 34th total-solar- London doctor, and in 1687 he travelled although he was scathing about witchcraft eclipse expedition — near the path’s US to Jamaica as physician to the island’s new and magic, and paid special attention to start in Salem, Oregon.) And I hope they governor, the Duke of Albemarle. anything that could be transformed into a convince many others to view it live. Sloane’s timing couldn’t have been commodity. Natural history, for him, was “a If you’re not in the zone of totality, just better: he arrived as the island and its sugar speculative exercise in scouring the globe for remember to wake up early enough to plantations were beginning to assume a things that might seem odd or trivial … but dodge the traffic jams. ■ pivotal role in Britain’s empire. Delbourgo which could ultimately triumph in the discov- does not shy away from the savagery of ery of prized new resources and goods”, writes Jay Pasachoff is Field Memorial the slavery from which the colonists prof- Delbourgo. Sloane’s account of the West Professor of Astronomy at Williams ited — violence and Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus) is a Collecting the College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, oppression that don’t World: The Life perfect example of what Delbourgo calls “total and chair of the International seem to have wor- and Curiosity of commercial cataloguing”. The creatures were Astronomical Union’s Working Group on ried Sloane. Indeed, Hans Sloane “reckon’d extraordinary food”; their cured Solar Eclipses. Sloane’s description JAMES DELBOURGO flesh could last “without corruption ... never e-mail: [email protected] of public tortures and Allen Lane: 2017. turning rancid”; the skeletons, ground to a 410 | NATURE | VOL 545 | 25 MAY ©20172017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT powder, had medicinal properties; and the hides could be transformed into either fine shoes or “whips for beating slaves”. Books in brief After his return to London in 1689, Sloane married the widow of one of Jamaica’s fore- The Evolution of Beauty most slave owners and bought property in Richard O. Prum DOUBLEDAY (2017) on-the-up Chelsea. In spite of his reliance Charles Darwin called it “the taste for the beautiful”. But the theory of on treatments such as “superpurgations”, sexual selection (reproductive competition pivoting on, say, iridescent he seems to have killed fewer patients than plumage) is fiercely debated. In this study, ornithologist Richard other doctors of his day, bringing him a huge Prum seeks to reintegrate it into Darwin’s great legacy. Prum, whose income and the presidency of the Royal research has taken him from Suriname’s ‘moonwalking’ golden- College of Physicians in 1719. headed manakin (Ceratopipra erythrocephala) to the “shockingly As the editor of the Royal Society’s journal violent” sex lives of ducks, posits that beauty and desire coevolved, Philosophical Transactions, he became “one of and that because individuals can make maladaptive mating choices, the pivotal information brokers in the Repub- evolution is odder than adaptation can explain. lic of Letters”. Not everything he published was palatable to learned society — including a second-hand report of a 68-year-old woman Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions who had breastfed her grandchildren. Such Alexander Todorov PRINCETON UNIVERSIty PRESS (2017) “vulgar wonder mongering”, notes Delbourgo, First impressions and snap judgements are not trivial: they can led some to view him as gullible and guilty overturn elections and make or break careers. Drawing on cognitive of distasteful self-promotion: Isaac Newton and computer science, this weighty, well-illustrated study by is said to have described Sloane as “a villain psychologist Alexander Todorov journeys under the skin to reveal and rascal” and “a very tricking fellow”. This how ‘face-reading’ — as in the old pseudoscience of physiognomy didn’t stop Sloane from succeeding Newton — has given way to a scientific understanding of perceptual bias as president of the Royal Society in 1727. vis-à-vis the visage. Todorov unpeels the responses of newborns to “With exemplary sociability, redoubtable “faceness”, the hunt for face-selective neurons, the chameleonic shrewdness and unflappable patience, he self-portraiture of artist Cindy Sherman and more. had installed himself at the centre of British society,” writes Delbourgo. As Sloane’s star rose, he found it easier Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History to access objects and anecdotes for his per- Stephen D. King YALE UNIVERSIty PRESS (2017) sonal museum. With immense skill, Del- As cooperative relationships between nation states shift, seven bourgo mines Sloane’s vast correspondence decades of modern globalization could run aground. So argues to uncover the global networks on which economist Stephen King in this in-depth survey examining the new he relied to accumulate miscellanea. The world order in light of the old, from the Ottoman Empire to German number, variety and curious nature of these unification. He analyses the economic impacts of issues such as objects is enthralling; they include blocks of migration and the teetering reputations of international institutions, rock from the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, an looks critically at technocratic trends — and asserts that with China arrow-shooter from Indonesia and that silver on the rise and an increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape, penis protector, from Panama.
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