PALEONTOLOGY1

Thoreau’s firm grasp of paleontology laid the groundwork for the climax of WALDEN, which describes the emergence of complexity and beauty from the simple flow of muddy sand at the Deep Cut. It also was the taproot of his lifelong frustration with Christian supernaturalists, who insisted on a fairly brief history of life. Paraphrasing Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, he jested [in A WEEK ON THE C ONCORD AND M ERRIMACK R IVERS]: “It took 100 years to prove that fossils are organic, and 150 more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.” Not everyone believes this, even today. Modern “young Earth” creationists still insist that the Elizabethan-era Mosaic chronology of Archbishop Ussher is the correct one, and that we twenty-first century scientists are in error. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, WALDEN’S SHORE, pages 60-1

1. (“Paleology” would be the study of antiques, how much they might fetch at auction.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

23,000 BCE

Full glacial world, cold and dry; Stage 2 (includes the latest “Glacial Maximum”). This period includes the two ‘coldest phases’ –Heinrich Events– at something like 21,000 BCE-19,000 BCE and at something like 15,000 BCE-12,500 BCE. Music was produced by humans in what is now France; archaeological evidence includes cave paintings, footprints in caves that seem to be those of dancers, and carved bones that seem to be wind and percussion instruments. People made artifacts with primitive geometrical designs. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Paleontology HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

18,000 BCE

On the basis of Carbon-14 measurements, this was the last Glacial Maximum, the coldest period of the most recent Ice Age. People made wall paintings in caves, for example in the cave of Lascaux, France. Rope was in use, according to evidence there.

Chauvet cave in France.

People living in or visiting caves in what are now Israel and Jordan were putting notches on bones to record sequences of numbers (the devices are thought to have functioned primarily as lunar calendars).

By about this point or at least by 13,000 BCE, the spear thrower and the harpoon would have been invented.

The first-known artifact with a map on it, made of bone, has been at what is now Mezhirich — it appears to show the region immediately around the site at which it was found.

THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

15,200 BCE

The receding of the glacial ice past Concord, Massachusetts toward the north, creating what has now become Walden Woods (“Historic woodland surrounding Walden Pond, especially to the north. Generally characterized by irregular topography and sterile soils associated with meltdown collapse of the Walden kame delta”) and what has now become Walden Pond. (“Lake in Concord, Massachusetts, created by melting of multiple residual blocks of stagnant ice and maintained by the filling of large voids with groundwater beneath a steady state water table. Its western basin was the site of Thoreau’s famous experiment in deliberate living and the inspiration for his book WALDEN”). THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

13,000 BCE

About 15,000 years ago the last age ended with average temperatures rising by several degrees Centigrade. A glacier dumped a boulder that would eventually be freighted with identity-politics significance as “The Plymouth Rock.” The Near East experienced a corresponding northerly migration of monsoon rains, resulting in a kind of “Garden of Eden” in Jordan, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Paleontology “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

610 BCE

Anaximandros of Miletus. Anaximander is sometimes designated the “father of astronomy,” because he was the first to develop a cosmology by using mathematical proportions to map and interpret the heavens. Anaximander was born in Miletus and could have been a pupil of the philosopher Thales. Anaximander analyzed the origin of the cosmos with the theory of apeiron: • The universe is boundless. • The universe consists of a primary substance. • He wrote influential works of biology, cosmology, and geography. He noted that human embryos initially appear fishlike. • He realized that the most obvious hypothesis to explain the marine fossils he noticed on dry land, was that this dry land was once upon a time at the bottom of the sea. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

600 BCE

At about this point the planet experienced a “relatively wet/cold event of unknown duration in many areas.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

430 BCE

At about this period, in Mesopotamian astronomy, the zodiac of signs was invented for use as a reference point.

Herodotus wrote his HISTORIES. He, like Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and Xenophanes, realized that the most obvious hypothesis to explain the marine fossils they noticed on dry land, was that this dry land had once upon a time been at the bottom of a sea.

Athens was visited by a pestilence, which swept off large numbers of her population.

The Book of RUTH, a novel. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

400 BCE

Peloponnesian War. Socrates. Thucydides. Aristophanes.

Herodotus related the myth of the griffin — which may well have been inspired by discoveries of the remains of Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

58 BCE

Marcus Antonius studied in Rhodes and Athens, where he met Aulus Gabinius, the new governor of Syria. He accompanied Gabinius as a cavalry commander for a period of service in Judaea and Egypt.

Toward the end of this year, Cato the Younger left Rome to become governor of the island of Cyprus.

Marcus Aemilius Scaurus displayed a skeleton of what was described as the “monster of Joppa,” having a 40- foot backbone and ribs taller than elephants. Did this consist of whale bones from Palestine? HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

44 CE

There was a Roman victory parade at Camulodunum (Colchester), and a triumph at Rome.

The three volumes of Pomponius Mela’s DE SITU ORBIS described what was “known” about the world at large, including travelers’ tales of fabulous creatures and peoples in distant lands. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

50 CE

Pedanius Dioscorides, a Roman army surgeon, was author of an ancient compilation of descriptions and medicinal uses for plants DE MATERIA MEDICA, which was the most widely known western botanical text during the middle ages. The earliest herbals were recapitulations of Dioscorides. With an expanding awareness of the natural world in the 16th-century, herbalists would begin to make their own descriptions of plants, and at last Dioscorides’s influence would wane. Dioscorides knew about 650 different species. PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

78 CE

Pliny the Elder’s 37-volume natural history encyclopedia containing some accurate and some inaccurate information.

Roman Governor Cnaeus Julius Agricola began a full-scale pacification of Great Britain. Like the US’s Strategic Air Command under General Curtis LeMay, he was all about peace. IRELAND

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Paleontology “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

150 CE

Claudius Ptolemeus (we refer to him as Ptolemy), the mapmaker at Alexandria, astronomer: TETRABIBLOS. Ptolemy knew the earth was a sphere and inferred that only a third of the northern hemisphere of this sphere was habitable. During the following decade Ptolemy would be writing his LIBER GEOGRAPHIA (GEOGRAPHY), which would include, based on information collected by the legions in their travels, an atlas of the world known to Rome.

Galen journeyed from Turkey to Alexandria to study anatomy. This physician would establish the concept of humors that determine both health and personality. Belief in four humors (phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile) would for many centuries be dominating medicine and biology. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

180 CE

Nipsus wrote on SURVEYING.

Pausanias described what was averred to be the skeleton of the hero Ajax (more likely it was the bones of a rhinoceros, or perhaps the fossil of a mastodon).

The Greek physician/anatomist Galen began to edit together all known medical knowledge, into a single compilation; this systematic analysis would remain in use for many centuries.

In Egypt, the first writings about alchemy appeared. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

512 CE

Townspeople in a district of Constantinople presented an illuminated manuscript of the 1st-Century DE MATERIA MEDICA of Pedanius Dioscorides of Anazarbus Πεδάνιος Διοσκουρίδης to their patron, Princess Anicia Juliana, daughter of puppet emperor Flavius Anicius Olybrius, as a “coffee-table” book. For a millennium “Juliana’s codex” would be recognized as the best compilation of Western knowledge available about botany — and this illuminated manuscript, slightly the worse for wear in a hospital over the years, happens to be still in existence at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

713 CE

At about this point the Japanese chronicle HITACHI FUDOKI described a shell mound — which is perhaps one of the oldest descriptions of prehistoric remains in medieval writings.

Turkic merchants introduced Islam to the T’ang court at Ch’ang-an.

Saracens conquered Spain. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

860 CE

Yet another altercation: at a siege of Constantinople, the Byzantines under the emperor Michael III defeated the Russians under their tribal leaders Oskold and Dir, maintaining the Pax Romana.

At about this point the Islamic writer al-Kindi noted that the finest swords in the Muslim world, with so-called “Damascus blades,” were being fabricated in Yemen, Arabia, and India, and that Damascus was merely distributing and marketing these weapons (while the term “damask” originally meant a kind of flowery cloth it would later come to mean similar designs inlaid into the steel of such blades). The Muslims had such religious compunctions against mixing metals, that actual manufacturing needed to be performed by non- Muslims. These blades were fabricated by hammering the iron into thin slabs, then laminating those slabs using repeated hammerings-together and quenching, much the same as with Japanese samurai swords. The process acquired great metaphysical and alchemical meaning and the steel produced was considered as of an entirely different category from the iron with which the smith began.

When at about this point the science writer Al Jahiz described some 350 kinds of animal in his BOOK OF ANIMALS, he commented upon an ongoing “struggle for existence” — does this amount to a prefiguration of evolutionary theory? PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

955 CE

Otto defeated the Magyars at the battle of Lechfeld near Augsburg, and the Slavs at Reichnitz.

At about this point some Syrian Shiite Muslims known as “The Brothers of Purity” were preparing an encyclopedia — and we can now note in this production THE AIM OF THE SAGE that they had a thorough and accurate understanding of the process of rock stratification. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1020 CE

Al-Karkhi wrote on al-gebra, algebra.

The Iranian poet Firdawsi described polo, a Central Asian equivalent of jousting, a favorite sport of Turkish aristocrats (according to Nizami, by the 13th Century their women also would be engaging in this horseyback competition).

The Muslim polymath ibn Sina (known to the West as Avicenna) compiled THE CANON OF MEDICINE, but he also wrote about erosion and (perhaps) produced an account of superposition. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1137 CE

In the West, the Vatican chorus began perhaps as early as the 12th Century to employ castrati as sopranos. In this year we know of a professor of song in Smolensk, named Manuel, who was a eunuch. Since the 12th century, the guard on the tomb of the Prophet Mohammed in Medina has been made up of eunuchs.

At about this point Adelard of Bath’s QUAESTIONES NATURALES stressed that to produce an explanation for natural phenomena, what we needed to do was search for natural causes (yes, in fact, people did need to have that sort of thing explained to them — and it’s the same for some even now). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1150 CE

The chronicles of South German in about this timeframe describe bohordicum jousts, between contestants who were not aristocrats. This word was based on a German term meaning a field that had been fenced off. During these mock battles two sides lined up and then ran at one another. The casualties were more severe than those at aristocratic tournaments, perhaps because these dudes weren’t sporting expensive suits of armor.

Cheap iron farm tools were, however, becoming more common, with village blacksmithies becoming a regular part of European village life.

At about this point the abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen authored a work describing the unicorn, a discriminate beast that was attracted only to women of high birth, never to peasants.

At about this point William of Conches’s PHILOSOPHIA MUNDI pointed up yet again that natural phenomena result from natural causes. PALEONTOLOGY

Constance of France was imprisoned in the Tower of London on orders of Geoffrey de Mandeville, and then released. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1171 CE

Saladin, a Muslim warrior and commander in the Egyptian army, overthrew the Fatimid dynasty.

A river bank collapsed to reveal giant fossil bones that were attributed to a man who had been 40 feet tall (we know about this as a factoid that Ralph of Coggeshall in Essex would later mention in a chronicle). PALEONTOLOGY

In Ireland, Dermot MacMurrough died. Strongbow became King of Leinster. Rory O’Connor besieged Dublin but was defeated by the Normans. King Henry II arrived to keep Strongbow in check, and Strongbow submitted and was granted the Kingdom of Leinster. When Dermot McCarthy, King of Desmond, also submitted to King Henry II, the southern kings and bishops followed suit. IRELAND HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1256

Albertus Magnus, author of one of the first bestiaries to express skepticism about medieval animal lore, prepared a BOOK OF MINERALS. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1370

Nicole Oresme’s DE CAUSIS MIRABILIUM described natural causes of natural phenomena, while discouraging the sorts of explanation that relied upon invocations of God or of demons. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1443

In this year John Stafford became Archbishop of Canterbury.

While digging the foundation of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna workmen came upon a huge femur, presumably from a mammoth (the find, inscribed with the date of its discovery and the motto of Emperor Frederick III, would end up chained to one of the doors of this cathedral). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1469

A new edition of Pliny the Elder’s NATURAL HISTORY appeared in Venice. PALEONTOLOGY

The city senate of Venice encouraged John Da Spira and his brother Wendelin Da Spira, Germans from Rhenish, Bavaria, to establish themselves as Venice’s first printers, by granting to them a 5-year exclusive privilege. When John Da Spira would die in the following year of the plague, the senate would however decide that the grant or “patient” it had given to these brothers had lapsed. Wendelin Da Spira, however, would continue to print there for four or five more years, until competition would drive him into bankruptcy. Venice soon was to become the printing center of Europe; before 1480, more than 50 printing establishments would be there in operation. Daniel Berkeley Updike asserts that the Venice press of John Da Spira and Wendelin Da Spira was the first to fashion and use truly roman type. Since it is supposed, by some scholars of printing history, that Nicholas Jenson worked for the de Spires in the year 1469, it may have been he who fashioned the first type used by this press. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1500

Pisan engineers were discovering that reverse-sloped walls of loosely packed dirt would successfully resist penetration by cannonballs. What would follow would be the construction of angular, powder-resistant bastions, known as “star-forts,” around the perimeters of European nations (ability to hold and maintain such star-forts against attacks from artillery seems to be, more than anything else, what has created the modern European frontiers).

One of these very active military engineers, Leonardo da Vinci, was proposed that fossil marine shells had neither been carried to their present locations on mountaintops by a deluge, nor had they originated while that spot was a mountaintop. THE SCIENCE OF 1500 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1514

Pope Leo X issued a bull denouncing slavery and the slave trade. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

When King Manuel I of Portugal enhanced the menagerie of animals enslaved by the Pope through the gift of an Indian elephant, fascinated crowds of locals trailed after this lumbering monster during the entire length of its journey along the Italian peninsula.

At the age of 30, in addition to his university professorship, the Reverend Martin Luder became the Catholic priest for Wittenberg’s city church of St. Mary, named for Mary Magdalene, the Stadtkirche St. Marien. THE SCIENCE OF 1514 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1519

Hernando Cortés brought Arabian horses from Spain to the North American continent. He noticed that the natives were smoking perfumed reed cigarettes. He entered Tenochtitlan, capital of Mexico, and was received by Montezuma, the Aztec ruler.

Tlaxcalteca warriors from the Yucatán presented Cortés’s troops with “giant’s bones” (the remains, we may presume, of mastodons). THE SCIENCE OF 1519 PALEONTOLOGY

Busy conquering part of Mexico, Cortés did not himself find the taste of cocoa all that interesting and was, therefore, mostly into cocoa beans as a substitute for money. He established in the name of Spain a plantation at which, henceforth, this “cash” crop was to be cultivated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1546

German minerologist Georgius Agricola’s ON THE NATURE OF FOSSILS, the 1st published paleontological treatise. THE SCIENCE OF 1546 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1554

In Antwerp, one “Cruydeboeck” or “CRVYDT-BOECK” prepared the first European illustration of tobacco.

This year produces the 1st written record of the tomato.2

Though the 1st description in Europe of kohlrabi was in this year, it would not be grown commercially for almost two more centuries, until 1734 (in Ireland). Records of this vegetable in the US do not begin for two and a half more centuries, until 1806. PLANTS

Roman naturalist Ippolito Salviani’s HISTORY OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. THE SCIENCE OF 1554

Guillaume Rondelet’s thick volume on the fish of the Mediterranean included a suggestion that glossopetrae, or “tongue stones,” more than a bit resembled the teeth of sharks (such a hypothesis would attract but little attention). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1565

Antwerp doctor Samuel Quicchelberg published a description of the curiosity cabinet of Hans Jacob Fugger, which included items from the animal, vegetable, and mineral world. THE SCIENCE OF 1565

In DE OMNI RERUM FOSSILIUM GENERE, GEMMIS, LAPIDIBUS, METALLIS, ET HUIUSMODI... (TREATISE ON FOSSIL OBJECTS), Conrad von Gesner of Zürich provided us with the earliest surviving description of a pencil,

2. Except, perhaps, for the quipu! HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

accompanied with a woodcut prepared by himself, depicting a wooden tube holding a piece of graphite.

Since the object derived its name from Middle English and Middle French words meaning “brush,” it was presumably of a round cross-section. Some scholars believe William Shakespeare did considerable play drafting with a “Gesner pencil” — although of course not while he was “Shakespeare in Love” on camera stage center with a considerably more photogenic inky quill. PALEONTOLOGY

Sweden began its own papermaking, at Norrström. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1590

At about this point, Zacharius Jensen of the Netherlands constructed a compound microscope with a converging objective lens and a diverging eye lens. This 1st microscope left a lot to the imagination: HISTORY OF OPTICS

Ulrich Vogelsang carved a dragon statue at Klagenfurt, Austria, that he based on the skull of a Pleistocene woolly rhinoceros found during the 14th Century. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

José de Acosta’s NATURAL AND MORAL HISTORY OF THE INDIES describing such weird creatures of the present era as iguanas — and they were visible to the naked eye! THE SCIENCE OF 1590 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1598

By this point Michael Drayton had already made a monumental resolve, that he was going celebrate in verse all the points of topographical or antiquarian interest in the island of Great Britain.

Jean Bauhin, a former student of Conrad Gesner, prepared a monograph about the medicinal waters and surrounding environment of the German fountains at Boll, and this has turned out to amount to a really important first — the 1st publication of a complete set of fossils from a specific location. THE SCIENCE OF 1598 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1616

Fortunio Liceti’s DE MONSTRORUM NATURA explained that God does not make monsters out of wrathfulness, but to induce wonder.

Lucilio Vanini suggested that humans descended from apes. THE SCIENCE OF 1616

Fabio Colonna’s DISSERTATION ON TONGUE STONES argued that “nobody is so stupid” as to fail to comprehend that “tongue stones” were really merely the fossilized teeth of sharks (but this idea would gain little traction). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1619

For having suggested in 1616 that humans descended from apes, Lucilio Vanini found himself being burned alive. “Hey, guys, let’s play ‘what if’ — what if I say I’m sorry?” THE SCIENCE OF 1619 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1628

An almanac was published that eventually would find its way into the library of Governor John Winthrop of Connecticut. That almanac was Jacobo Rosco’s EPHEMERIS PERPETUA HOC EST GENERALE CALDENDARIUM ASTRONOMICUM ET ASTROLOGICUM (Basiliae).

Caspar Bartholinus’s slim volume, on the unicorn and related topics, also described horned bugs, birds, snakes, and people. THE SCIENCE OF 1628 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1637

Francesco Stelluti and Federico Cesi decided that “fossil wood” could not be of organic origin. THE SCIENCE OF 1637 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1639

Archbishop James Ussher’s BRITANNICARUM ECCLESIARVM ANTIQVITATES. QUIBUS INFERTA EFT PEFTIFERAE ADVERFÙS DEI GRATIAM À PELAGIO BRITANNO IN ECCLEFIAM INDUCTÆ HÆREFEOS HISTORIA.

ECCLESIARVM ANTIQVTATES

Ulisse Aldrovandi’s posthumous SERPENTUM, ET DRACONUM (NATURAL HISTORY OF SNAKES AND DRAGONS). THE SCIENCE OF 1639 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1641

René Descartes argued in MEDITATIONES DE PRIMA PHILOSOPHIA (PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY) that the universe was governed by simple laws and that the earth could have been shaped by natural processes. THE SCIENCE OF 1641

Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (born a Pieterszoon, he had renamed himself after the tulip) provided in his OBSERVATIONES MEDICAE the first formal description of the anatomy of the ape (chimp, bonobo, or orangutan).

Isaac La Peyrère requested to publish a claim that since the Chaldeans could legitimately trace their civilization back 470,000 years, the human species must have been in existence prior to Adam (such permission would of course not be forthcoming, but 14 years later an anonymous PRAE-ADAMITAE in Latin, and then MEN BEFORE ADAM in English, would stir outcry). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1643

Laborers uncovered bones in Flanders that measured in “Brabantian cubits” and were ascribed to a giant (later to be identified as a fossil proboscidian). THERE WERE GIANTS ... PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1643 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1644

Balthasar de Monconys inspected ancient elephant bones found during excavation for the Vatican. IOVRNAL DES VOYAGES PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1644 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1650

Archishop James Ussher in ANNALES VETERIS TESTAMENTI, A PRIMA MUNDI ORIGINE DEDUCTI, UNA CUM RERUM ASIATICARUM AEGYPTICARUM CHRONICO, A TEMPORIS HISTORICI PRINCIPIO USQUE AD MACCABAICORUM INITIA PRODUCTO (ANNALS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, DEDUCED FROM THE FIRST ORIGINS OF THE WORLD, THE CHRONICLE OF ASIATIC AND EGYPTIAN MATTERS TOGETHER PRODUCED FROM THE BEGINNING OF HISTORICAL TIME UP TO THE BEGINNINGS OF MACCABES) calculated the first day of Creation by summing the ages of Biblical prophets (theologians, relying on his calculations, would identify the date of creation as having begun, in the proleptic Julian calendar, at nightfall on Sunday, October 26th, 4004 BCE). THE SCIENCE OF 1650 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1651

Dr. William Harvey insisted in EXERCITATIONES DE GENERATIONE ANIMALIUM (DISPUTATIONS TOUCHING THE GENERATION OF ANIMALS) that all animal life began with the egg, whether it was birds, amphibians, or mammals. PALEONTOLOGY

THE SCIENCE OF 1651 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1655

Ole Worm’s MUSEI WORMIANI HISTORIA described his cabinet of natural curiosities. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1655 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1658

Father Martino Martini of the Society of Jesus pointed out that documented Chinese history extended prior to 2,300 BCE, the year generally assigned in the West to the great flood of Noah and his ark. THE SCIENCE OF 1658 PALEONTOLOGY

Archishop James Ussher of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin, presented in a posthumous publication THE ANNALS OF THE WORLD that:

For as much as our Christian epoch falls many ages after the beginning of the world, and the number of years before that backward is not onely more troublesome, but (unless greater care be taken) more lyable to errour; also it hath pleased our modern chronologers, to adde to that generally received hypothesis (which asserted the Julian years, with their three cycles by a certain mathematical prolepsis, to have run down to the very beginning of the world) an artificial epoch, framed out of three cycles multiplied in themselves; for the Solar Cicle being multiplied by the Lunar, or the number of 28 by 19, produces the great Paschal Cycle of 532 years, and that again multiplied by fifteen, the number of the indiction, there arises the period of 7980 years, which was first (if I mistake not) observed by Robert Lotharing, Bishop of Hereford, in our island of Britain, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and 500 years after by Joseph Scaliger fitted for chronological uses, and called by the name of the Julian Period, because it conteined a cycle of so many Julian years. Now if the series of the three minor cicles be from this present year extended backward unto precedent times, the 4713 years before the beginning of our Christian account will be found to be that year into which the first year of the indiction, the first of the Lunar Cicle, and the first of the Solar will fall. Having placed therefore the heads of this period in the kalends of January in that proleptick year, the first of our Christian vulgar account must be reckoned the 4714 of the Julian Period, which, being divided by 15. 19. 28. will present us with the 4 Roman indiction, the 2 Lunar Cycle, and the 10 Solar, which are the principal characters of that year. We find moreover that the year of our fore-fathers, and the years of the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews were of the same quantity with the Julian, consisting of twelve equal moneths, every of them containing 30 dayes, (for it cannot be proved that the Hebrews did the Lunary Moneths, before the Babylonian Captivity) adjoyning to the end of the twelfth moneth, the addition of five dayes, and every fourth year six. And I have observed by the continued succession of these years, as they are delivered in holy writ, That the end of the great Nebuchadnezars, and the beginning of Evilmerodachs (his sons) reign, fell out in the 3442 year of the World, but by collation of Chaldean History and the Astronomical Cannon, it fell out in the 186 year of Nabonasar, and, as by certain connexion, it must follow in the 562 year before the Christian account, and of the Julian Period, the 4152. and from thence I gathered the Creation of the World did fall out upon the 710 year of the Julian Period, by placing its beginning in Autumn: but for as much as the first day of the World began with the evening of the first day of the week, I have observed that the Sunday, which in the year 710 aforesaid, came nearest the Autumnal Æquinox, by Astronomical Tables (p) notwithstanding the stay of the Sun in the dayes of Joshua, and the going back of it in the dayes of Ezekiah) happened upon the 23 day of the Julian October; from thence concluded that from the evening preceding, that first day of the Julian year, both the first day of the Creation and the first motion of time are to be deduced. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1659

John Tradescant the younger deeded his family’s collection to fellow collector Elias Ashmole who would later donate it to Oxford University on condition that a separate building be constructed for it. THE SCIENCE OF 1659 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1663

Dr. Otto von Guericke pieced together bones from different species to fabricate a fossil “unicorn.” THE SCIENCE OF 1663 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1664

Thomas Willis’s THE ANATOMY OF THE BRAIN AND NERVES. THE SCIENCE OF 1664

In his private museum in Rome, Virgilio Romano exhibits a Hippopotamus major canine tooth found in gravels along the Via Nomentana, that we have since come to understand date to the Pleistocene. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1665

In this year in England Robert Hooke revealed that there be micro-monsters, in his MICROGRAPHIA, a book with elaborate drawings of various objects under the microscope, accompanied by an accessible prose commentary, PALEONTOLOGY

according to Samuel Pepys “the most ingenious booke that I ever read in my life.” HISTORY OF OPTICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

He was describing his observations with a compound microscope having a converging objective lens and a converging eye lens. He described his observations of the colours produced in flakes of mica, soap bubbles, and films of oil on water. He recognized that the color produced in mica flakes was related to their thickness but was unable to establish any definite relationship between thickness and color. He advocated a wave theory for the propagation of light. He also revealed to an amazed world what the crater Hipparchus on the moon would like to them if they had access to a 30-foot telescope:

This audience even got an opportunity to glimpse for the first time what such mundane objects as mere HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

snowflakes looked like under magnification!

LE JOURNAL DES SAVANTS was 1st published in France, and PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY was 1st published in England. THE SCIENCE OF 1665

From this year into 1678, Athanasius Kircher, the inventor of the magic lantern which projects still pictures on the wall by means of a lens and transparent slides, was writing MUNDUS SUBTERRANEUS.

PALEONTOLOGY SYMMES HOLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1666

Dr. Francesco Redi conducted experiments in spontaneous generation and concludes that the dung and rotting meat in his experiments amounted merely to breeding sites for preexisting vermin (two years later he would challenge the spontaneous generation claims being made by Kircher). THE SCIENCE OF 1666 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1667

Niels Stensen (Steno) described his dissection of the head of a giant white shark and correctly identified shark teeth, still generally supposed (despite Rondelet’s and Colonna’s reasonings in the preceding century) to have been the tongues of serpent. PALEONTOLOGY

The Royal Society of London conducted a sheep-to-human blood transfusion experiment. (remarkably, the human survived). THE SCIENCE OF 1667

Johann Homilius delivered a dissertation DE MONOCEROTE criticizing all who doubted the existence of unicorns, pointing out that this animal had been described in the BIBLE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

Gaspar Schott’s PHYSICA CURIOSA, SIVE MIRABILIA NATURAE ET ARTIS LIBRIS XII. COMPREHENSA..., printed at Würzburg, relied on the imaginative zoology of the engraver’s teacher Athanasius Kircher:

PALEONTOLOGY CATS WITH WINGS HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1668

Jan Swammerdam dissected a caterpillar for Cosimo de Medici, to demonstrate that butterfly wings already existed within its body (a year later he would publish HISTORIA INSECTORUM GENERALIS). THE SCIENCE OF 1668

John Somner found woolly rhino teeth near Canterbury in Kent, and imagined that they might be the remains of some sea monster. As he would die before he could publish his conclusions, his brother William would produce his article “A Brief Relation of Some Strange Bones There Lately Digged Up In Some Grounds of Mr. John Somner.” PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

December 19, Saturday morning (Old Style): An earthquake was experienced on this morning in Nashobah Plantation just after Robert Hooke had, in England, delivered a lecture before the Royal Society in which he asserted it to have been earthquakes, rather than a Biblical flood, that had caused fossils to be embedded in stones now located at the tops of mountains. PALEONTOLOGY

I don’t know why we haven’t turned up, so far, some Concord town record or diary record of the event.3 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

3. An earthquake table lists this one as “1668DEC19 42.5 71.5 3.5 MA LITTLETON.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1669

THE FLYING SERPENT, OR, STRANGE NEWS OUT OF ESSEX: BEING A TRUE RELATION OF A MONSTROUS SERPENT WHICH HATH DIVERS TIMES BEEN SEEN AT A PARISH CALLED HENHAM ON THE MOUNT WITHIN FOUR MILES OF SAFFRON WALDEN: SHOWING THE LENGTH, PROPORTION AND BIGNESS OF THE SERPENT, THE PLACE WHERE IT COMMONLY LURKS, AND WHAT MEANS HATH BEEN USED TO KILL IT: ALSO A DISCOURSE OF OTHER SERPENTS, AND PARTICULARLY OF A COCKATRICE KILLED AT SAFFRON-WALDEN / THE TRUTH OF THI[S] RELATION OF THE SERPENT IS ATTESTED, BY RICHARD JACKSON … [et al.]. London: Printed and sold by Peter Lillicrap … THE SCIENCE OF 1669

Niels Stensen (Steno)’s FORERUNNER, showing diagrammatic sections of the Tuscany area geology, making the important point that sediments are ordinarily to be found in horizontal layers. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1670

Agostino Scilla’s VAIN SPECULATION UNDECEIVED BY SENSE argued for the organic origin of fossils. THE SCIENCE OF 1670 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1672

Dragon bones were found in the caves of the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania (presumably this had been a bear). THE SCIENCE OF 1672 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1673

While on a journey out of Occhoneeche, their base island in Virginia, to trade with the Cherokee, James Needham and Gabriel Arthur passed through “Aeno,” describing it as “an Indian towne two dayes jorny beyond Occhoneeche.”

Dr. Olfert Dapper’s DIE UNBEKANTE NEUE WELT described the New World, displaying a unicorn with an American eagle on its back.

Leeuwenhoek begins corresponding with the Royal Society of London describing his discoveries under the microscope. THE SCIENCE OF 1673 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1676

Robert Plot described a dinosaur bone, accurately identifying it as the distal end of a femur but attributing it to a giant human. THE SCIENCE OF 1676 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1678

Athanasius Kircher gave us his concept of what was indicated by the presence in rocks of huge fossil bones: there be dragons.

THE SCIENCE OF 1678 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1679

Edward Lhwyd’s a description of a “flatfish” in the PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY (his specimen was actually a trilobite, an ancient marine arthropod). THE SCIENCE OF 1679 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1681

Thomas Burnet began to offer his TELLURIS THEORIA SACRA, OR SACRED THEORY OF THE EARTH in which he combined what passed as scripture with what passed as rationalism. In the consideration of this author, mountains were ugly signs of decay formed during a catastrophic flood and eventually the planet would rebound to its perfect sphericity.

Dr. Gerard Blasius’s ANATOME ANIMALIUM examined the internal anatomy and skeletal structure of animals. THE SCIENCE OF 1681

When Neremiah Grew examined some “sea serpent teeth” found by John Somner in 1668, he recognized that they were the teeth of a rhinoceros. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1684

Robert Hooke described a practical system of telegraphy. Also, during this year, he invented an odometer, an “otocousticon” aid to hearing, a reflecting quadrant, a wheel barometer, the anchor escapement of clocks, and the universal joint. Also during this year, he made suggestions as to the true principle of the arch, anticipated a method for showing nodal lines in vibrating surfaces, indicated the motion of the sun among the stars, and formed notions as to the nature of fossils and the succession of living things on Earth — notions that would later prove to be correct. PALEONTOLOGY

Filippo Bonanni’s RICREATIONE DELL’ OCCHIO E DELLA MENTE was perhaps the 1st book devoted entirely to seashells. THE SCIENCE OF 1684 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1688

Giovanni Giustino Ciampini described the remains of an extinct straight-tusked elephant, Elephas antiquus, uncovered in the town of Vitorchiano in the region of Latium. THE SCIENCE OF 1688 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1693

The Reverend John Ray’s THREE PHYSICOTHEOLOGICAL DISCOURSES ABOUT THE CREATION, THE DELUGE AND THE CONFLAGRATION discussed conflicting theories about the nature of fossils. THE SCIENCE OF 1693 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1697

Olof Rudbeck the Elder’s ATLANTICA, although its author’s agenda was to establish that Sweden was Atlantis the cradle of civilization –and that the original language of humankind was Swedish– and although its curious method was to connect word etymology with mythical history, also attempted a legitimate scientific task, of chronologically measuring sedimentary deposits — thus anticipating both the methods of archaeology and the new field of stratigraphy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

(Sometimes crazyness isn’t just crazyness.) THE SCIENCE OF 1697 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1699

Based on a dissection performed during the previous year, Edward Tyson’s ORANG OUTAN, SIVE HOMO SYLVESTRIS: OR, THE ANATOMY OF A PYGMIE COMPARED WITH THAT OF A MONKEY, AN APE, AND A MAN pointed out similarities between chimpanzee and human anatomy (although he used the term “orang-outan” he had dissected an infant chimpanzee). THE SCIENCE OF 1699

Edward Lhwyd’s LITHOPHYLACII BRITANNICI ICHNOGRAPHIA, devoted to British fossils, described ichthyosaur remains as those of a fish. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1704

Dr. Michael Bernhard Valentini’s MUSEUM MUSEORUM, ODER VOLLSTÄNDIGE SCHAU-BÜHNE ALLER MATERIALIEN UND SPECEREYEN, NEBST DEREN NATÜRLICHEN BESCHREIBUNG... AUS ANDERN MATERIAL-KUNST- UND NATURALIEN-KAMMERN, OOST- UND WEST-INDISCHEN REISS-BESCHREIBUNGEN assembled sources of “true and false” unicorn horns (we don’t seem to know who discovered that what had been taken to be the horns of unicorns were actually the enormous hollow spiraling lower left canine tooth of the male of the narwhal, or when this happened except that it must have been sometime during the 18th Century). THE SCIENCE OF 1704 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1705

Maria Sibylla Merian’s METAMORPHOSIS INSECTORUM SURINAMENSIUM described insects and other animals she had inspected in Surinam.

A giant fossil tooth found on the bank of the Hudson River would initially be identified by the Reverend Cotton Mather as that of a giant human who had drowned at the time of Noah — but would eventually be correctly identified by Georges Cuvier as that of a mastodon. THE SCIENCE OF 1705

Georg Eberhard Rumphius’s AMBOINSCHE RARITEITKAMER (AMBOINA CURIOSITY CABINET) offered detailed descriptions of soft and hard shellfish, minerals, rocks, and fossils found at the island of Ambiona off the coast of Indonesia. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1715

Edmond Halley assured the Royal Society that it would be readily possible to obtain an approximate figure for the age of the planet Earth, because the saltiness of ocean water was the result of salts carried into it by streams and rivers. All one would need to do was compare the total salt in the oceans of the earth –easily approximated by multiplying the saltiness of an average seawater sample by the total volume of the oceans– with the rate at which additional salt was being carried into it at the present time! (His calculation of course presumed that the oceans never lost any of their salt, which of course can only be very false — as enormous deposits of solid salt are known to be buried within the crust of the earth.) THE SCIENCE OF 1715 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1717

Albertus Seba inventoried his wonder cabinet of some 1,000 European insects and 400 animal specimens for the benefit of an avid collector, Tsar Peter the Great of Russia (when the tsar bought him out Seba would begin another such collection, which he would be describing in print by 1734). THE SCIENCE OF 1717 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1719

William Stukeley’s “An Account of the Impreffion of the almoft Entire Sceleton of a large Animal in a very hard Stone” (these remains they were presuming to be an ancient crocodile or porpoise, noticed on the underside of a slab of rock by Charles Darwin’s great-grandfather the barrister Robert Darwin, was in fact a plesiosaur and the 1st-known fossil of a Jurassic reptile). ALMOFT ENTIRE SCELETON PALEONTOLOGY

With the planet Mars in opposition to the sun, and therefore at its brightest, many were taking it to be a red comet representing calamity. Observations at the Paris Observatory, however, were establishing on the basis of the appearance and disappearance of surface features that the planet’s rotation period was approximately 24 hours, 40 minutes. They were able at this point to identify not only Syrtis Major but also a darkish swath from Mare Sirenum to Mare Tyrrhenum, and to verify that Mars, like Earth, had two noticeably whitish polar spots.

ASTRONOMY THE SCIENCE OF 1719 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1720

In the collapse of the Mississippi Bubble and the vanishing of stock values in the Company of the Indies, the treasury of France was bankrupted.

In the midst of all this angst, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur proposed to the Académie des Sciences that a Noachian flood, because as described in the BIBLE so very brief, would not begin to account for all the thick sedimentary layers composed largely of broken shells, that underlay the region of Tours. His suggestion would be that for a very long time the region must have been at the bottom of a sea. THE SCIENCE OF 1720 PALEONTOLOGY

In the Treaty of the Hague, in exchange for the Habsburgs of Austria obtaining Sicily, the Savoys of Piedmont obtained Sardinia, which had been under Spanish rule under Viceroy Gonzalo Chacón de Orellana, and Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy became King of Sardinia (in 1730, under the effect of some sort of sadness that probably amounted to a mental illness, Victor Amadeus II would abdicate in favor of his son Charles Emmanuel III, Duke of Savoy, who would function as King of Sardinia until 1773). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1722

Harvard College acquired a 24-foot refracting telescope. ASTRONOMY HARVARD OBSERVATORY THE SCIENCE OF 1722

Benoît de Maillet’s anonymous manuscript TELLIAMED OU ENTRETIENS D’UN PHILOSOPHE INDIEN AVEC UN MISSIONNAIRE FRANÇOIS SUR LA DIMINUTION DE LA MER, LA FORMATION DE LA TERRE, L’ORIGINE DE L’HOMME, &C reported the teachings of an oriental sage who inferred, on the basis of measurements of falling sea levels, that the earth must be at least 2,000,000,000 years old (you will immediately notice that this title is the anonymous author’s name spelled backward; the manuscript would not be publishable until after his death in 1748, and until the Catholic Church had spent a decade editing it in an attempt to reconcile his proposals with dogma). PALEONTOLOGY GEOLOGY TELLIAMED, DE MAILLET HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1723

Jean-Frédéric Bernard’s CÉRÉMONIES ET COUTUMES RELIGIEUSES DE TOUS LES PEUPLES REPRÉSÉSENTÉS PAR DES FIGURES DESSINÉES PAR BERNARD PICART, 1723-1743 (9 volumes).

A Clothing-Optional Beach in Florida HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

Antoine de Jussieu suggested to the Académie des Sciences that an ancient stone tool, since it had been made of the same material and by the same process as those still in use by a modern population, presumably had then the same function as now (duh, yeah).

Sharpening tools in Australia PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1723 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1728

Sir Hans Sloane, M.D.’s two papers on large fossils found in Siberia and North America argued that these had been elephants rather than giants or monsters. THE SCIENCE OF 1728 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1729

John Woodward’s AN ATTEMPT TOWARDS A NATURAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND described as “pinecones” what upon more careful more recent inspection would turn out to be coprolites. THE SCIENCE OF 1729 PALEONTOLOGY

John Evelyn’s A PHILOFOPHICAL DIFCOURFE OF EARTH, RELATING TO THE CULTURE AND IMPROVEMENT OF IT FOR VEGETATION, AND THE PROPAGATION OF PLANTS, &C. AS IT WAS PREFENTED TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY, APRIL 29. 1675. BY J. EVELYN EFQ; FELLOW OF THE FAID SOCIETY was printed in London by instruction of the Royal Society. Henry Thoreau would use material from pages 14-16 of a 1778 edition of this (and a remark about Sir Kenelm Digby):

WALDEN: Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all PEOPLE OF once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid WALDEN for it in the end, “there being in truth,” as Evelyn says, “no compost or lætation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade.” “The earth,” he adds elsewhere, “especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement.” Moreover, this being one of those “worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath,” had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted “vital spirits” from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans.

SIR KENELM DIGBY JOHN EVELYN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE BEANFIELD

JOHN EVELYN’S TERRA HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1731

Johann Jakob Scheuchzer’s KUPFER-BIBEL, IN WELCHER DIE PHYSICA SACRA, ODER GEHEILIGTE NATUR- WISSENSCHAFT DERER IN HEIL. SCHRIFFT VORKOMMENDEN NATÜRLICHEN SACHEN, DEUTLICH ERKLÄRT UND BEWÄHRT (SACRED PHYSICS) provided a neato pictorial account of the earth’s history based on OLD TESTAMENT stories (he included a description of what he inferred must have been a fossilized victim of the Noah-and-the-Ark flood, which actually had been a large ancient salamander). SACRED PHYSICS PALEONTOLOGY

At this point Nils Rosen, professor of anatomy, returned to the University of Uppsala from his trip abroad and tension developed between him and Carl von Linné. Rosen wanted to give the botany lectures as well as his lectures in anatomy, but Rudbeck, Linné’s sponsor, blocked this. However, some unpleasantry in Rudbeck’s household soon resulted in Linné’s losing his benefactor’s confidence and needing to find himself another place to live. THE SCIENCE OF 1731 BOTANIZING HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1739

Native Americans traveling with French Canadian captain Charles Lemoyne de Longueil found mastodon fossils at Big Bone Lick along the Ohio River in what would become Kentucky (these bones would be shipped as curiosities to King Louis XV and become the initial American fossils studied by scientists). THE SCIENCE OF 1739 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1742

Daniel Tilas suggested that drifting sea ice might be the explanation for the presence of erratic boulders in the Scandinavian and Baltic regions. THE SCIENCE OF 1742

Pierre Martel visited the valley of Chamonix in the Alps of Savoy. In his RELATIONS DE LEURS DEUX VOYAGES AUX GLACIERS DE CHAMONIX, 1741-1742 he would record that the locals were attributing the dispersal of erratic boulders to a presumption that once upon a time the glaciers must have been of greater extent (similar explanations would be offered by villagers elsewhere in the Alps). THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1748

Benoît de Maillet, long safely dead, took issue with the brief chronologies of the earth sponsored by John Lightfoot (1647) and James Usher (1650), in his 1722 TELLIAMID, finally published during this year after the Catholic Church had spent a decade editing it in an attempt to reconcile his proposals with dogma, and depicted an earth that was already at least a couple of billion years old. THE SCIENCE OF 1748

This would be widely condemned until 1921, when Henry Russell would be able to establish on the base of uranium/lead dating that Maillet had been underestimating rather than overestimating. (We now have unmetamorphized rocks from northern Canada, as inclusions in a later formation, that are around 3.96 billion years old, and believe that there must be remelted and reprocessed rocks in the earth’s crust which, could they be identified, would date back to about 4,600,000,000 BCE.) GEOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY TELLIAMED, DE MAILLET HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1749

The 1st of the 36 volumes of Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s HISTOIRE NATURELLE was printed in this year. This seriously short naturalist was Director of the Jardin du Roi in Paris.

Natural history embraces all the objects the universe presents to us. This prodigious multitude of quadrupeds, birds, fish, insects, plants, minerals, etc., offers to the curiosity of the human mind a vast spectacle, of which the whole is so great that the details are inexhaustible.

PALEONTOLOGY BOTANIZING

He made the mistake of hypothecating that the planets had been formed when a comet had crashed into the sun. Under pressure from the Faculty of Theology of Paris (that understood God doesn’t pull stunts like that!), in the next volume he would include a retraction. THE SCIENCE OF 1749 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1752

Bishop Erik Pontoppidan’s NATURAL HISTORY OF NORWAY, a book being printed off in this year and the following one, was confirming that “Here, in the diocese of Bergen, as well as in the manor of Nordland, there are several hundreds of persons of credit and reputation who affirm, with the strongest assurance, that they have seen this kind of creature.”

John Hill speculated that such reports were such as might arise upon “an imperfect view” of the sea cow. THE SCIENCE OF 1752 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1760

December 23-January 5: The maw of Mount Vesuvius opened and it transited into its eruptive, non-quiescent condition, which phase typically obtains for this particular volcano for between half an year and just shy of 31 years.4

MOUNT VESUVIUS Giovanni Arduino had just proposed that the layers of rock in the earth might be distinguishable into categories, and he proposed, from bottom up, the nomenclature “Primary,” lacking fossils, “Secondary,” tilted strata containing fossils, “Tertiary,” horizontal strata containing fossils, “Quaternary,” materials overlying Tertiary strata (under that classification scheme these modern lava flows, and the ancient ones as well, would clearly offer evidence of the Quaternary). Although Arduino was not relating these categories to sacred scripture, many would of course be interpreting them in terms of Biblical reports.This early formulation would lead eventually to the modern geological and paleontological timescale of Precambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Myocene, Pliocene, Quaternary, and of course Holocene. THE SCIENCE OF 1760

4. “Effusiva-Esplosiva — Bocche a circa 300 m s.l.m. in località Noto (Torre Annunziata). Lava verso S (si ferma a meno di 300 m dal mare). Interruzione della strada regia. Crolli per terremoti. Fratture del suolo fino al mare.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1763

Richard Brookes noted that some people were terming certain fossils “tortoise eggs,” because they resembled the carapaces of tortoises (the fossils were of sea urchins). PALEONTOLOGY

A comet passed 0.09 astronomical units from Earth. SKY EVENT HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

An image was made of the moon: HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

THE SCIENCE OF 1763 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1767

Benjamin Franklin crossed the channel to France and was presented at court. He wrote a thank-you note to a wealthy Irish trader, for a box of proboscidian “tusks and grinders” (he considered that these were the remains of elephants but made astute observations about how the climate in which they existed must have differed from that of the present). THE SCIENCE OF 1767 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1769

Jonathan Carver sailed to dun the British government for compensation for his expenses in exploration, and also for the grand golden reward for having traced out a potential Northwest Passage. Abandoning his wife Abigail Carver with his family in the colonies, he would never see her again. He would spend the balance of his life in England, perennially dunning anyone in the government who would grant him an audience, and would in fact achieve two separate crown grants although he would not set eyes on the grand golden reward that had been offered by King and Parliament for identifying a Northwest Passage. While struggling at this lobbying endeavor in London, he would author his travel book and begin a new family.

William Hunter incorrectly identified an American fossil proboscidean, which he named Pseudelphant, as a carnivore, but did recognize that it had become extinct. THE SCIENCE OF 1769 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1770

5 Dr. Erasmus Darwin had his portrait done, by Joseph Wright, and began the writing of ZOONOMIA.

His deep small pox pits were of course omitted from the painting.

THE SCIENCE OF 1770

His wife Mary (Polly) Howard Darwin died “after a long and suffering illness.” The grandson Charles Robert 5. Although Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s grandson Charles Robert would read ZOONOMIA at the age of 16 or 17, he would report later in life that the poem had been without effect on his mind. He hadn’t even retained a memory of what his family’s motto E conchis omnia was, or what it signified. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

would report that “judging from all that I have heard of her, [she] must have been a superior and charming woman.” “They seem to have lived together most happily during the thirteen years of their married life, and she was tenderly nursed by her husband during her last illness.”

In this year he had the new motto E conchis omnia, “Everything from shells,” added to the painting on his coach door of the Darwin family’s coat of arms (which had pictured three scallop shells). The image below is not what was painted on his coach door, but what he would have engraved for a bookplate in the following year:

Unfortunately, the Canon of Lichfield Cathedral, the Reverend Thomas Seward (father of the poet Anna Seward who would fall in love with Dr. Darwin, would be rejected for another, and, after her love’s death, would author a scathing and demonstrably false biography), would spot the reference, and –in satirical verse– would accuse his neighbor of renouncing his creator, and would exhort him to change that “foolish motto.” Great wizard he! by magic spells Can all things raise from cockle shells Dr. Darwin would need to have his coach repainted to remove this offensive material.6 PALEONTOLOGY

The biographer Desmond King-Hele acknowledges that it is Charles Darwin, not his grandfather Erasmus, who created the theory of evolution, but seems not to comprehend why this is so:

Charles Darwin read ZOONOMIA when he was sixteen or seventeen, and also listened to a panegyric in praise of evolution from his 6.Imagine parking in the parking lot of your local fundie church, nowadays, with one of those “Darwin” fish-with-legs logos on the trunk lid of your car! Why was such a motto so offensive? –Because the official story then, which would be the official story during Charles Darwin’s life as well, and would be the official story during Henry Thoreau’s life, and would be the official story at the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee, and is still the official story, as for instance the official belief system of the Wubya administration of born-again Christians — is that our lives, to be of significance to us, to be meaningful to us, must have a divine purpose and legitimation. (That’s why we attacked Iraq — Wubya’s God told him he needed to “take Saddam out.” Wubya’s administration wasn’t mainly about stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. Wubya’s life, in fact, post-salvation, has divine purpose and legitimation. It is now a life as full of meaning, as once it was full of drunken revels.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

friend Dr Robert Grant at Edinburgh University. “At this time I greatly admired the ZOONOMIA,” he says. But neither Grant nor ZOONOMIA had “any effect on my mind.” This is true: otherwise he would have become an evolutionist before going on the voyage of the Beagle, rather than after. Therefore, perhaps, I should here explicate why it was that creating the theory of evolution was left for Charles, and why it was that the early reading of ZOONOMIA, with its recognition of evolution, did nothing in this regard: it is one thing to regard evolution as a fact, and another thing entirely to create a theory which accounts for it by hypothesizing a plausible mechanism and demonstrating the inevitability of this mechanism. Lots of people regarded evolution as a fact, before Charles created his theory. Almost as many people were perfectly well aware of evolution as a fact in 1770, as had been perfectly well aware in 1491 that the earth was a globe — before Columbus obtained funding to sail west from Spain!

During the 1770s, Erasmus would be helping to found The Birmingham Lunar Society, a social club for the great scientists and industrialists of the day. The society would hold its monthly meetings at the Soho House on the Monday night nearest the full moon, and this supposedly was so that the attenders would afterwards be

able to find their way home. This society has been characterized as the think tank of the industrial revolution. Members of the society included the Reverend Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, Friend Samuel Galton, a wealthy Quaker industrialist who eventually would be disowned due to his manufacture of firearms, William Small, the eccentrics Thomas Day and Richard Edgeworth, the Matthew Boulton who was known as “the creator of Birmingham,” James Watt, William Withering, James Keir, and Josiah Wedgewood.

Other personages linked to this society include Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Rudolph Erich Raspe, and William Murdock, developer of a self-propelled vehicle and the inventor of gas lighting. (Murdock would end his days living at the court of the Shah of Persia, where he would be credited with being an incarnation of Marduk, ancient god of light.) THE LUNAR SOCIETY OF BIRMINGHAM HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1771

The Reverend Gilbert White of Selborne discontinued the GARDEN KALENDAR which he had maintained since 1751, in favor of the format of Daines Barrington’s THE NATURALIST’S JOURNAL.7

In Nürnberg, Volume II of Conrad Gesner’s botanical manuscripts. BOTANIZING

Luigi Galvani of Bologna recorded “animal” electricity. THE SCIENCE OF 1771

The Reverend Joseph Priestley discovered that a plant could produce enough breathable air to sustain a mouse plus keep a candle burning. Though he described this in different terms, he had discovered oxygen.

In Gailenreuth Cave in Germany, Father Johann Esper found human bones beneath those of extinct animals. He concluded that the bones had gotten underneath by some sort of happenstance, the alternative being unthinkable — and this was an opinion with which Cuvier would concur. PALEONTOLOGY

7. See the extracts edited by Walter Johnson, published in 1931 and reprinted in 1970. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1774

The bleaching effect of chlorine was discovered. This replaced much more complex and less effective methods previously used to eliminate the natural color of plant fibers used for yarn and cloth.

F.A. Mesmer of Austria introduced “animal magnetism” (later “hypnosis”) for health.

Lord Monboddo considered orangutans as a race of men in an arrested state of development, who had never acquired speech. Edward Long’s HISTORY OF JAMAICA considered orangutans to be closer to negroes than negroes to white men. PALEONTOLOGY

Abraham Gottlob Werner’s VON DEN ÄUßERLICHEN KENNZEICHEN DER FOßILIEN (ON THE EXTERNAL CHARACTERS OF FOSSILS, OR OF MINERALS), the first modern textbook on descriptive mineralogy.

Werner’s attitude toward geology began with the “Neptunism” of Jean-Étienne Guettard — the geological record was that of an all-encompassing ocean, that had gradually receded to its present remainder while precipitating out of solution, or depositing, almost all the rocks and minerals of the planet’s present crust. He believed that, on the basis of lithology and superposition, he could discern universal formations from this universal ur-ocean. He coined a New Greek term geognosy to describe a “science of the earth,” one based on the recognition of the order, position, and relation of the layers now forming the earth’s crust. He considered that this crust had gone through a series of 5 formations: • 1. Primitive (Urgebirge) Series — intrusive igneous rocks and high rank metasediments (the 1st precipitates of the ocean, before the emergence of land). • 2. Transition (Ubergangsgebirge) Series — more indurated limestones, dikes, sills, and thick sequences of greywackes that were the first orderly deposits from the ocean (“universal” formations extending without interruption around the world). • 3. Secondary or Stratified (Flötz) Series — the remaining, obviously stratified fossiliferous rocks and certain associated “trap” rocks (the emergence of mountains from beneath the ocean had resulted in beds of eroded materials, deposited on their flanks). • 4. Alluvial or Tertiary (Aufgeschwemmte) Series — poorly consolidated sands, gravels, and clays (Werner considered that these were formed during the withdrawal of the oceans from the continents). • 5. Volcanic Series — younger lava flows demonstrably associated with volcanic vents (Werner considered that these rocks reflected the local effects of burning coal beds). THE SCIENCE OF 1774 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1775

Tobias Mayer mapped the visible surface of the moon. CARTOGRAPHY ASTRONOMY

In Florence, Grand duke Pietro Leopoldo established the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History (La Specola). Unlike many older natural history repositories, this institution would admit any visitor — at least, of course, anyone meeting the museum’s standards for dress and hygiene. THE SCIENCE OF 1775 PALEONTOLOGY

In approximately this timeframe, Benjamin West closed his store in Providence, Rhode Island and began to make revolutionary war uniforms.

THE NEW-ENGLAND ALMANACK FOR 1775. By Benjamin West. Providence: John Carter. It contains “A brief view of the present controversy between Great Britain and America, with some observations thereon.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

ANDERSON IMPROVED: BEING AN ALMANACK, AND EPHEMERIS FOR THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1775. By John Anderson, Philom. Newport: Printed by Solomon Southwick. The publication included verses on the history of astronomy. The (pseudonymous) author addressed his American public in these “troublesome times,” disclaiming any “gift of prophecy” but daring to offer his two cents worth so that we may “remain the freest and happiest people under Heaven.” Americans needed to “stop all trade with Great Britain till the Parliament shall recognize your right to carry on trade upon an equal footing with the people of England, till they withdraw all their useless creatures and tools from this country, and till they leave the sole government of yourselves to yourselves.” A tabulation of Britain’s exports makes a case that “America takes off more of the British manufactures, &c. than all the other parts of the world.”

Nathanael Low’s AN ASTRONOMICAL DIARY; OR, ALMANACK FOR...1775. Boston: Printed and Sold by John Kneeland, in Milk Street. Low also was determinedly fanning the flames of rebellion. His title-page woodcut depicted a “virtuous patriot at the hour of death.” His “Address to the Inhabitants of Boston” took up four pages and decried the Port Bill as well as the “British armament parading in your streets and harbour”: “My dear brethren, the destiny of America seems to be suspended on the present controversy; and it is on your fidelity, HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

firmness and good conduct ... that a happy issue of it in a great measure depends....” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1776

Pierre-Louis-Georges Du Buat began a study of hydraulics. He would compile experimental data from which he would be able to generalize a basic algebraic expression for calculating the rate of discharge from pipes and open channels. Though predictive only within the range of his experimental data, this equation was able to provide the best algorithm at the time, for predicting the performance of water-supply systems and similar works. He would deal extensively with matters of boundary resistance, velocity distribution, underflow, overflow, and backwater. THE SCIENCE OF 1776

Although Abbé Jacques-François Dicquemare described reptilian fossils in Journal de Physique, he refrained from any speculation as to their provenance. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1778

Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s LES EPOQUES DE LA NATURE, asserting that the earth is a staggering 74,832 years old, and had been in existence long before the arrival of humans — or of any other form of life. PALEONTOLOGY

Joseph Banks began his 42-year stint as president of the Royal Society. THE SCIENCE OF 1778

John Fothergill brought Cymbidium ensifolium and Phaius tankervilliae to England from China (these were the first Asiatic orchids to appear in England). PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1780

An image of Mount Vesuvius made in this year:

MOUNT VESUVIUS Abraham Gottlob Werner was asserting that each and every rock in the earth’s original crust had been created by being deposited out of solution from a primordial planet-embracing ocean (this “Neptunism” would for many years be accepted with little question, all igneous formations of rock being presumed to be mere later reprocessings of such original depositions). PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1780 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1784

Charles Willson Peale established a natural history museum in Philadelphia, one of the first successful American museums.

Cosimo Alessandro Collini’s description of the 1st known pterosaur. THE SCIENCE OF 1784 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1787

Thomas Jefferson’s NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA rejected Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s assertion that America’s harsh, moist climate stunted the growth of its inhabitants. He addressed the issue of race, describing Native Americans favorably, African slaves unfavorably. NOTES ON VIRGINIA

Caspar Wistar and Timothy Matlack informed the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia that they have discovered a “giant’s bone” in New Jersey (presumably a dinosaur, but soon afterward, the bone would be lost). THE SCIENCE OF 1787

Petrus Camper’s ON THE ABSURDITY OF THE SUPPOSED UNICORNS pointed out that no land species had a cranial structure that could support a single heavy bone mass above the eyes. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1788

Charles Wilkins was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

Juan-Bautista Bru mounted the initial relatively accurate fossil reconstruction of an extinct animal from South America (Georges Cuvier classified this as having been a giant sloth). THE SCIENCE OF 1788 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1779

Karl Wilhelm Scheele determined that “plumbago” was a form of carbon rather than of lead (a decade later, Abraham Gottlob Werner would be sponsoring a renaming of this substance, suggesting the term “graphite” be used, as a coinage from the Greek word for writing).8

8. Scheele discovered a number of things. A case could be made that he discovered oxygen. Unfortunately, a case could also be made that he discovered mercury to be a deadly poison. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1790

The soybean was grown at Kew, but had no crop significance at that time for Europe.

Archibald Menzies journeyed as surgeon-naturalist on Captain George Vancouver’s expedition to the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver had sailed with James Cook on his 2d and 3d voyages of discovery) and collected some dried herbarium material. BOTANIZING

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play Torquato Tasso.9 Also, Goethe’s most significant biological contribution, VERSUCH DIE METAMORPHOSE DER PFLANZEN ZU ERKLÄREN (AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PLANTS). This work was done within a developing morphological tradition which would come to be known under the rubric “unity of type.”

The overview was that all plant organs, flowers included, began as leaves — an overview that would enjoy some support from 21st-Century genetic research. THE SCIENCE OF 1790 PALEONTOLOGY

9. The play would be translated into English in 1861. Henry Thoreau, who could read both Italian and German and very much enjoyed Tasso’s poetry in the original Italian, would have in his personal library a copy of Goethe’s play in the original German: CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

The focus in this sort of scientific work of the period was upon discovering some abstract generating form which would enable us to understand all the developed parts of a plant as being merely the diversified products of this one archetypal form. The archetypal form of all the structures of the plant, Goethe hypothesized, was perhaps best exemplified by its leaf. The cotyledon of a plant, and the sepals and petals and pistils and stamen of its flower, and indeed its fruit, were all to be construed as differentiated end results arising out of this one archetypal form observable in its simplest form in its leaf.

WALDEN: The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank, – for the sun acts on one side first,– and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me, –had come to where he was still at work, sorting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat, , labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; , globus, lobe, globe, also lap, flap, and many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed,) with a liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

Where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe opinioned that “The organs of the vegetating and flowering plant, though seemingly dissimilar, all originate from a single organ, namely, the leaf,” he was not saying that all is leaf, or anything nearly that foolish. What he was saying was that a full account of the various structures of a plant involved a description of the complex interactions among three categories of influences: • stability: the influence of some universal and inherent archetype • direction: the impact upon that archetype of directional influences • recurrence: the impact upon that archetype of cyclical influences

What we see in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS is that Henry Thoreau would be ready to utilize this sort of scientific speculation to problematize the very distinction between living and inanimate nature.

You can visit the European fan palm (Chamaerops humilis var. arborescens) which Goethe used for his illustration of his idea about the Ur-shape of leaves, which Goethe had sighted in 1786. This palm tree still survives. It had been planted in 1585. It is in the glass house inside the circular garden in the botanical garden of Padua, Italy.

PLANTS

Goethe wrote to Charlotte von Stein: What pleases me most at present is plant-life. Everything is forcing itself upon me, I no longer have to think about it, everything comes to meet me, and the whole gigantic kingdom becomes so simple that I can see at once the answer to the most difficult problems. If only I could communicate the insight and joy to someone, but it is not possible. And it is no dream or fancy: I am beginning to grow aware of the essential form with which, as it were, Nature always plays, and from which she produces her great variety. Had I the time in this brief span of life I am confident I could extend it to all the realms of Nature – the whole realm. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thoreau would be informing himself of Goethe’s Italian journey during Spring 1838. Although today this thinking about the Ur-shapes of leaves falls under the category of obsolete science, in that period before the creation of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, while Thoreau would be studying it, this would still be cutting edge science. Read about it in James McIntosh’s THOREAU AS ROMANTIC NATURALIST (Cornell UP, 1974). (Of course, when Darwin would publish in 1859, taking the science of biology beyond this Goethe stage, Thoreau would be one of his very first American readers, and would be open to Darwin’s heretical new ideas.)

Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out, in his essay “More Light on Leaves,” that Goethe’s system was a whole lot more than a mere theory of the Leaf as the archetypal form of the Plant. In his most fascinating intellectual move, this 18th-Century scientist grafted two additional principals onto the idea of leaf-as-archetype to produce a complete account of plant development which would explain the systematic variation in form which we observe, as we pass up the stem. The two additional principles are: • the directionality of time’s arrow: the progressive refinement of the sap • the repetition of time’s cycle: cycles of expansion and contraction Never mind that these principles are no longer accepted today. This theory of his was a good theory given what HDT WHAT? INDEX

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was known at the time: • 1. Refinement of sap as a directional principle. Up and down; heaven and hell; brain and psyche vs. bowels and excrement; tuberculosis as a noble disease of airy lungs vs. cancer as the unspeakable malady of nether parts (see Susan Sontag’s important book, Illness as Metaphor): THis major metaphorical apparatus of Western culture almost irresistibly applies itself to plants as well, with gnarly roots and tubers as things of the ground and fragrant, noble flowers as topmost parts, straining towards heaven. Goethe, by no means immune to such thinking in a romantic age, viewed a plant as progressing towards refinement from cotyledon to flower. He explained this directionality by postulating that each successive “leaf” progressively filters an initially crude sap. Flowering is prevented by these impurities and cannot occur until they have been removed. The cotyledons begin both with minimum organization and refinement, and with maximum crudity of sap:

We have found that the cotyledons, which are produced in the enclosed seed coat and are filled to the brim, as it were, with a very crude sap, are scarcely organized and developed at all, or at best roughly so.

The plant moves towards its floral goal, but too much nutriment delays the process of filtering sap, as material rushes in and more stem leaves must be produced for drainage. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A decline in nutriment allows filtering to attain the upper hand, producing sufficient purification of sap for flowering:

As long as cruder sap remains in the plant, all possible plant organs are compelled to become instruments for draining them off. If excessive nutriment forces its way in, the draining operation must be repeated again and again, rendering inflorescence almost impossible. If the plant is deprived of nourishment, this operation of nature is facilitated.

Finally the plant achieves its topmost goal:

While the cruder fluids are in this manner continually drained off and replaced by pure ones, the plant, step by step, achieves the status prescribed by nature. We see the leaves finally reach their fullest expansion and elaboration, and soon thereafter we become aware of a new aspect, apprising us that the epoch we have been studying has drawn to a close and that a second is approaching — the epoch of the flower.

• Cycles of expansion and contraction. If the directional force worked alone, then a plant’s morphology would be a smooth continuum of progressive refinement up the stem. Since, manifestly, plants display no such pattern, some other force must be working as well. Goethe specifies this second force as cyclical, in opposition to the directional principle of refining sap. He envisages three full cycles of contraction and expansion during growth. The cotyledons begin in a retracted state. The main leaves, and their substantial branching on the stem, represent the first expansion. The bunching of leaves to form the sepals at the base of the flower marks the second contraction, and the subsequent elaboration of petals the second expansion. Narrowing of the archetypal leaf to form pistils and stamens identifies the third contraction, and the formation of fruit the last and most exuberant expansion. The contracted seed within the fruit then starts the cycle again in the next generation. Put these three formative principles together —the archetypal leaf, progressive refinement up the stem, and three expansion-contraction cycles of vegetation, blooming, and bearing fruit— and the vast botanical diversity of our planet yields to Goethe’s vision of unity:

Whether the plant vegetates, blossoms, or bears fruit, it nevertheless is always the same organs with varying functions and with frequent changes in form, that fulfill the dictates of nature. The same organ which expanded on the stem as a leaf and assumed a highly diverse form, will contract in the calyx, expand again in the petal, contract in the reproductive organs, and expand for the last time as fruit. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1793

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BIBLE, OR, A DESCRIPTION OF ALL THE BEASTS, BIRDS, FISHES, INSECTS, REPTILES, TREES, PLANTS, METALS, PRECIOUS STONES, &C. MENTIONED IN THE SACRED SCRIPTURES. COLLECTED FROM THE BEST AUTHORITIES, AND ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED. BY THADDEUS MASON HARRIS, D.D. ... (Printed at Boston: By I. Thomas and E.T. Andrews). IN THE SCRIPTURE

Completion of the 12 parts of the Reverend James Douglas’s NENIA BRITANNICA; OR, A SEPULCHRAL HISTORY OF GREAT BRITAIN FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO ITS GENERAL CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY, which had been in the works since 1786. NENIA BRITANNICA

This provided perhaps the initial record of a fossil (a sea urchin) at an archaeological site. THE SCIENCE OF 1793 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1794

Dr. Alexander Adam, LL.D., Rector of the High School of Edinburgh’s A SUMMARY OF GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY, BOTH ANCIENT AND MODERN; CONTAINING, AN ACCOUNT OF THE POLITICAL STATE, AND PRINCIPAL REVOLUTIONS, OF THE MOFT ILLUFTRIOUS NATIONS IN ANCIENT AND MODERN TIMES; THEIR MANNERS AND CUSTOMS; THE LOCAL SITUATION OF CITIES, EFPECIALLY OF FUCH AS HAVE BEEN DIFTINGUIFHED BY MEMORABLE EVENTS: WITH AN ABRIDGEMENT OF THE FABULOUS HISTORY OF MYTHOLOGY OF THE GREEKS. TO WHICH IS PREFIXED, AN HIFTORICAL ACCOUNT OF THE PROGREFS AND IMPROVEMENTS OF ASTRONOMY AND GEOGRAPHY, FROM THE EARLIEFT PERIODS TO THE TIME OF SIR ISAAC NEWTON: ALFO, A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWTONIAN PHILOSOPHY, OCCAFIONALLY COMPARED WITH THE OPINIONS OF THE ANCIENTS, CONCERNING THE GENERAL AND PARTICULAR PROPERTIES OF MATTER; THE AIR, HEAT AND COLD, LIGHT, AND ITS EFFECTS; THE LAWS OF MOTION; THE PLANETARY SYSTEM &C. —— WITH A SHORT DEFCRIPTION OF THE COMPONENT PARTS OF THE TERRAQUEOUS GLOBE, ACCORDING TO THE NOTIONS OF THE ANCIENTS, AND THE MORE ACCURATE DIFCOVERIES OF MODERN CHEMIFTS. DEFIGNED CHIEFLY TO CONNECT THE STUDY OF CLASSICAL LEARNING WITH THAT OF GENERAL KNOWLEDGE (Edinburgh: Printed for T. Cadell and A. Strahan, London). ADAM’S SUMMARY

James Hutton’s AN INVESTIGATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF THE PROGRESS OF REASON, FROM SENSE TO SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY (Edinburgh: Strahan & Cadell) — buried within the 2,138 pages HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of the 3 volumes of this philosophical tome that advanced “Plutonism” as an alternative for Abraham Gottlob Werner’s “Neptunism” is a chapter about variety in nature in which the author anticipates Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection! PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1794 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1795

James Hutton explained in THEORY OF THE EARTH; WITH PROOFS AND ILLUSTRATIONS (Edinburgh) that Abraham Gottlob Werner’s “Neptunism” is a mistake because the processes by which rock is created must be more or less in balance with the forces by which rock is destroyed — and that the erratic boulders of the Alps are merely evidence of the action of local glaciers. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s DE GENERIS HUMANI VARIETATE NATIVA LIBER described the human species as a single entity consisting of five distinct types: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American Indian, and Malayan. THE SCIENCE OF 1795 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1797

Georges Cuvier’s TABLEAU ÉLÉMENTAIRE DE L’HISTORIE NATURELLE DES ANIMAUX (ELEMENTARY SURVEY OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ANIMALS).

John Frere described and illustrated handaxes from Hoxne that would turn out to be some 400,000 years old. THE SCIENCE OF 1797 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1799

From this year into 1803, Augustin Pyramus de Candolle’s PLANTARUM HISTORIA SUCCULENTARUM, in 28 sections. BOTANIZING

Faujas described as a crocodile the Maastricht animal, a spectacular mosasaur found in chalk quarries in the Netherlands. PALEONTOLOGY

Charles White’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE REGULAR GRADATION IN MAN, AND IN DIFFERENT ANIMALS AND VEGETABLES, a treatise on the great chain of being, indicated that people of color were at the bottom of the human chain.

Thomas Jefferson described Megalonyx, a North American fossil ground sloth similar to the one found in South America.

Alexander von Humboldt named the Jurassic System after the Jura Mountains. This time period will later be identified as the “middle period” of the dinosaurs — hence “Jurassic Park.”

George Shaw described a platypus even though he suspected his specimen might be a hoax.

The British government purchased the collection of Scottish anatomist John Hunter, forming the Hunterian Museum.

William Smith mapped rock formations in the vicinity of Bath, England, making perhaps the world’s first geologic map. The same year, Smith, Joseph Townsend, and Benjamin Richardson recognized rocks containing the Permian and Triassic, though not necessarily by those names. (These periods will later be identified as spanning the earth’s most catastrophic mass extinction.)

The Adams mammoth was discovered in the Russian tundra — this fossil would sit in a St. Petersburg museum for two centuries before geneticists would piece together its DNA from small samples of its hair. THE SCIENCE OF 1799 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1800

Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck proposed his theory of evolution. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1800

April: Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s PHYTOLOGIA: OR THE PHILOSOPHY OF AGRICULTURE AND GARDENING declared that leaves breathe air through tiny pores, that sugar and starch are the products of plant “digestion,” and that nitrates and phosphorus promote vegetation.

THE SCIENCE OF 1800

Dr. Darwin had performed what we might regard as the rather obvious experiment of coating leaves with oil and had done some reasoning as to why this caused the plants to wither away. In this poem he declared that the plants must be inspiring air through tiny pores in their leaves (predicting the later discovery of microscopic stomata), that the sugars and starches these plants create and store in their bodies must be the products of some sort of plant “digestion,” and that nitrates and phosphorus will promote their growth. But not only that: this book offered its author, at one point, an opportunity to fulminate against human enslavement — and so he seized upon that opportunity: In many plants, sugar is found ready prepared ... and in the SWEETS sugar-cane it abounds.... Great God of Justice! grant that it WITHOUT may soon be cultivated only by the hands of freedom, and may SLAVERY thence give happiness to the labourer, as well as to the merchant and consumer. Samuel Taylor Coleridge would coin the term “darwinizing,” meaning to speculate wildly, in reference to the ideas of Erasmus Darwin.

During this year Dr. Darwin made a new machine to copy handwriting, similar to the machine he had constructed for himself in 1779, for the use of his small son Charles Robert.

The good doctor enjoyed studying the cultivation of plants in part because he enjoyed food. He enjoyed it so much that as he grew older and stouter, he had a semi-circle cut in the side of his dining-table so he could be more intimate with his meal.10 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1801

Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck’s SYSTÈME DES ANIMAUX SANS VERTÈBRES (1801, 1815-1822). PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1801

10. An apparatus remarkably similar to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s famous revolving circular bed at the original Penthouse in Chicago. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1802

The 1st volume of Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus’s 6-volume work, BIOLOGIE ODER PHILOSOPHIE DE LEBENDEN NATUR. (This was, however, not the very 1st use of the word “biology,” as Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck actually had already in the course of this year coined this term.)11 THE SCIENCE OF 1802 PALEONTOLOGY

Bernard M’Mahon established his nursery in Philadelphia and began his own limited publication series (Curtis would establish a similar series in 1806).

Robert Brown arrived at Sydney (Australia) on the Investigator, along with botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer. George Caley, who had already been sent to collect plants in New South Wales by Banks, was furious. (In 1803 Banks received seed of 170 species from Caley.)

There would be no more ship production in Holland: A country without a history began to live in the past. — J.H. Plumb

11. Notice, please, that by choice of this term to describe the science, an inherent pro-life bias was built into the foundation of a supposedly “objective” science. Ever after this, the science would have incredible difficulties accounting for the utter naturalness and, indeed, inevitability of the process of species extinction. THE SCIENCE OF 1802 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Theropod dinosaur footprints were first noticed by white people of the valley of the Connecticut River. Here is what Pliny Moody saw; Moody prepared a sketch from which this lithograph was made:

THE SCIENCE OF 1802

At this early point no-one grasped, it goes without saying, what these fossil tracks represented. Their best guess was that they were the tracks left by Noah’s raven. PALEONTOLOGY

William Paley’s NATURAL THEOLOGY deployed a then-persuasive analogy, that of a watch presupposing a watchmaker, to argue that the existence of an intelligible universe implied the existence of a pre-existing intelligent designer.

December 11, Saturday: While attending a lecture on worms by the Baron Georges Jean-Léopold-Nicolas- Frédéric Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck achieved a realization that the pot category of worms would need to be subdivided into at least two separate categories, one for the annelid worms and the other for the parasitic internal worms, and this insight would, by 1820, caused him entirely to abandon his preposterous theology of a progressive ladder of life, in favor of a contingent bush or branching tree of life. –In other words, Stephen Jay Gould points out, Lamarck has been faulted for centuries for adhering to a theory which, when faced with evidence, he had entirely abandoned. THE SCIENCE OF 1802 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1803

Spring: As the United States was in the process of purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, President Thomas Jefferson in the White House in Washington DC was preparing a plan to explore this newly acquired, uncharted western territory, territory that was expected to contain erupting volcanoes, mountains of salt, and in accordance with the biology of the time, unicorns, living mastodons and 7-foot-tall beavers (there would not be such, but there would indeed be abundant fossils of such). THE SCIENCE OF 1803 PALEONTOLOGY

He appointed Meriwether Lewis to explore the purchase lands. Lewis went to the United States Armory and Arsenal that George Washington had caused to be established at Harpers Ferry to select weapons and hardware for his transcontinental expedition. He obtained 15 rifles hopefully adequate to stop a mastodon, a unicorn, or a 7-foot beaver in its tracks, 15 powder horns, 30 bullet molds, 30 ball screws, extra rifle and musket locks, gunsmith’s repair tools, several dozen tomahawks, 24 knives large enough and sharp enough to butcher a mastodon, a unicorn, or a 7-foot beaver, and a collapsible iron-framed canoe.

The rifles he obtained may well have looked like this standard Baker, then in use in the British Army: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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He also went to Philadelphia to obtain the best available instruction in botany, zoology, celestial navigation, and medicine. He wrote to a former army comrade, William Clark, inviting him to share command of expedition. Clark wrote back, accepting.

The President wanted William Bartram to go along with the explorers, as Official Naturalist. His eyes, unfortunately, not to mention his legs, would not be up to this. BOTANIZING

For the 1st time, in this crop year, the US would find itself exporting more cotton, a slave-labor-intensive commodity, than tobacco, a slave-labor-intensive commodity. In fact, as cotton became more profitable, and as the renewal of hostilities in Europe increased demand for US commodities, and the demand for field hands to tend and pick this cotton increased — South Carolina would be resuming importation of slaves! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1804

The Baron Georges Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier suggested that fossils found in the area around Paris were “thousands of centuries” old (this casual observation of course pushed the age of the earth well beyond its commonly accepted limits). Cuvier’s paper explaining that the fossil animals he studied bore no resemblance to anything still living, in effect, served as an unambiguous endorsement of the reality of extinction. THE SCIENCE OF 1804

The 1st of James Parkinson’s 3 volumes about the ORGANIC REMAINS OF A FORMER WORLD (In this volume he described fossils as the remains of Noah’s Flood, but in the following several years he would recognize fossils as the remains of a world before people, and he would acknowledge as much in his 3d volume, to appear in 1811). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1809

Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck proposed in PHILOSOPHIE ZOOLOGIQUE that animals might acquire new characteristics during their lives and pass those characteristics on to their offspring, a conceit for which he was openly ridiculed by the Baron Georges Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier, and which eventually he would THE SCIENCE OF 1809

abandon.12 PALEONTOLOGY BIOLOGY

12. This idea would be most carefully scrutinized by Charles Darwin, who did not possess and knew he did not possess a theory of genetics adequate to the phenomena he was describing in evolution, and in fact although Darwin would never embrace this theory for which Lamarck has been so roundly chastised — he also would never entirely dismiss it. In fact if it were necessary for us to select one guy to chastise, it is an open question whether we should prefer to use the French biologist Lamarck as our dodohead, or the English biologist Darwin. (In fact the actual reason why Lamarck has always been selected as the dodohead is that Lamarck had been assigned to play the role of frog in the perpetual frog/limey contretemps — and ever since Napoleon scared the pants off Europe limeys have been portraying themselves as perpetually righteous while denigrating frogs as perpetually wrongheaded.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1810

Saartje Baartman, known to publicity as the “Hottentot Venus,” was brought to Piccadilly Circus by a white man named Hendrik Cezar and placed upon display. He was a Boer with a body type characteristic of that group, she was a Khoikhoi with a body type characteristic of that group. After a successful tour of the provinces, she was brought to Paris to be examined, and painted in the nude, by the Baron Georges Jean- Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The cartoonists of the day paid particular attention to her huge butt, relatively safe to draw pictures of, but the paying spectators were paying attention particularly to her genitals, for the shocking pink lips of her vagina hung down to an extraordinary length. She would die in Europe in 1817 of complications of alcoholism and the small pox, giving the Baron his opportunity to dissect her private parts and write a lengthy report for the MÉMOIRES DU MUSEUM D’HISTOIRE NATURELLE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1811

Mary Anning’s big brother Joseph discovered the skull of the world’s 1st recognized fossil ichthyosaur (during the following year his little sister would collect this skull).

The Baron Georges Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier identified the “biblical flood” victim, described by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer in 1731, as a giant salamander. THE SCIENCE OF 1811 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1812

The Baron Georges Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier’s RECHERCHES SUR LES OSSEMENTS FOSSILES DE QUADRUPÈDES correctly identified pterosaurs as flying reptiles. (His conclusions would of course for many years be largely ignored.)

PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The young orphan of a poor carpenter, on the village Poor Relief, Mary Anning spent a good deal of her time searching for fossils in the sea cliffs near Lyme Regis in the coastal district of Dorset simply because they could be sold for small amounts of money. In this year, at the age of about 13, the “fossilist” who had been so

diligent and attentive as to recover the first complete skeleton of a prehistoric swimming reptile was enabled to hand along her find, to a local landowner for the sum of £23, whereupon the amazing shaped stone was taken to London and put on display in Piccadilly. Nothing like this 17-foot-long fossil animal had ever before been brought to the attention of the natural philosophers of England.

THE SCIENCE OF 1812

Since the word “dinosaur” hadn’t yet been coined, this would receive the name “Ichthyosaurus,” which means “sea lizard”:

DINOSAURIA PALEONTOLOGY BIOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1813

The Baron Georges Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier’s AN ESSAY ON THE THEORY OF THE EARTH. THE SCIENCE OF 1813 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1814

The 1st volume of Alexander von Humboldt’s RELATION HISTORIQUE or PERSONAL NARRATIVE, the next two published volumes of which would appear in French in 1819 and 1825 (he would destroy the 4th volume of his manuscript), and the 1st English version of which would appear in 1822 as the well-known radical Helen Maria Williams’s PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS TO THE EQUINOCTIAL REGIONS OF THE NEW CONTINENT DURING THE YEARS 1799-1804 (London: Longman et al.).

THE SCIENCE OF 1814

Patrick Syme’s revised version of Abraham Gottlob Werner’s 1774VON DEN ÄUßERLICHEN KENNZEICHEN DER FOßILIEN (ON THE EXTERNAL CHARACTERS OF FOSSILS, OR OF MINERALS), entitled WERNER’S NOMENCLATURE OF COLOURS, WITH ADDITIONS, ARRANGED SO AS TO RENDER IT USEFUL TO THE ARTS AND SCIENCES. ABRAHAM G. WERNER HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1815

From this year into 1822, Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck would be restating his transmutational theories in a 7-volume study on invertebrates, HISTOIRE NATURELLE DES ANIMAUX SANS VERTÈBRES.

Under the close editorship of Pierre Étienne Louis Dumont, Jeremy Bentham’s TACTIQUE DES ASSEMBLÉES LEGISLATIVES (Geneva).

William Smith’s geologic map of England, Wales, and part of Scotland identified the strata of the earth largely on the basis of the fossils they contained (before long Smith would be in debtors’ prison). THE SCIENCE OF 1815

Jean-Pierre Perraudin explained the erratic boulders of the Val de Bagnes in the Swiss canton of Valais as due to the glaciers in the area, which had once upon a time been longer. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1817

Georges Cuvier’s LE RÈGNE ANIMAL DISTRIBUEÉ D’APRÈS SON ORGANIZATION (THE ANIMAL KINGDOM DISTRIBUTED ACCORDING TO ITS ORGANIZATION).

THE SCIENCE OF 1817 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1818

Göran Wahlenberg described the glaciation of the Scandinavian peninsula as a mere regional phenomenon. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

Posthumous publication of Dr. William Charles Wells 1813 hypothesis about selection and human evolution (Charles Darwin would later acknowledge that this had been the 1st anticipation of his principle of natural selection as yet recognized in pre-1859 scientific literature). • Wells: “[What was done for animals artificially] seems to be done with equal efficiency, though more slowly, by nature, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which they inhabit. Of the accidental varieties of man, which would occur among the first scattered inhabitants, some one would be better fitted than the others to bear the diseases of the country. This race would multiply while the others would decrease, and as the darkest would be the best fitted for the [African] climate, at length [they would] become the most prevalent, if not the only race.”

• Darwin: “In this paper he [Wells] distinctly recognizes the principle of natural selection, and this is the first recognition which has been indicated; but he applies it only to man, and to certain characters alone. After remarking that negroes and mulattoes enjoy an immunity from certain tropical diseases, he observes, firstly, that all animals tend to vary in some degree, and, secondly, that agriculturalists improve their domesticated animals by selection; and then he adds, but what is done in this latter case by art, seems to be done with equal efficacy, though more slowly, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which they inhabit.” THE SCIENCE OF 1818 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1820

During this year and the following one, Mary Anning would be excavating the 1st nearly complete fossil Plesiosaurus.13

THE SCIENCE OF 1820

In this year Gideon Mantell and William Buckland also discovered dinosaur remains.14 Gideon Mantell discovered, in England, a fossil trunk of a tree resembling that of a tropical palm — evidence that once upon a time there had been there a much warmer climate. PALEONTOLOGY

13. This fossil when it would be reported in 1823 would demonstrate the correctness of an analysis offered in 1821 on the basis of more fragmentary remains by Henry De la Beche and the Reverend William Daniel Conybeare. 14. However, this term “dinosaur” is something of an anachronism as of 1820, as it would not even be coined as a word in the language for another 22 years, until 1842. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1821

Henry De la Beche and the Reverend William Daniel Conybeare described, from fragmentary remains (the discovery by Mary Anning of a more complete skeleton in 1820 as yet being unreported), the saurian Plesiosaurus. Their analysis would be shown to have been accurate in 1823 by the skeleton that was being recovered by Anning.

PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1821 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1822

Jean-Baptiste de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, at age 78, put out his HISTOIRE NATURELLE DES ANIMAUX SANS VERTEBRES. Lamarck’s work was the first to draw a distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates.

Etienne Geoffroy’s ANATOMICAL PHILOSOPHY identified similarities between skeletal structures –such as bat wings, paws, and hands– that supported the evolutionary claims of Lamarck. He noticed that the body plans of arthropods and vertebrates although similar were the inverse of each other.

Lorenz Oken’s GESSELLSCHAFT DEUTSCHEN NATURFORSCHER UND ÄRZTE, which would be the inspiration for not only the British but also the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

William Buckland’s description of how ancient hyenas lived and fed in Kirkdale Cave was based on their fossil remains (this amounted to one of the 1st descriptions of living habits to be based upon fossil evidence). Buckland noticed that a human skeleton had been covered in ocher (referred to as “Red Lady,” this find would eventually be classified as a male Cro-Magnon).

On the basis of massive deposits of chalk, Omalius d’Halloy named the “Cretaceous System” (this timeframe would later be identified to have been that of the final dinosaurs and initial flowering plants).

On the basis of coal deposits, William Conybeare and William Phillips named the “Carboniferous System” (this timeframe would also come to be identified, in the United States, as the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian Periods).

Pondering upon some curiously shaped fossils near Lewes, Gideon Mantell identified them as fish parts (they were coprolites). THE SCIENCE OF 1822 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1823

The Reverend William Daniel Conybeare became rector of Sully in Glamorganshire. The discovery of a fossil skeleton by Mary Anning demonstrated the correctness of the analysis of Plesiosaurus that he and Henry De la Beche had offered in 1821.

THE SCIENCE OF 1823 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Mary Anning found another remarkable fossil skeleton. The skull was small, without either the snout or the teeth of Ichthyosaurus. The creature had paddles for feet, and a swanlike neck quite as long as its body. Her second creature would receive the name “Plesiosaurus,” or “nearly a lizard.”

THE SCIENCE OF 1823 This being the 19th Century with a fantasy life (and a politics) red in tooth and claw, the illustrators soon began HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to pose these two monsters as if engaged in hostilities: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1824

The Reverend Professor William Buckland, D.D., F.R.S.’s “Notice on the Megalosaurus” or “giant lizard” — the 1st such fossil to be described and named (this would be in 1842 the initial genus that Richard Owen would incorporate into the family Dinosauria, although at this point such a term as “dinosaur” was yet to be coined). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Reverend also announced the discovery of the 1st fossil mammal from the Mesozoic Era. THE SCIENCE OF 1824 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Jens Esmark, paying attention to evidence that glaciers had once been larger and thicker, covering much of Norway and the adjacent sea floor, argued that there might have been a sequence of worldwide ice ages. He proposed that these glaciations might have been caused by changes in climate due to changes in this planet’s orbit. The glaciations had produced Norway’s deep fjords. Over the following years such ideas would be discussed and taken over in parts by Swedish, Scottish, and German scientists. At the University of Edinburgh, Professor Robert Jameson seemed relatively open to Esmark’s theory — his remarks about ancient glaciers in Scotland seem to have been prompted by Esmark. Another scientist who adopted Esmark’s theory was Professor Albrecht Reinhard Bernhardi of Dreissigacker, Germany, who would propose in 1832 that a ungeheuere Eismeer colossal sea of ice had extended from the Polar region to create the erratics and moraines of the Northern European Plain.” THE SCIENCE OF 1824 THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1825

Adolphe Dureau de la Malle used the term societé about an assemblage of plant individuals of different species. ECOLOGY

Father John MacEnery began digging in Kent’s Cave in Devon. Eventually he’d discover humans and extinct mammals within the same layer — although this finding would be dismissed by Buckland. THE SCIENCE OF 1825

From this year into 1827, Robert Grant’s series of articles on sea sponges would establish that they are animals rather than plants, and would provide support for the theory of transmutationism.

Gideon Mantell’s NOTICE ON THE IGUANODON, the 2nd description of a dinosaur and the 1st of an herbivorous fossil reptile (Richard Owen would in 1842 include this in the family Dinosauria). PALEONTOLOGY BIOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1826

During this year and the following one François Pierre Guillaume Guizot prepared the initial part of his HISTOIRE DE LA RÉVOLUTION D’ANGLETERRE DEPUIS CHARLES I À CHARLES II, in two volumes (he would add two more volumes after the revolution of 1848 during an exile in England).

Louis-Antoine Desmoulins’s HISTOIRE NATURELLE DES RACES HUMAINES DU NORD-EST DE L’EUROPE, DE L’ASIE BORÉALE ET ORIENTALE ET DE L’AFRIQUE AUSTRALE ...: APPLIQUÉE A LA RECHERCHE DES ORIGINES DES ANCIENS PEUPLES, Á LA SCIENCE ÉTYMOLOGIQUE, A LA CRITIQUE DE L’HISTOIRE, ... SUIVIE D’UN MÉMOIRE [entitled “MÉMOIRE SUR LA PATRIE DU CHAMEAU À UNE BOSSE, ET SUR L'ÉPOQUE DE SON INTRODUCTION EN AFRIQUE”] LU, EN 1823, À L’ACADÉMIE DES INSCRIPTIONS ET BELLES-LETTRES DE L'’NSTITUT. [WITH A FOLDING TABLE.] MS. NOTES [BY SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE ... argued for 16 distinct, unchanging human species. THE SCIENCE OF 1826

James Cooper formally inserted Fenimore into his name. Awarded the position of U.S. Consul at Lyons in France, New-York’s Bread and Cheese Club threw him a going-away party.

December 17, Sunday: In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 17th 12 M 1826 / Our Meeting this forenoon was silent & solid. — When we returned home we found a letter from Benjamin Marchall, encouraging us to send John immediately to Hudson to enter his Cotton establishment there, which seemed very sudden & unexpected to us, tho we had calculated on his going there in the Spring or summer coming —- after considering & turning the proposition in our minds for a little while, - I saw no other way than to consult my dear Aged Mother & Uncle & Aunt Stanton on the subject who all have a deep interest in Johns wellfare & accordingly set out on foot & arrived there by sunset. — Our united conclusion was to consult John & say [lay?] the subject fully before him. - Tho’ we all felt seriously affected at the Idea of taking him from the Boarding School at Providence, so suddenly where he seems to be laying a good foundation for the time to come. — I went to bed & rose early on 2nd day [Monday] Morning & got home by 8 OC, & waited the whole day, consulting such of our friends, as came in our way who all seemed to concur with the Idea of leaving the exchange, chiefly to his decision - We accordingly wrote him this eveng, intending it for the Mail tomorrow morning. — The prospect as to the outward is uncommonly good for him, but I see many things which will be a great drawback on prospects of that Kind, but what can we do in our present situation, but to trust him to that Kind Providence which has from his birth to the present day signally favoured him — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Francis Trevelyan Buckland was born at Oxford, England, a son of the Reverend Professor William Buckland, D.D., F.R.S., Dean of Westminster.

His father was a Canon of Christ Church, one of the largest Colleges of the University of Oxford (as well as being a college, Christ Church is also the cathedral church of the diocese of Oxford, to wit Christ Church Cathedral). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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CHRIST CHURCH

His father was also the geologist and paleontologist who had written the 1st full account of a fossil dinosaur. His father was a friend of Sir Richard Owen, Order of the Bath, a biologist, comparative anatomist, and paleontologist who is remembered today not only as the person who had coined the term “Dinosauria” but also as an opponent of Charles Darwin’s theory of origin of new species by gradual modification and adaptation. His father’s great hobby was the consumption of such unusual items as mice in batter, squirrel pie, horse’s tongue, and ostrich (in fact he was “heavy into” grossing people out big time in every way possible and according to one story he gobbled the preserved heart of King Louis XIV), and this “zoöphagy” would become the portly son’s favorite hobbyhorse as well. THE SCIENCE OF 1826 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1827

Charles Lyell abandoned the legal profession in favor of geology. He had already begun to plan his chief work, THE PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY: AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE FORMER CHANGES OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE BY REFERENCE TO CAUSES NOW IN OPERATION.

THE SCIENCE OF 1827

Thoreau’s firm grasp of paleontology laid the groundwork for the climax of WALDEN, which describes the emergence of complexity and beauty from the simple flow of muddy sand at the Deep Cut. It also was the taproot of his lifelong frustration with Christian supernaturalists, who insisted on a fairly brief history of life. Paraphrasing Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, he jested [in A WEEK ON THE C ONCORD AND M ERRIMACK R IVERS]: “It took 100 years to prove that fossils are organic, and 150 more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.” Not everyone believes this, even today. Modern “young Earth” creationists still insist that the Elizabethan-era Mosaic chronology of Archbishop Ussher is the correct one, and that we twenty-first century scientists are in error. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, WALDEN’S SHORE, pages 60-1 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A WEEK: As we passed under the last bridge over the canal, just before reaching the Merrimack, the people coming out of church paused to look at us from above, and apparently, so strong is custom, indulged in some heathenish comparisons; but we were the truest observers of this sunny day. According to Hesiod, “The seventh is a holy day, For then Latona brought forth golden-rayed Apollo,” and by our reckoning this was the seventh day of the week, and not the first. I find among the papers of an old Justice of the Peace and Deacon of the town of Concord, this singular memorandum, which is worth preserving as a relic of an ancient custom. After reforming the spelling and grammar, it runs as follows: “Men that travelled with teams on the Sabbath, Dec. 18th, 1803, were Jeremiah Richardson and Jonas Parker, both of Shirley. They had teams with rigging such as is used to carry barrels, and they were travelling westward. Richardson was questioned by the Hon. Ephraim Wood, Esq., and he said that Jonas Parker was his fellow- traveller, and he further said that a Mr. Longley was his employer, who promised to bear him out.” We were the men that were gliding northward, this Sept. 1st, 1839, with still team, and rigging not the most convenient to carry barrels, unquestioned by any Squire or Church Deacon and ready to bear ourselves out if need were. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, according to the historian of Dunstable, “Towns were directed to erect ‘a cage’ near the meeting-house, and in this all offenders against the sanctity of the Sabbath were confined.” Society has relaxed a little from its strictness, one would say, but I presume that there is not less religion than formerly. If the ligature is found to be loosened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another. You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be. The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.

HESIOD CHARLES LYELL

For the following three years Charles T. Jackson and Francis Alger of Boston would be making a sort of amateur mineralogical/geological survey of Nova Scotia (their “A Description of the Mineralogy and Geology of a part of Nova Scotia; by Charles T. Jackson and Francis Alger” would appear in the January 1829 issue of The American Journal of Science and Arts). In the course of their travels they would notice a flat rock inscribed with the date “1606” and seeming to bear a symbol that they understood to indicate the Masonic Order. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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CAPE COD: The very gravestones of those Frenchmen are probably older than the oldest English monument in New England north of the Elizabeth Islands, or perhaps anywhere in New England, for if there are any traces of Gosnold’s storehouse left, his strong works are gone. Bancroft says, advisedly, in 1834, “It requires BANCROFT a believing eye to discern the ruins of the fort”; and that there were no ruins of a fort in 1837. Dr. Charles T. Jackson tells me JACKSON that, in the course of a geological survey in 1827, he discovered a gravestone, a slab of trap rock, on Goat Island, opposite Annapolis (Port Royal), in Nova Scotia, bearing a Masonic coat- of-arms and the date 1606, which is fourteen years earlier than the landing of the Pilgrims. This was left in the possession of HALIBURTON Judge Haliburton, of Nova Scotia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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As we can see above, Jackson would carry his story to Henry Thoreau, who would include it in CAPE COD. Unfortunately, the scratching above the date “1606” would turn out not to have been any sort of recognizable Masonic symbol — the Masonic Order, ordinarily eager for this sort of discovery, would disdain the entire idea! The marks may have been merely random marks left by a shovel, or may possibly have been intended to indicate that the white settler who had been buried beneath this flat rock had been a carpenter. Although the rock itself seems to have been lost (buried under plaster somewhere inside a wall), we do still have a photograph of it:

The Masonic Stone of 1606 By R.W. Bro. REGINALD V. HARRIS, Grand Historian, Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia15 It will be good to read this article in conjunction with Bro. Harris’ article on “Freemasonry in Nova Scotia” published in The Builder of August last; and with the Study Club article of last month. Bro. Harris’ critical analysis of the claims of the Nova Scotia stone to be the monument of the earliest known appearance of Freemasonry on this continent was published in Transactions of Nova Scotia Lodge of Research, Jan. 31, 1916; as here given he has altered it somewhat. WHAT some Masonic students and historians regard as the earliest trace of the existence of Freemasons or Freemasonry on this continent so far as we are now aware, is afforded by the inscriptions on a stone found in 1827 upon the shores of Annapolis Basin, Nova Scotia. There are two accounts of the finding of this stone. The first, from the pen of Judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton (known to us as the author of “Sam Slick”), was written in the year of the finding of the stone or very shortly afterward, and is to be found in his HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL ACCOUNT OF NOVA SCOTIA, published in 1829 (Vol. II., pp. 155-157), as follows: About six miles below the ferry is situated Goat Island, which separates the Annapolis Basin from that of Digby, and forms two entrances to the former. The western 15. As published in The Builder Magazine for October 1924 (Volume X, Number 10). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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channel, though narrow, is deep and generally preferred to others. A small peninsula, extending from the Granville shore, forms one of its sides. On this point of land the first piece of ground was cleared for cultivation in Nova Scotia by the French. They were induced to make this selection on account of the beauty of its situation, the good anchorage opposite it the command which it gave them of the channel, and the facility it afforded of giving the earliest notice to the garrison at Port Royal of the entrance of an enemy into the Lower Basin. In the year 1827 the stone was discovered upon which they had engraved the date of their first cultivation of the soil, in memorial of their formal possession of the country. It is about two feet and a half long and two feet broad, and of the same kind as that which forms the substratum of Granville Mountain. On the upper part are engraved the square and compass of the Free Mason, and in the centre, in large and deep Arable figures the date 1606. It does not appear to have been dressed by a mason, but the inscription has been cut on its natural surface. The stone itself has yielded to the power of the climate, and both the external front and the interior parts of the letters alike suffered from exposure to the weather: the seams on the back of it have opened, and, from their capacity to hold water and the operation of frost on it when thus confined, it is probable in a few years it would have crumbled to pieces. The date is distinctly visible, and although the figure 0 is worn down to one-half of its original depth and the upper part of the figure 6 nearly as much, yet no part of them is obliterated — they are plainly discernible to the eye and easily traced by the finger. At a subsequent period, when the country was conquered by the English, some Scotch emigrants were sent out by Sir William Alexander, who erected a fort on the site of the French cornfields, previous to the Treaty of St. Germain’s. The remains of this fort may be traced with great ease, the old parade, the embankment and ditch, have not been disturbed, and preserve their original form. It was occupied by the French for many years after the peace of 1632. * * * * The other account of the finding of the stone is contained in a letter written nearly thirty years after the event, and now in the possession of the New England Historic-Genealogical Society from the pen of Dr. Charles T. Jackson of Boston, the celebrated chemist and geologist. It is in the following words: June 2, 1856. Dear Sir: When Francis Alger and myself made a mineralogical HDT WHAT? INDEX

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survey of Nova Scotia in 1827 we discovered upon the shore of Goat Island, in Annapolis Basin, a grave-stone partly covered with sand and lying on the shore. It bore the Masonic emblems, square and compass, and had the figures 1606 cut in it. The rock was a flat slab of trap rock, common in the vicinity. At the ferry from Annapolis to Granville we saw a large rounded rock with this inscription ‘La Belle 1649.’ These inscriptions were undoubtedly intended to commemorate the place of burial of French soldiers who came to Nova Scotia, “Annapolis Royal, Acadia,” in 1603. Coins, buttons and other articles originally belonging to these early French settlers, are found in the soil of Goat Island in Annapolis Basin. The slab bearing date 1606, I had brought over by the Ferryman to Annapolis, and ordered it to be packed in a box to be sent to the Old Colony Pilgrim Society (of Plymouth, Mass.), but Judge Haliburton, then Thomas Haliburton, Esq., prevailed on me to abandon it to him, and he now has it carefully preserved. On a late visit to Nova Scotia I found that the Judge had forgotten how he came by it, and so I told him all about it. * * * * * * * Yours truly, C. T. Jackson. (Addressed)

J.W. Thornton (Present.) This letter is accompanied by a photograph of the stone made some thirty years later showing the square and compasses and the figures 1606, rudely cut and much worn by time and weather, but still quite distinct.

We shall later refer more particularly to the stone itself and the two accounts of its finding, but wish first to refer to the subsequent history of the stone which is most singularly unfortunate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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About 1887 it was given by Robert Grant Haliburton (son of Judge T.C. Haliburton) to the Canadian Institute of Toronto with the understanding that the stone should be inserted in the wall of the building then being erected for the Institute. It was to be placed in the wall, the inscription facing inside in one of the principal rooms. Sir Sanford Fleming wrote that he received the stone from Mr. R.G. Haliburton for the purpose of being placed in the museum of the Canadian Institute, Toronto, in order that it might be properly cared for. There is an entry respecting it in the minutes of the Institute, acknowledging its arrival and receipt. Sir Daniel Wilson was then President, and on March 21, 1888, read a paper on “Traces of European Immigration in the 17th Century,” and exhibited the stone found at Port Royal bearing date 1606. Sir Sanford Fleming further adds: I have myself seen it more than once since its being placed in the Canadian Institute. When the building was erected on the northwest corner of Richmond and Berti Streets, Toronto instructions were given by Dr. Scadding to build it into the wall with the inscription exposed; but, very stupidly, it is said the plasterer covered it over with plaster, and even the spot cannot now be traced, although the plaster has been removed at several places to look for it. Before these facts were made known to me, or any trace could be had of the stone, I had a long correspondence with the Institute authorities, and I further offered a reward of $1,000 for the stone if it could be found but it was all to no purpose. I regret extremely that I can throw so little light on it at this day. If ever the present building be taken down diligent search should be made for the historic stone, perhaps, the oldest inscription stone in America. It is a most regrettable fact that this priceless stone should have ever gone out of Nova Scotia. The necessity for a Masonic museum in this Province needs no argument when such things as this happen.

HALIBURTON’S ACCOUNT IS PROBABLY MORE CORRECT To return to the two accounts of the finding of the stone itself, there can be little or no doubt that Judge Haliburton’s account written at the time of the discovery and on the spot, by one who had made a study of the locality and of its history, is correct; and that Dr. Jackson’s account, written from recollection thirty years after he found the stone, cannot be relied upon as to the place of discovery. Moreover, the historical facts stated by Judge Haliburton as to the place of the first settlement by the French establish beyond any doubt that the stone marked with the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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date 1606 was found on the peninsula extending from the Granville shore opposite Goat Island, Annapolis Basin. As to the inscription on the stone, although the stone is not now to be found for inspection, there can be little or no doubt as to the particulars of that inscription. Judge Haliburton undoubtedly wrote his description of the stone with it immediately before him. Dr. Jackson’s account made after he had seen it a second time, confirms it and the photograph made before the stone was sent to Toronto further establishes the fact that the stone bore the date 1606 and the “square and compasses” of the Mason, though these emblems would seem to be too much worn away to admit of a good photographic reproduction, a condition not to be wondered at after an exposure to the weather for over two hundred years. On the other hand, some who have examined only the photograph have doubted whether the marks on the stone (other than the date 1606) were really the square and compasses of the Freemason. The fact that these marks appear not to have been cut so deeply and well has suggested to them that they are surface scratches such as might have been made accidentally in digging with a pick or spade. An examination of the photograph, however, clearly shows that the marks are more than mere scratches — deeper, clearer and more lasting, as they must have been to survive the attacks of the elements for more than two centuries. Judge Haliburton in describing the stone says: “It does not appear to have been dressed by a mason but the inscription has been cut on its natural surface.” It is quite impossible today to decide whether the inscription was the work of a skilled or unskilled workman. Turning now to the explanations and theories respecting the inscription. Judge Haliburton describes it as a stone “upon which they (the French) had engraved the date of their cultivation of the soil, in memorial of their formal possession of the country.” Against this theory may be urged the fact that the first cultivation of the soil by these French settlers was in 1605 and not 1606; Champlain’s map showing gardens is dated 1605; also that they had taken possession of the country in 1604; and the probability that a national emblem, such as the fleur-de-lis, would be used rather than a Masonic emblem for such purposes. That this is exactly what they did is evident from the record of Argall’s capture of Port Royal. In Murdoch’s HISTORY OF NOVA SCOTIA he states that in 1614 “Argall destroyed the fort and all monuments and marks of French national power. It is recorded that he even caused the names of Demonts and other captains and the fleur-de-lis to be effaced with pick and chisel from a massive stone on which they had been engraved.” This account not only shows what emblems the French used to commemorate their occupation of the country, but also that if this stone was visible it does not commemorate a national event.

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FOUNDING OF A MASONIC LODGE The theory that the stone might commemorate the establishment of a lodge of Freemasons has virtually nothing to support it, though it is perhaps more than a matter of interest that during the winter of 1606-7 the French colonists, under the leadership of Champlain, established a sort of club or society styled the “Ordre de Bon Temps,” consisting of fifteen members. Each member in turn became the caterer to his brethren, a plan which excited so much emulation among them that each endeavored to excel his predecessor in office, in the variety, profusion and quality of the viands procured for the table during his term of office. Lescarbot, a member of the society and the historian of these early events, says that on each such occasion the host wore the collar “of the order and a napkin and carried a staff.” At dinner, he marshalled the way to the table at the head of the procession of guests. After supper he resigned the insignia of office to his successor, with the ceremony of drinking to him in a cup of wine. The little company included several distinguished names: Poutrincourt, the real founder of Port Royal; Champlain, the founder of Quebec, two years later, and the historian of many events at Port Royal; Biencourt, Poutrincourt’s son; Lescarbot, advocate, poet and historian of this early period; Louis Hebert, one of the first settlers of Quebec; Robert Grave, Champdore, and Daniel Hay, a surgeon. That this social club was Speculative Freemasonry is highly improbable. The colony was a French settlement, and Speculative Freemasonry was not known in France for more than a hundred years afterward, namely in 1718. The corporations and gilds of stonemasons and architects, we are told in Rebold’s GENERAL H ISTORY OF FREEMASONRY, were suppressed in 1539 by Francis I., although a sort of trade unionism seems to have existed from about 1650, and a correspondence with each other is believed to have taken place between the unions at Marseilles, Paris, Lyons, and certain cities in Belgium. These were undoubtedly operative bodies and consisted of not only masons and stone cutters, but of members of other trades, carpenters, architects, decorators, etc. That a union of these workmen may have existed at Port Royal is not of course impossible, but that it contained any speculative members is exceedingly improbable. In England evidence is lacking of the admission of Speculative Masons into Masonic lodges prior to 1646, and in Scotland prior to 1634. If such a speculative lodge existed at Port Royal in 1606 or if the Ordre de Bon Temps was even in a remote way connected with any trade, either Champlain or Lescarbot in their very detailed accounts of these early days would have mentioned other facts which would establish beyond any doubt such relationship. The entire absence of any such facts must be taken as conclusive in this matter. There remains for consideration one other theory respecting the stone, that of Dr. Jackson; that it was “undoubtedly intended HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to commemorate the place of burial of French soldiers.” This expression of opinion by Dr. Jackson in 1856 may have been founded on information given him by Judge Haliburton on his “recent” visit to Nova Scotia, and may indicate that the judge had also changed his mind. Whatever the facts, the gravestone theory would seem to have more to support it than any other. First, as to the stone itself. As described by Judge Haliburton who had possession of the stone from 1827 until his removal to England in 1859, it evidently measured two by two and a half feet; undoubtedly monumental size and shape. Secondly, as to the place where it was found. Champlain in his VOYAGES gives a plan of the fort erected by him in 1605. This plan shows a burying ground and a garden outside the eastern parapet or palisade. Judge Haliburton’s theory that the stone commemorated the first cultivation of the soil may have been based on the fact that it was found on the site of the garden but it is equally clear that it might also be a gravestone, although Dr. Jackson says in his letter of 1856 that it was found “upon the shore” “partly covered with sand and lying on the shore.” Assuming that the stone is a gravestone, two questions present themselves: 1st. Why are the square and compasses on the stone? 2nd. Whose gravestone is it? It will be convenient to answer these two queries together. Champlain in his history tells us that during the winter of 1605- 1606 six members of the little colony died. While Champlain does not give the names of those who departed this life nor whether they died’ before or after Jan. 1, 1606, yet from his context and Lescarbot’s account it would not be difficult to draw a very strong inference that all died before the New Year dawned. I think we may safely assume that the stone is not the gravestone of any of these six settlers.

LESCARBOT DESCRIBES THEIR ACTIVITIES In the spring of that year (1606) Poutrincourt, who had gone home with DeMonts in the autumn of 1605, induced Mare Lescarbot, an advocate of Paris, to join the colony. They reached Port Royal on July 27, where they remained until Aug. 28, when Poutrincourt started on an exploratory voyage down the American coast, as far as Cape Cod, leaving Lescarbot behind in charge of the colony. Lescarbot, in his New France, has this to say about the work done while the rest were away: Meanwhile I set about making ready the soil, setting off and enclosing gardens wherein to sow wheat and kitchen herbs. We also had a ditch dug all around the fort which was a matter of necessity to receive the dampness and the water which previously had oozed underneath our dwellings, amid the roots of the trees which had been cut down and which had very likely been the cause of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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unhealthiness of the place. I have no time to stop here to describe in detail the several labours of our other workmen. Suffice it to say that we had numerous joiners, carpenters, masons, stone cutters, locksmiths workers in iron, tailors, wood sawyers, sailors, etc., who worked at their trades, and in doing so were very kindly used, for after three hours work a day they were free. * * * But while each of our said workmen had his special trade, they had also to set to work at whatever turned up, as many of them did. Certain masons and stone cutters turned their hands to baking and made as good bread as that of Paris. Let us note in passing the use by Lescarbot of the two words “masons” and “stone cutters.” The original French words in Lescarbot’s history are “masson” (mason) and “tailleur la Pierre,” the former being a word of wider significance than the other, including any operative on the construction of a building, using either stones, bricks, plaster or cement, the latter word denoting greater skill including not only the work of cutting inscriptions, but approaching the work of the sculptor. Poutrincourt’s party meanwhile spent some weeks exploring and when near Cape Cod a party of five young men landed in defiance of orders and were attacked by Indians. Three were killed and buried on the spot by their comrades; the other two were severely wounded; one of them, Duval, a locksmith, lived to take part in a revolt at Quebec two years later; the other was so pierced with arrows that he died on reaching Port Royal on Nov. 14, 1606, where he was buried. During the winter of 1606-1607 there were four deaths but these occurred in February and March, 1607, and not during the year 1606, according to both Champlain and Lescarbot. If, therefore, the stone was erected to mark the grave of one of the colonists who died during the year 1606, it must have been the grave of the man who died on Nov. 14, 1606, or shortly afterward of wounds received at Cape Cod. What was his profession or trade? We know Duval was a locksmith, and though this is very scant light for us to be guided by, it is probable that his companions on their wild episode on shore with the Indians were members of the various trades which Lescarbot says were at Port Royal at this time. This is merely assumption, and not conclusive. If he had been a man of standing either Champlain or Lescarbot would have named him. They name none of those who died at Port Royal. CARPENTERS HAD THEIR OWN MYSTERY We must not forget that at that time the carpenters of France had their own mystery or trade gild, worked on lines somewhat akin to Operative Masonry, and using the square and compasses HDT WHAT? INDEX

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as their emblem. This may be well illustrated by a short quotation from Felix Gras, the eminent Provencal poet and novelist, whose works were so highly esteemed by the late W.E. Gladstone. In his Les Rouges du Midi, a book dealing with the French Revolution (written in 1792), he describes a visit paid by Vauclair, a carpenter from Marseilles, to Planctot, a carpenter residing and working in Paris. As we stood outside the door we could hear the smooth “hush hush” of a big plane as it threw off the long shavings, but the planing stopped short at our loud knock, and then the door flew open and there was Planctot himself. It was plain that he knew Vauclair on the instant, but instead of shaking hands with him, he turned his back and rushed off like a crazy man.... In a few minutes we heard the clatter of old Planctot’s wooden shoes on the stair. He had come to greet Vauclair according to the rite and ceremonial of their craft. He had put on his Sunday hat and his best wig; and before he said a word he laid a compass and a square down on the floor between himself and Vauelair. At once Vauelair made the correct motions of hand and foot, to which Planetot replied properly and then, under their raised hands, they embraced over the ... compass and square. Old Planctot is several times called “le maitre,” “the master,” which I take to denote his standing in the Craft. I think there can be no historical doubt of the existence of such a craft gild among French carpenters at the beginning of the 17th century; that is, about 1606. Let us summarize our theories: First, the stone was a gravestone; secondly, it marked the last resting place of a French settler who died in 1606; thirdly, this settler was probably a workman and may have been an operative mason or stone cutter; fourthly, speculative Masonry, unknown in France in 1606, was not practiced by the French colonists; lastly, the emblem of square and compasses would seem to be a trade-mark or emblem undoubtedly used by operative masons as their emblem, and possibly by carpenters as well. In a word, the stone marked the grave of either a mason or stone cutter or possibly a carpenter who died Nov. 14, 1606, and not that of a Speculative Freemason. ----o---- “A king may make a noble knight, And breathe away another; But he in all his power and might, Cannot make a brother.” ----o---- HDT WHAT? INDEX

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To summarize: Thoreau would include in CAPE COD something Dr. Jackson had bragged to him about. Dr. Jackson claimed to have discovered, while on vacation in Nova Scotia as a Harvard undergraduate, evidence of Freemasonry dating to 1606 (what he had found along that coast was the gravestone of a white settler bearing such a date, along with what seemed obviously to him to be a “Masonic coat-of-arms”). Jackson would go on in his life to allege when the electric telegraph began to be trendy after 1837, that actually he had been the one to initiate the whole thing (although his credit for this had somehow been misappropriated), and then when anesthesia began to be the cat’s pajamas in surgery and dentistry in 1846, that actually he had been the one to have ginned up the whole scheme (although his credit for this had somehow been misappropriated), and then to be terminated from his surveying contract in 1847 for incompetence or leadership failure or whatever — until finally he would fall apart and need to be institutionalized. So, here’s my question for you (now that it is clear that the rock Jackson had found in 1827, and had bragged to Thoreau about, did not actually have any sort of recognizable “Masonic coat-of-arms” engraved upon it): can this 1827 lookie-lookie-what-I-discovered-thingie in Nova Scotia now be understood as an early glimmer of the pretentious craziness that was going to characterize, and so damage, this man’s life? Can we see, in Thoreau’s book about the cape, early evidence of this fabulator’s easy ability to intrigue people? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1828

Mary Anning discovered Britain’s 1st recognized pterosaur fossil. (Although Gideon Mantell has already found pterosaur remains — he had supposed this to a bird). PALEONTOLOGY

A year after discovering the mammalian egg cell, Karl Ernst von Baer’s ENTWICKELUNGSGESCHICHTE DER THIERE tracing the developmental history of animals. BIOLOGY

Adolphe Brongniart’s PRODROME D’UNE HISTOIRE DES VÉGÉTAUX FOSSILS, a study of fossil plants, hypothecated that there had been four distinct phases in plant prehistory: (1) primitive plants from the Coal Measures, (2) the first conifers, (3) domination by cycads and conifers, and finally (4) flowering plants. THE SCIENCE OF 1828 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1829

Jules Desnoyers named the Quaternary System — a period in which we humans have lived.

Philippe-Charles Schmerling collected a Neanderthal fossil, the partial cranium of a small child (although Charles Lyell would present an illustration of this in 1863 in ANTIQUITY OF MAN, it would not be until the following century that the skull would be recognized as Neanderthal). PALEONTOLOGY

Ignaz Venetz believed that the dispersal of erratic boulders in the Alps, the nearby Juras, and the Northern German Plain must have been due to some really huge glaciers, but at the Schweizerische Naturforschende Gesellschaft he encountered scepticism. Finally he would manage to convert a friend, Jean de Charpentier, who would transform his concept into a theory resembled that of Göran Wahlenberg in which such glaciation was confined to the Alpine region. THE SCIENCE OF 1829 THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1830

The 1st volume of Charles Lyell’s THE PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY: AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE FORMER CHANGES OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE BY REFERENCE TO CAUSES NOW IN OPERATION appeared in London, distinguishing between three periods of geological history which Sir Charles termed the eocine (“recent”), the miocene (“less recent”), and the pliocene (“more recent”). The earth was depicted as millions of years old rather than thousands (the volumes would be printed year by year through 1833, but Charles Darwin would be taking this initial volume along with him aboard the Beagle for his voyage around the world; eventually Henry Thoreau would study the 5th British or 1st American edition, published in 1837 by John Murray in London and James Kay, Jun. & Brother at 122 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia).

LYELL’S GEOLOGY Georg Goldfuss announced that he could perceive “hairs” on a fossil of a pterosaur (and this outlandish assertion would in fact be supported by later fossil discoveries). PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1830 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1831

Patrick Matthew’s ON NAVAL TIMBER AND ARBORICULTURE contained an appendix in which he described what Charles Darwin would later designate as “natural selection” (Darwin would belatedly be made aware of Matthew’s hypothesis, and in a reprint of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES would carefully acknowledge this). PALEONTOLOGY

William Buckland conducted experiments with tortoises and crocodiles, to compare their footprints with fossil tracks found in Scotland.

A DISCOURSE ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE, AND THE CHANGES THEREBY PRODUCED IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. BY BARON G. C UVIER, COMMANDER OF THE LEGION OF HONOUR AND OF THE ORDER OF THE CROWN OF WURTEMBERG, MEMBER OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY, &C. &C. &C. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND A GLOSSARY (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea). CUVIER’S REVOLUTIONS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This would be in Waldo Emerson’s library, and Henry Thoreau would make use of it for CAPE COD: “Cuvier says, that at the present time the jaw-bone of the whale is used in Norway for the purpose of making beams or posts for buildings.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 24, Wednesday: The Reverend John Stevens Henslow, Professor of Botany at Cambridge University and founder of the Botanic Garden there, suggested that Charles Darwin travel with him aboard HMS Beagle, a 10-gun brig, for its 2d world voyage of exploration and charting, visiting, among other locations, the Galápagos Islands. THE SCIENCE OF 1831

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 24th of 8th M 1831 / Rode with my wife to Smithfield & attended Moy [Monthly] Meeting - it was to me a remarkably solid & good meeting - in the first Meeting Wm Almy bore a short testimony In the last we did not have much buisness but affairs HDT WHAT? INDEX

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were conducted in a solid manner I believe this was the first meeting I ever attended with Moses Brown where he was wholly silent in a Meeting for buisness. — he was pretty smart in health, but he told me after meeting that he had nothing special to offer tho’ he took an interest in the subject before us — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1832

Professor Albrecht Reinhard Bernhardi of Dreissigacker, Germany proposed that a ungeheuere Eismeer colossal sea of ice had extended from the Polar region to create the erratics and moraines of the Northern European Plain: “...the polar ice reached as far as the southern boundary of the tract of land which is now covered by that rocky debris [and] in the course of millennia, gradually melted away to its present extent ... that Nordic debris must be compared with the walls of rock debris that surround almost every glacier ... or in other words are nothing other than the moraines, which that colossal Arctic sea of ice during its gradual withdrawal bequeathed us.” Alpine glaciation might also have been more prominent in such a milieu: “If this hypothesis is correct, it would also apply to the mysterious occurrence of similar rocky debris in other areas, such as the Jura mountains, etc. Even the eternal snow and glaciers of the Alps had, in those long-past times, a far greater extent, descending into valleys now entirely ice-free. It was thus possible that rock debris from its original site in the Alps though separated by deep valleys and even lakes ... arrived at their present sites....”

THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION THE SCIENCE OF 1832

Hylaeosaurus, one of Richard Owen’s original dinosaurs (an ankylosaur), was discovered by Gideon Mantell. He would announce this in his GEOLOGY OF THE SOUTHEAST OF ENGLAND in the following year, making it the 3d identified dinosaur species. This is what it would be made out to have looked like in a woodcut during Thoreau’s lifetime, based upon a concrete reconstruction on the grounds of the relocated Sydenham, England Crystal Palace south of LondonLONDON . PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1833

In Montevideo, Uruguay’s National University of the Republic was founded, and in Philadelphia the Religious Society of Friends founded Haverford College.

Professor Richard Harlan was one of three Americans to attend the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He presented a paper on the fossil reptiles of the United States. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1833 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Augustus A. Gould, M.D. translated from French into English Jean-Baptiste de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck’s work on conchology, as LAMARCK’S GENERA OF SHELLS, WITH A CATALOGUE OF SPECIES (Boston: Allen and Ticknor), and issued the very 1st edition of his often-republished textbook A SYSTEM OF NATURAL HISTORY; CONTAINING SCIENTIFIC AND POPULAR DESCRIPTIONS OF VARIOUS ANIMALS; CHIEFLY COMPILED FROM THE VARIOUS WORKS OF CUVIER, GRIFFITH, RICHARDSON, GEOFFREY, LACEPEDE, BUFFON, GOLDSMITH, SHAW, MONTAGU, WILSON, LEWIS AND CLARKE, AUDUBON, AND OTHER WRITERS ON NATURAL HISTORY; ARRANGED ACCORDING TO THE CLASSIFICATION OF STARK. ILLUSTRATED WITH NUMEROUS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ENGRAVINGS (Boston: Carter, Hendee, & Co.; Brattleboro’: Published by Peck & Wood). LAMARCK’S SHELLS GOULD’S NATURAL HISTORY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The 1st two volumes of Professor Charles Lyell’s THE PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY: AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE FORMER CHANGES OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE BY REFERENCE TO CAUSES NOW IN OPERATION were

republished in a second edition, with the addition of a third volume dealing with the successive formations of PALEONTOLOGY

the earth’s crust. By 1872, eleven editions of this work would appear, each with important revisions and additions. Lyell divided the “Secondary” and “Tertiary” rock-layer categories of Giovanni Arduino into the following periods: Newer Pliocene, Older Pliocene, Myocene, Eocene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, and Carboniferous. This reclassification would lead eventually to the modern paleontological timescale: Quaternary, Pliocene, Myocene, Oligocene, Eocene, Paleocene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Permian, Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, Ordovician, Cambrian, and Precambrian. THE SCIENCE OF 1833

Gideon Mantell named the genus Hylaeosaurus, which Richard Owen would in 1842 include in the family Dinosauria. (He had discovered it in the previous year, and in this year he announced his discovery in his GEOLOGY OF THE SOUTHEAST OF ENGLAND.) On a nearby screen is what the beast would be made out to have looked like in a woodcut during Thoreau’s lifetime, based upon a concrete reconstruction on the grounds of the relocated Crystal Palace south of London. BIOLOGY

Having considered the history of the controversy between “Neptunism” and “Plutonism” as offered to Henry Thoreau at Harvard by way of Professor Amos Eaton’s A GEOLOGICAL AND AGRICULTURAL SURVEY ... and as offered to Thoreau after college by way of Lemuel Shattuck’s A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;..., Professor Thorson passes on to Lyell’s “Uniformitarianism” as offered to Thoreau in THE PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY .... What Thorson asserts his vision to be –his vision that has now resulted in his WALDEN’S SHORE– is that uniformitarianism (1) led to unconformities (2), that in turn led Thoreau to (3) his WALDEN emphasis on a bedrock he terms “point d’appui”: By the late 1830s, however, neptunism lay in ruins, thanks to Charles Lyell’s upgrade (1830) of James Playfair’s upgrade (1802) of James Hutton’s upgrade (1795) of his earlier published lectures (1783-1788) gathered as the THEORY OF THE EARTH WITH PROOFS & ILLUSTRATIONS. Hutton’s theory was based on original field observations made at the scale of cliffs and mountains, rather than on inherited theories involving the origin of crystals. It held that landscapes are endlessly created and destroyed during episodes of vigorous mountain building that alternated with more protracted and passive episodes of erosion. During times of landscape construction, the sedimentary residues of the previous age are re-crystallized and re-melted by geothermal heat and re- raised as highlands. This made Hutton an obligate plutonist, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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even though this meta-process covered only the first half of his theory. The second half came during deconstruction, when these crystalline highlands were laid low by weathering processes within the soil, and by the flushing of the residues to the sea by rivers. As Playfair summed up, “the decay of one part” is “subservient to the restoration of another, and gives stability to the whole.” Unconformities were key to the system, being the boundaries between the rock-generating and rock-destroying hemicycles of the full cycle, referred to by Hutton as a “revolution.” Using Hutton’s term in its proper context, Thoreau described two unconformities in his JOURNAL, both of which became covertly significant in the final version of WALDEN.16

16. Thoreau’s “revolutions” were at the contact between the Andover Granite and the overlying glacial sediments, and between the glacial sediments and the overlying “alluvion.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1834

Taking a suggestion from Persian “Titan” legends about the Siwalik Hills, paleontologist Hugh Falconer would there be excavating literally tons of proboscidian and giraffid fossils.

Friedrich von Alberti named the Triassic System (which would later by identified as that of the initial dinosaurs). BIOLOGY

A woodcut-maker from Meiringen in the Bernese Oberland, name not of record, advocated a theory of an Ice Age to Jean de Charpentier. (Comparable explanations were also heard from the Val de Ferret in the Valais and the Seeland in western Switzerland, and in Goethe’s SCIENTIFIC WORK. Similar explanations would also be found in other parts of the world.)

THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION De Charpentier presented a paper on this Ice Age before the Schweizerische Naturforschende Gesellschaft. THE SCIENCE OF 1834 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Professor Charles Lyell made an excursion to Denmark and Sweden, the result of which would be his Bakerian lecture to the Royal Society “On the Proofs of the gradual Rising of Land in certain Parts of Sweden.” Lyell also would bring before the Geological Society a paper “On the Cretaceous and Tertiary Strata of Seeland and Möen.”

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As of 1820 Gideon Mantell and William Buckland had discovered dinosaur remains in a stone-quarry in Maidstone, and in this year, a blast revealed a mass of rock containing a number of remnants of an gigantic prehistoric reptile. The fossil is on display in the British Museum, where it is referred to as the Mantle-piece:

A tooth identifies the giant animal as an Iguanodon, and in addition there were two thigh bones each nearly three feet long, assorted other leg bones, bones of the fore- and hind-feet, several vertebrae, ribs, and collar bones. An artist, John Martin, would visit Mantell’s Museum and be inspired by the shaped stones to restore life to the Iguanodon, in its proper setting, preyed on by a Megalosaurus, flanked by a giant crocodilian, watched by a pterodactyl in a diorama of cycads, tree-ferns, and yuccas — by means of a painting. This effort would eventually be the basis for a mezzotint frontispiece in the 1st edition of Mantell’s WONDERS OF GEOLOGY. Here is what would be considered, during Henry Thoreau’s era, “The Country of the Iguanodon”: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(It would still not be until 1842 that the anatomist Richard Owen would coin his term Dinosauria, “terrible lizards.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1835

Henry Peter Brougham’s A DISCOURSE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY, SHOWING THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE AND THE ADVANTAGES OF THE STUDY attempted to produce factual evidence for the existence of design in the world by providing a description of the human mind and how it works. This functioning provides, he averred, evidence “of the most skilful contrivance ... the operations which it performs, all its faculties, are plainly means working to an end.” It is due to the fact that our minds provide us with this clear evidence of our having had an intelligent cause, and to the fact that we are conscious of our will’s ability to cause our movements, that we are able to formulate our notion of power and then to transfer this notion “to the relations between events wholly external to ourselves.” (This would also be published as part of the 6th volume of his WORKS.)

Adam Sedgwick named the Cambrian System, recognizing the initial rich assemblage of fossils in the rock record. Roderick Murchison named the Silurian System (he believed, not entirely accurately, that the Silurian predated the fossils of land plants, and consequently any economically valuable coal seams). Murchison and Sedgwick would later engage in a bitter priority dispute over their systems. PALEONTOLOGY

A 2d edition of the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock of Amherst College’s state-subsidized REPORTS ON THE GEOLOGY, MINERALOGY, BOTANY, AND ZOÖLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS, MADE AND PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THAT STATE. SECOND EDITION (Amherst). In this, Part iv, “A Catalogue of the Animals and Plants in Massachusetts, vi, Crustacea, pp. 548-550” was by Dr. Augustus Addison Gould. THE SCIENCE OF 1835

Professor Hitchcock became aware of the stone slabs in the valley of the Connecticut River that contained what appeared to be large footprints. (The slabs had been there all along, and had been known to uneducated white people since 1802.) Professor Hitchcock at first called his subject matter “ichnolithology,” and then shortened this to “ichnology.” He would publish a number of articles as he amassed a collection of footprint- bearing slabs for a museum at his college. This chromolithograph depicts the Moody Footmark Quarry in South Hadley: GEOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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We now know that nearly all of the markings that Hitchcock collected had been made by Triassic dinosaurs. In the very year of the publication of Professor Hitchcock’s sumptuous review of the evidences that these were the tracks of humongous birds, entitled ICHNOLOGY OF NEW ENGLAND: A REPORT ON THE SANDSTONE OF THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY, ESPECIALLY ITS FOSSIL FOOTMARKS (Boston MA: William White, 1858), the first conclusive evidence of bipedal dinosaurs was being uncovered in New Jersey by Joseph Leidy.

From this year, here is Gideon Mantell’s suggestion as to what these giant lizards might have looked like when they were leaving behind them these tracks in the mud — they must have looked like humongous iguanas!

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Summer: Waldo Emerson sent one of the four copies of SARTOR RESARTUS to the Reverend James Freeman Clarke in Louisville, Kentucky and probably also lent another of the copies to Alexander H. Everett, editor of Boston’s North American Review. At this point a second set of four copies from Thomas Carlyle in England were languishing at the Boston Custom Shed, mired in bureaucracy and quite unretrievable.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

At the end of his Sophomore year David Henry Thoreau walked home to Concord with Charles Stearns Wheeler, and evidently there was a problem with his shoes for he had to walk the last two miles in his stockings, the last miles taking him literally hours. (One wonders whether, without shoes with, perhaps, something wadded into the toe of the right shoe, a young man without a right big toe would have trouble in balancing.)17

Karl Friedrich Schimper, while studying the mosses on erratic boulders in the alpine upland of Bavaria, found himself wondering where the hell these great blocks of stone had come from. Indeed they were so huge, and out of place, this was marvelous! During a summer excursion to the Bavarian Alps he brought himself to a conviction that only ice could have been the means of transport for the boulders in the alpine upland. THE SCIENCE OF 1835 THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

17. In regard to the difficulty of balancing, when one attempts to walk without a big toe, I can offer the following personal experience, obtained from an anonymous individual on the internet: “I wear a size 7 on my right foot and size 6 on my left due to a partially amputated big toe. My dilemma is this: The smallest shoe size I can find is a size 7, so obviously the shoe is too big on my left foot. Do you sell a product or have an idea as to how I can fill the space (toe cap) as to where I can wear a size 7 shoe comfortably. I am possibly looking for a hard toe cap that would fit over my half toe but extend to measure up to a size 7 shoe. I am starting to have great difficulties in my walking. I see that you sell the Toe Silopad Digital Cap. Would this work? It appears to be a soft fabric, so if I was to wear a sock over the toe cap, would it flatten the toe cap and not give me the support I need?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Winter: Karl Friedrich Schimper suggested, in Munich, that there must have been global times of obliteration (“Verödungszeiten”), with a cold climate and frozen water.

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1836

Henry Riley and Samuel Stutchbury named Thecodontosaurus, the 4th named dinosaur species. PALEONTOLOGY

Edward Hitchcock’s initial paper on the stone footprints of Connecticut. He would continue to study and publish papers on these footprints with the conviction that they had been left by giant birds (they were left by bipedal dinosaurs). THE SCIENCE OF 1836 BIOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Summer: Ellery Channing made a solitary trip into the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

He went by stage to North Conway and walked up the Saco Valley toward Crawford Notch, riding part way in a farm wagon with Abel Crawford, whose family had given the Notch its name. Channing then took a stage to Ethan Crawford’s and Bethlehem, and the Lafayette House near the Great Stone Face. He passed through Franconia Notch on his way back to Massachusetts.

Karl Friedrich Schimper spent the summer near Bex in the Swiss Alps with his former university friend Louis Agassiz and Jean de Charpentier. Schimper, De Charpentier and possibly Ignaz Venetz convinced Agassiz that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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there had been a period of glaciation. THE SCIENCE OF 1836 THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

Winter: James Ellsworth De Kay studied the specimens he had collected as Zoologist for the Geological Survey of New York and employed a draftsman, John W. Hill, to draw those of particular interest.

Louis Agassiz and Karl Friedrich Schimper developed the theory of a sequence of glaciations. They mainly drew upon the preceding works of Goethe, of Ignaz Venetz, of Jean de Charpentier and on their own fieldwork. There are indications that Agassiz was already familiar with Albrecht Reinhard Bernhardi’s paper at that time. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1837

Early in this year, Alfred Russel Wallace was exposed to the utopian ideals of Robert Dale Owen and his followers.

Hermann von Meyer named Plateosaurus, the 5th named dinosaur species. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1837

Friedrich Tiedemann’s DAS HIRN DES NEGERS (THE BRAIN OF THE NEGRO) described his measurements of brain size, which had found no significant differences between Caucasian, Mongolian, (American) Indian, Malayan, and Negro races. He also told the stories of some members of the Negro race who had been educated and subsequently contributed to science and literature (given the times, Tiedemann’s book was, to say the least, unusual).

Thomas Bell’s A HISTORY OF BRITISH QUADRUPEDS, INCLUDING THE CETACEA. ILLUSTRATED BY NEARLY 200 WOODCUTS (London: J. Van Voorst). Henry Thoreau would have a copy of this in his library, and would HDT WHAT? INDEX

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refer to it in CAPE COD, and his personal copy is now at the Concord Free Public Library. BRITISH QUADRUPEDS

It was early in this year that Charles Darwin found out that a flightless bird, the rhea, that he had collected in southern Patagonia, belonged to a new species even though it was very similar to another bird. Taking this into full consideration, he analogized that if one such species of bird could succeed another in the dimension of space, then perhaps one such species might also succeed another in the dimension of time.

Temporal sequence might be recording evolutionary transformation. (This was the eureka moment of evolution. Later, when Darwin was also informed that a number of the birds with distinctively different bills which he had collected on the various islands of the Galápagos group were, despite all appearances, nevertheless all finches, he would opt to elucidate his argument by employment of this example rather than by HDT WHAT? INDEX

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reference to his initial situation, of the various flightless rheas of Patagonia.)

Fearful of the intensity of the reaction his theory obviously was going to cause, Darwin would delay publishing.18

“Everything is what it is because it got that way.” — D’Arcy W. Thompson, ON GROWTH AND FORMS Cambridge UP, 1917

Gould, Stephen Jay. EIGHT LITTLE PIGGIES: REFLECTIONS IN NATURAL HISTORY. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1994, pages 147-9: Darwin ... revered William Paley during his youth. In a courageous act of intellectual parricide, he then overthrew his previous mentor — not merely by becoming an evolutionist, but by constructing a particular version of evolutionary theory maximally disruptive of Paley’s system and deepest beliefs.... Where did Darwin get such a radical version of evolution? Surely not from the birds and bees, the twigs and trees. Nature helped, but intellectual revolutions19 must also have ideological bases. Scholars ... agree that two Scottish economists of the generation just before Darwin played a dominant role: Thomas Robert Malthus and the great Adam Smith himself. From Malthus, Darwin received the key insight that growth in population, if 18. At some point in the late 1830s, Darwin jotted into a notebook that “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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unchecked, will outrun any increase in the food supply. A struggle for existence must therefore arise, leading by natural selection to survival of the fittest (to cite all three conventional Darwinian aphorisms in a single sentence). Darwin states that this insight from Malthus supplied the last piece that enabled him to complete the theory of natural selection in 1838 (though he did not publish his views for twenty-one years). Adam Smith’s influence was more indirect, but also more pervasive. We know that the Scottish economists interested Darwin greatly and that, during the crucial months of 1838, while he assembled the pieces soon to be capped by his Malthusian insight, he was studying the thought of Adam Smith. The theory of natural selection is uncannily similar to the chief doctrine of laissez-faire economics. (In our academic jargon, we would say that the two theories are “isomorphic” — that is, structurally similar point for point, even though the subject matter differs.) To achieve the goal of a maximally ordered economy in the laissez-faire system, you do not regulate from above by passing explicit laws for order. You do something that, at first glance, seems utterly opposed to your goal: You simply allow individuals to struggle in an unfettered way for personal profit. In this struggle, the inefficient are weeded out and the best balance each other to form an equilibrium to everyone’s benefit. Darwin’s system works in exactly the same manner, only more relentlessly. No regulation comes from on high; no divine watchmaker superintends the work of his creation. Individuals are struggling for reproductive success, the natural analog of profit. No other mechanism is at work, nothing “higher” or more exalted. Yet the result is adaptation and balance — and the cost is hecatomb after hecatomb after hecatomb.... For Malthus, Paley actually cites the key line that inspired Darwin’s synthesis in 1838 (but in the context of a passage on civil vs. natural evils). Paley writes: The order of generation proceeds by something like a geometrical progression. The increase of provision, under circumstances even the most advantageous, can only assume the form of an arithmetic series. Whence it follows, that the population will always overtake the provision, will pass beyond the line of plenty, and will continue to increase till checked by the difficulty of procuring subsistence. [At this point, Paley adds a footnote: “See this subject stated in a late treatise upon population” — obviously Malthus.]

19. According to Davydd J. Greenwood, the phrase “intellectual revolution” is such an impoverished one that it should not be used in regard to Darwin’s accomplishment. It is a complaint about our mother tongue, that it offers us no better idiom than this to use to describe such an utterly fundamental reconceptualization. It is not anyone’s fault, for it is the language we are working with which is at fault. The idiom leads us to suppose that we are dealing with merely another “recirculation of the elites” among ideas, and Darwin’s contribution is more overwhelmingly fundamental than that. In frustration I would almost want to resort to the term “catastrophe,” referring to Darwin’s great reconceptualization as having been an intellectual catastrophe — except that people would suppose incorrectly that I was suggesting that what he accomplished was evil or incorrect! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

January: At the beginning of this year Karl Friedrich Schimper coined the term Eiszeit (Age of Ice).

THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

Paleontology “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July: Jean de Charpentier having described how glaciers carry along “erratic” rocks and scrape and gouge the bedrock which they pass over, Louis Agassiz, after a tour of the valley of the Rhone River, recognizing that many of the topographical features he could inspect in this land currently free of rivers of ice (known as “glaciers”) could be best explained as features left behind by vanished massive past rivers of ice, proposed that this same process had operated at one time on a vastly larger scale than at present, and that huge glaciers had once covered Europe and Asia all the way down to the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas.

THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION (There have been actually, we now know, not merely the recent “Wisconsonian” but at least 17 glacial maximums, or “Ice Ages.” The rocks of America are presently still rising after having been pressed down under an accumulation of three kilometers of such overburden, the Laurentide, that had melted and flowed into the oceans only 12,000 years ago.) At a meeting of the Swiss Society of Natural Sciences (Schweizerische Naturforschende Gesellschaft) at Neuchâtel, Professor Agassiz presented his theory that there had been an Ice Age (Eiszeit) during which all of Europe had been covered by glaciers. The shocked audience reacted with hostility — most scientists were then presuming that the earth had been gradually and smoothly cooling down HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ever since its birth as a molten globe, and his theory was viewed as in conflict with this general tendency.

“Everything is what it is because it got that way.” — D’Arcy W. Thompson, ON GROWTH AND FORMS Cambridge UP, 1917 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1838

As of 1820 Gideon Mantell and William Buckland had discovered dinosaur remains, and as of 1834, in a stone-quarry in Maidstone, a blast had revealed a mass of rock containing a number of fossil bones of what proved to be an Iguanodon, although it would still not be until 1842 that the anatomist Richard Owen would coin his term “Dinosauria,” or “terrible lizards.” A celebrity painter, John Martin, visited Mantell’s Museum and was inspired by the shaped stones to restore life to the Iguanodon, in its proper setting, preyed on by a Megalosaurus, flanked by a giant crocodilian, watched by a pterodactyl in a diorama of cycads, tree-ferns, and yuccas — by means of a painting. This effort was reproduced in this year as a mezzotint for the first edition of Mantell’s WONDERS OF GEOLOGY, where it appears as the frontispiece to Volume 1. From this year into 1842, he would be churning out dramatic illustrations of feisty dinosaurs, for books written largely for the public. These dragon-like depictions would be hits with their intended audience but many scientists would reject them as inaccurate. An example would be his “The Country of the Iguanodon.” THE SCIENCE OF 1838

From this year into 1842, celebrity painter John Martin would be producing dramatic illustrations of feisty dinosaurs for books being written largely for the general public. These dragon-like popular depictions would be hits with their intended audience but many scientists would repudiate them as imaginative. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

Roderick Murchison and Adam Sedgwick named the Devonian System. THE SCIENCE OF 1839

From this year until the great European revolution of 1848, Professor Arnold Henri Guyot would be teaching physical geography and history at the Academy of Neuchatel. His interests were in glaciology, physical geography, meteorology, and cartography. His early studies on the flow of ice and the distribution of glacial erratics in Switzerland served to underpin the theory of glaciation that had been advanced and championed by Professor Louis Agassiz. PALEONTOLOGY

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1840

Louis Agassiz’s ÉTUDES SUR LES GLACIERS ... OUVRAGE ACCOMPAGNÉ D’UN ATLAS DE 32 PLANCHES (Neuchatel, aux frais de l’auteur).20 In this he demonstrated irrefutably that at a geologically recent period all of Switzerland had been covered by “great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland,” resulting in all this “unstratified gravel (boulder drift)” that now clutters its surface. He and Charles Darwin made each

20. Henry Thoreau would check this out of Harvard Library on March 13, 1854. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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other’s acquaintance at the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

THE SCIENCE OF 1840

(Characteristically, the author omitted any mention of Karl Friedrich Schimper, who had brought him into this glacial research and who also was preparing a book about the glaciation of the Alps.) THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

1840s, 1850s: In this timeframe several scientists were glimpsing chromosomes under the microscope, but not having the slightest clue what it was that they were looking at.

Laura Dassow Walls has pointed out in SEEING NEW WORLDS: THOREAU AND HUMBOLDTIAN SCIENCE that to enact the agenda of exploration and investigation being recommended by Alexander von Humboldt would require an army of workers — which on the continent of North America was indeed created, in the form of the tax-funded Corps of Topographical Engineers established by the federal government of the United States of America.

There were in the first half of the 19th Century a multitude of Congress-sponsored scientific expeditions and the control of our new federal government was extended in this manner over much of North America. Geological or natural history surveys funded by state governments had begun in North Carolina in 1823, and by the end of the 1830s such surveys had been initiated by 13 states. In addition the federal government had been funding or assisting with exploration since the expedition of Lewis and Clark, but throughout the 1840s and 1850s the great reconnaissance of the American West was being conducted by Army officers. Lieutenant HDT WHAT? INDEX

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John Charles Frémont led only three of these numerous expeditions across the western regions of the North

American continent. Between 1840 and 1860, the US government published 60 enormously expensive multi- volume double-folio or oversize treatises on the American West, in addition to 15 treatises on global naval expeditions and uncounted reports of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Very little of our incessant contemporary dialog about the “free enterprise system” dates back to that era, and the cost of all this seems to have amounted 1 1 to from /4th to /3d of the annual federal budget without having in any way set off alarm bells in the minds of the ideologues of the right of the political spectrum!21 Since Humboldt was very much in touch with these activities, a number of the explorers, scientists, and artists of the period may safely be characterized as “Humboldt’s Children”:22 personages such as Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Frederic Edwin Church, John Charles Frémont, and Professor Thomas Nuttall. However, Louis Agassiz would also need to be characterized as having been a protégé of Humboldt, and Charles Darwin, Professor Asa Gray, and Arnold Henri Guyot. Humboldt corresponded with and was visited by American scientists such as vice-president of the Boston Society of Natural History Charles T. Jackson, academic scholars such as Harvard professor George Ticknor, and popular writers such as Washington Irving (to whom in this year we were offering the position of Secretary of the Navy).

Dr. Augustus Addison Gould of Massachusetts General Hospital became a corresponding member of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia, of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, of the National Institute in Washington DC, and of the American Statistical Association. He published a pioneering work in the United States on the geographical distribution of species, “Results of an Examination of the Shells of Massachusetts and their Geographical Distribution,” in the Boston Journal of Natural History (Volume 3, Art. xviii, pp. 483-494).

James Ellsworth De Kay became First Vice-President of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York. His CATALOGUE OF THE ANIMALS BELONGING TO THE STATE OF N.Y. AS FAR AS THEY HAVE BEEN FIGURED AND DESCRIBED (made May 7, 1839) appeared on pages 7-14 of the FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE STATE MADE JANUARY 24, 1840 (484 pages, New York Assembly Document #50) and was reviewed in the American Journal of Science (Volume 40:73-85). (His “Report of the zoological dept” appeared on pages 15-36 of that same document.)

21. NASA, eat your heart out. 22. Goetzmann, William H. NEW LANDS, NEW MEN, AMERICA AND THE SECOND GREAT AGE OF DISCOVERY. NY: Viking, 1986 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock was awarded the degree of LL.D. by Harvard University. His DYSPEPSY FORESTALLED AND RESISTED, OR, LECTURES ON DIET, REGIMEN, AND EMPLOYMENT. Also, his textbook ELEMENTARY GEOLOGY (of which there would be 31 editions):

ELEMENTARY GEOLOGY (You may be forgiven, I suppose, as modern types, for initially presuming that the above colorized paleontological chart, revealing as it does the branchings of genera and species over immense eras of time, had something or other to do with “evolution of species” — in fact, however, it did not have anything at all to do with anything of that sort! Looking backward to the 1840s through our eyes, it is easy for us to be guilty of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“presentism” — of, that is to say, supposing that the sorts of scientific understanding we now take for granted were being somehow prefigured or anticipated in the minds of yesteryear when they most definitely were not.) PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1841

During this year and the following one, Louis Agassiz’s ÉTUDES CRITIQUES SUR LES MOLLUSQUES FOSSILES.

Roderick Murchison named the Permian System.

William Smith’s nephew John Phillips proposed the geologic eras Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cainozoic (Cenozoic).

During this year and the following one Sir Richard Owen was sponsoring the nomenclature Dinosauria (“terrible lizards”). THE SCIENCE OF 1841 PALEONTOLOGY

August 2, Monday: At the British Association in Plymouth, Professor Richard Owen presented a “Report on British Fossil Reptiles” in which he deployed a new coinage — Dinosaur, or “terrible lizard.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1842

As of 1820 Gideon Mantell and William Buckland had discovered dinosaur remains. It was not, however, until this year that “dinosaur” became a word in our language. The anatomist Richard Owen coined Dinosauria, or “awesomely large lizards,” in an attempt to order and name these recently discovered prehistoric reptiles. (He was using them as an example against evolution and for the so-called “argument from design.”)

Here is an 1842 conceptualization by John Richardson, strangely reminiscent of your Sunday-night Sophomore impress-the-Coeds belching contest:

PALEONTOLOGY Here is an 1838 image. THE SCIENCE OF 1842 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Pierre Jean Édouard Desor contribute material to Volume III of Professor Louis Agassiz’s MONOGRAPHIES D'ÉCHINODERMES VIVANTS ET FOSSILES (Neuchâtel). THE SCIENCE OF 1842

Based on Professor Agassiz’s theory of an Age of Ice, Charles Maclaren pointed out in a newspaper article that substantial ice sheets in the northern hemisphere would have lowered global sea levels (as can be seen in this globe as the exposure of the continental shelves).

THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION Large numbers of Americans paid to see Phineas Taylor Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid.”

April: The term Dinosaur had been coined by Professor Richard Owen to describe a class of animals that we now believe were dominant on the Earth for approximately 175 million years. At this point he named Cetiosaurus, the 6th such species to be identified. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July: Henry Thoreau contributed poems and NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS to THE DIAL. Nathaniel Hawthorne liked this review of the nature literature — but Waldo Emerson disliked it. Cruickshank commentary Professor of Geology Robert M. Thorson of the University of Connecticut has indicated on pages 34-5 of his WALDEN’S SHORE: HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE why it is that the dust jacket of that history-of-science text published by Harvard University Press happens to be decorated with a photograph of a granite pebble containing a sparkling vein of quartz. The granite is intended to represent the Andover Granite bedrock far underneath the glacial detritus within which the waters of Walden Pond are situated. The pebble’s quartz vein presents the “frost-work of a longer night” of which Thoreau wrote in his essay for THE DIAL “NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS” –it is an emblem of Thoreau’s affiliation with Vulcan rather than Neptune, Plutonism rather than Neptunism in the history of the development of scientific understanding – and the regular ovoid shape of the specimen would be indicative of its subsequent tumbling down a streambed of time. The one thing of which we are not informed in this text is whether or no this particular photographed pebble is one of those Henry himself picked out for the mineral collection he kept in his attic room in the Concord boardinghouse, a mineral collection that is now in storage at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts (and perhaps this would be something that matters only to me): Being a big fan of Vulcan made Thoreau an easy mark for the plutonist school of thought, despite his formal education during the neptunian era. He sensed beneath Concord the presence of a great “subterranean fire,” one responsible for creating gemlike crystals of quartz within the veins of the Andover Granite. These, he collected for his specimen cabinet. These he interpreted as the “frost-work of a longer night.” This six-word snippet of prose-poetry densely abstracts three Huttonian verities. Crystals of water-ice and silica-ice were indeed both hexagonal “frosts” originating from fluids, whether vapor or liquid. Freezing quartz requires a “longer night” than freezing water. And these respective nights have different causes. In Playfair’s words, the “revolutions within the earth are independent of revolutions within the celestial spheres.” Thoreau correctly envisioned planet Earth emerging from an initially molten state under darkened skies. “Mornings of creation, I call them ... A morning which carries us back beyond the Mosaic creation, where crystallizations are fresh and unmelted. It is the poet’s hour.” This passage was inspired by a Promethean scene coming from a Concord field on a moonless night. From a distance, Henry saw a burning “heap of stumps half covered with earth,” a “phosphorescence ... a strange, Titanic thing this Fire, this Vulcan.... within are fiery caverns, incrusted with fire as a cave with saltpetre ... the glass men are nearer the truth than the men of science.” This last clause offered playful support for the plutonists who, as “glass men,” invoked a molten origin for local rock. Conversely, it was a dig at the neptunist thrall for their aqueous version of creation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest fly? ANACREON There were ears for these sounds in Greece long ago, as Anacreon’s ode will show” — Henry David Thoreau “Natural History of Massachusetts” July 1842 issue of The Dial23

23. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn reported that “one of Harvard College’s natural historians” (we may presume this to have been Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, Thoreau’s teacher in natural science in his senior year) had remarked to Bronson Alcott that “if Emerson had not spoiled him, Thoreau would have made a good entomologist.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Anacreon’s Ode to the Cicada

We pronounce thee happy, cicada, For on the tops of the trees, Sipping a little dew Like any king thou singest. For thine are they all, Whatever thou seest in the fields, And whatever the woods bear. Thou art the friend of the husbandmen. In no respect injuring any one; And thou art honored among men, Sweet prophet of summer. The muses love thee, And Phoebus himself loves thee, And has given thee a shrill song; Age does not wrack thee, Thou skilful – earth-born – song-loving, Unsuffering – bloodless one; Almost thou art like the gods. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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NUTTALL ARISTOTLE

NUTTALL

In this issue of THE DIAL appeared Thoreau’s translation of one of Anacreon’s odes in CARMINUM POETARUM NOUEM, under the title “Return of Spring”: “the works of men shine,” etc.

In this issue of THE DIAL, in the context of an article “Prayers” by Waldo, a poem appeared in quotation without any attribution and without title. We suspect this sarcastic comment in the form of a prayer to have been contributed by Thoreau: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself, That in my action I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye. And next in value, which thy kindness lends, That I may greatly disappoint my friends, Howe’er they think or hope that it may be, They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me. That my weak hand may equal my firm faith, And my life practice what my tongue saith; That my low conduct may not show, Nor my relenting lines, That I thy purpose did not know, Or overrated thy designs.

This issue of THE DIAL also contained portions selected by Waldo out of Sir William Jones’s and Charles Wilkins’s translations of the THE HEETOPADES OF VEESHNOO-SARMA, IN A SERIES OF CONNECTED FABLES, 24 INTERSPERSED WITH MORAL, PRUDENTIAL, AND POLITICAL MAXIMS.

A WEEK: It is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense in very old books, as the Heetopades of Veeshnoo HITOPADESA Sarma; a playful wisdom which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself.

WALDEN: Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a HITOPADESA world? Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this ÆSOP crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals to their XENOPHANES best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. PEOPLE OF WALDEN THE DIAL, JULY 1842

We commence in the present number the printing of a series of selections from the oldest ethical and religious writings of men, exclusive of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Each nation has its bible more or less pure; none has yet been willing or able in a wise and devout spirit to collate its own with those of other nations, and sinking the civil-historical and the ritual portions to bring together the grand expressions of the moral sentiment in different ages and races, the rules for the 24. The HITOPADESA or “Salutary Instructions” is a very ancient collection and is also familiarly known to us as “THE FABLES OF PILPAY.” Many of these tales are condensations of material to be found in the PANCHATANTRA, which consists of five apologues recited by a Brahmin teacher name of Vishnu Sarma for the instruction of his class of Indian princes in the principles of their princeship. Since this collection emphasizes worldly-wiseness, it has been exceedingly popular, indeed even more popular than Machiavelli’s THE PRINCE: we presently know of over 200 different editions in at least 50 languages around the world. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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guidance of life, the bursts of piety and of abandonment to the Invisible and Eternal; — a work inevitable sooner or later, and which we hope is to be done by religion and not by literature. The following sentences are taken from Charles Wilkins's translation of the Heetopades or Amicable Instructions of Veeshnoo Sarma, according to Sir William Jones, the most beautiful, if not the most ancient collection of apologues in the world, and the original source of the book, which passes in the modern languages of Europe and America, under the false name of Pilpay.

EXTRACTS FROM THE HEETOPADES OF VEESHNOO SARMA.

Whatsoever cometh to pass, either good or evil, is the consequence of a man's own actions, and descendeth from the power of the Supreme Ruler. Our lives are for the purposes of religion, labor, love, and salvation. If these are destroyed, what is not lost? If these are preserved, what is not preserves? A wise man should relinquish both his wealth and his life for another. All is to be surrendered for a just man when he is reduced to the brink of destruction. Why dost thou hesitate over this perishable body composed of flesh, bones, and excrements? O my friend, [my body,] support my reputation! If constancy is to be obtained by inconstancy, purity by impurity, reputation by the body, then what is there which may not be obtained? The difference between the body and the qualities is infinite; the body is a thing to be destroyed in a moment, whilst the qualities endure to the end of the creation. Is this one of us, or is he a stranger is the enumeration of the ungenerous; but to those by whom liberality is practised, the whole world is but as one family. Fortune attendeth that lion amongst men who exerteth himself. They are weak men who declare Fate the sole cause. It is said, Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a former state of existence; wherefore it behoveth a man vigilantly to exert the powers he is possessed of. The stranger, who turneth away from a house with disappointed hopes, leaveth there his own offences and departeth, taking with him all the good actions of the owner. Hospitality is to be exercised even towards an enemy when he cometh to thine house. The tree does not withdraw its shade even from the wood-cutter. Of all men thy guest is the superior. The mind of a good man does not alter when he is in distress; the waters of the ocean are not to be heated by a torch of straw. Nor bathing with cool water, nor a necklace of pearls, nor anointing with sanders, yieldeth such comfort to the body oppressed with heat, as the language of a good man cheerfully uttered doth to the mind. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Good men extend their pity even unto the most despicable animals. The moon doth not withhold the light, even from the cottage of a Chandala. Those who have forsaken the killing of all; those who are helpmates to all; those who are a sanctuary to all; those men are in the way of heaven. Behold the difference between the one who eateth flesh, and him to whom it belonged. The first hath a momentary enjoyment, whilst the latter is deprived of existence. Who would commit so great a crime against a poor animal, who is fed only by the herbs which grow wild in the woods, and whose belly is burnt up with hunger? Every book of knowledge, which is known to Oosana or to Vreehaspatee, is by nature planted in the understanding of women. The beauty of the Kokeela is his voice; the beauty of a wife is constancy to her husband; the beauty of the ill-favored is science; the beauty of the penitent is patience. What is too great a load for those who have strength? What is distance to the indefatigable? What is a foreign country to those who have science? Who is a stranger to those who have the habit of speaking kindly? Time drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action, which ought to be performed and is delayed in the execution. When Nature is forsaken by her lord, be she ever so great, she doth not survive. Suppose thyself a river, and a holy pilgrimage in the land of Bharata, of which truth is the water, good actions the banks, and compassion the current; and then, O son of Pandoo, wash thyself therein, for the inward soul is not to be purified by common water. As frogs to the pool, as birds to a lake full of water, so doth every species of wealth flow to the hands of him who exerteth himself. If we are rich with the riches which we neither give nor enjoy, we are rich with the riches which are buried in the caverns of the earth. He whose mind is at ease is possessed of all riches. is it not the same to one whose foot is enclosed in a shoe, as if the whole surface of the earth were covered with leather? Where have they, who are running here and there in search of riches, such happiness as those placid spirits enjoy who are gratified at the immortal fountain of happiness? All hath been read, all hath been heard, and all hath been followed by him who, having put hope behind him, dependeth not upon expectation. What is religion? Compassion for all things which have life. What is happiness? To animals in this world, health. What is kindness? A principle in the goode. What is philosophy? An entire separation from the world. To a hero of sound mind, what is his own, and what a foreign country? Wherever he halteth, that place is acquired by the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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splendor of his arms. When pleasure is arrived, it is worthy of attention; when trouble presenteth itself, the same; pains and pleasures have their revolutions like a wheel. One, although not possessed of a mine of gold, may find the offspring of his own nature, that noble ardor which hath for its object the accomplishment of the whole assemblage of virtues. Man should not be over-anxious for a subsistence, for it is provided by the Creator. The infant no sooner droppeth from the womb, than the breasts of the mother begin to stream. He, by whom geese were made white, parrots are stained green, and peacocks painted of various hues, — even he will provide for their support. He, whose inclination turneth away from an object, may be said to have obtained it.

[Wilkins, Sir Charles. THE BHAGVAT-GETA, transl. 1785. THE HEETOPADES, transl. Bath, 1787. THE STORY OF … SAKOONTALA, TRANSL. FROM THE MAHÄBHÄRATA. 1795. GRAMMAR OF THE SANSKRITA LANGUAGE. 1808.

Horace Hayman Wilson. THE MÉGHA DUTA: OR, CLOUD MESSENGER: A POEM IN THE SANSKRIT LANGUAGE BY KALIDASA, WITH TRANSL. IN ENGLISH VERSE. Calcutta, 1814, etc. SANSCRIT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY. Calcutta, 1819; 2nd edn., 1832. HINDU THEATRE. 3 vols. Calcutta, 1827, etc. THE VISHNU PURANA, transl. 1840; new edn., 1867-1870. ARIANA ANTIQUA, A DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT OF THE ANTIQUITIES AND COINS OF AFGHANISTAN. 1841. INTRODUCTION TO SANSKRIT GRAMMAR. 1841. RIG-VEDA SANHITA, translated: Volume 1, 1850; New Edition, 1868, II, 1854, III, 1857; completed by E.B. Cowell; IV, 1866, V-VI, 1870. Collective edn. of WORKS. 12 vols. 1862-1871] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

Professor Louis Agassiz completed LES POISSONS FOSSILES describing fossil fish of the world. This single monograph increases tenfold the formally described vertebrates known to science. PALEONTOLOGY

Based on earlier interpretations by Samuel Thomas von Soemmering, Edward Newman portrayed a Pterosaur as a furry bat. THE SCIENCE OF 1843 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

October 20, Sunday: George Combe the noted phrenologist wrote to Friend Lucretia Mott about a new work that displayed great scientific learning, that he had just recommended to his friend Robert Chambers, titled VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, which she should read as “another battery erected against superstition.”

The crowd-pleasing heresy offered by this book was that since species had evolved over time directed by divine intervention, to superior forms, we the perusers of this literature must be superior beings and greatly entitled, and authorized to do whatever we want. Although this is of course an ever popular conceit, it was inevitable that some would be wise enough to recognize it as what it is, and so the crowd-pleasing pseudoscientist who had authored it would need to keep his identity secret until his death 27 years later. THE SCIENCE OF 1844

VESTIGES offered enticing opportunities.... [Various cited passages] struck just the right note of tasteful solemnity. Fashionable readers, both women and men, scanned the reviews for such passages ... opening up possibilities for talk.... VESTIGES had the advantage of making an orthodox subject into something just dangerous enough to be attractive.... [Divine creation had been given] a topical frisson for the first time in years.... All in all, VESTIGES offered wonderful opportunities for displaying conversational skill. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1849

In about this period, Moses Kimball and P.T. Barnum purchased the contents of the Peale Museum (established in 1784). PALEONTOLOGY

Based on a humerus that measured a humongous 58 inches in circumference, Dr. Gideon Algernon Mantell named a new dinosaur species — Pelorosaurus, the 1st recognized sauropod. THE SCIENCE OF 1849 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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As the culmination of what are referred to in the trade as “Emerson’s most productive working years” (which had begun in 1836): the 2d edition of NATURE. The motto of this new edition included the inane Lamarckian formulation which Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck himself had seen fit to disavow, “striving to be man, the worm / Mounts through all the spires of form.”25

25. To me the formula is so blatantly speciesist as to amount within the human context to an implicit racism. “Worm aspiring” is hardly any advance over Alexander Pope’s “all must full or not coherent be” from the “Essay on Man.” Whatever this is, it is not biology, and hence not evolution either. The idea of the Great Chain of Being had already been under attack as of John Locke’s ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING in 1689-1690, but nothing in Waldo Emerson’s ideas constitute a dismissal, or a critique, of pre-evolutionary thinking. Nevertheless, on the basis of this motto and Emerson’s and his own entire inability to understand Darwinism, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway would later assert that Emerson, rather than Darwin and Wallace, had originated the theory of evolution! AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In this timeframe Ernst von Bibra was being informed by natives of the Chilean Andes that the fossil moraines there were due to earlier glaciers. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

Early in the 1850s, the family of Dr. John Kimball de Laski and Anne Wise de Laski moved to Carver’s Harbor (the village of Vinalhaven), and then to Iron Point, and later the village on North Haven, in the state of Maine. Dr. de Laski would be practicing medicine for nearly 30 years, during which time he also would be carefully observing the Maine landscape. He would catalog, for instance, evidences on the ground of the former extensive glaciation of the region.

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THE POETRY OF SCIENCE, OR STUDIES OF THE PHYSICAL PHENOMENA OF NATURE. BY ROBERT HUNT, AUTHOR OF ‘PANTHEA,’ ‘RESEARCHES ON LIGHT,’ ETC. ... FIRST AMERICAN FROM THE SECOND LONDON EDITION (Boston: Gould, Kendall, & Lincoln, 59 Washington Street).

THE POETRY OF SCIENCE

Henry Thoreau would comment on these materials in his essay “WALKING”. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“WALKING”: The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent, — others merely sensible, as the phrase is — others prophetic. Some forms of disease even may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.” The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

ROBERT HUNT HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“WALKING”: There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman, discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and but for provisions of nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.” But he observed “that those bodies which underwent this change during the day-light possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitment was no longer influencing them.” Hence it has been inferred that “The hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation, as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness. I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated; part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

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1851

Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker’s VICTORIA REGIA.

Gregor Mendel began a 2-year program of study at the University of Vienna. He would take a variety of courses and study with, or attend the lectures of, among others, Professor of Plant Physiology Franz Unger whose BOTANISCHE BRIEFE would in 1852 argue for the evolution of (i.e. non-fixity) of species, Andreas von Ettinghausen, whose course on experimental method and physical apparatus likely drew on his 1826 writings on combinatorial analysis and 1842 writings on the organization of experiments, and Christian Johann Doppler, a well-regarded lecturer on experimental physics.

Hofmeister described alternation of generations in higher plants.

Over the following four years Charles Darwin would be issuing 4 volumes of monographs on cirripedes (marine invertebrates including barnacles). His thorough research would be recognized with the Royal Medal.

Henry Thoreau read in Zoölogy and in Botany: • William Bartram and John Bartram JOHN BARTRAM’S BOOK WM. BARTRAM’S BOOK • Peter Kalm, a disciple of Carolus Linnaeus • the Baron Cuvier, teacher of Louis Agassiz • Loudon, apostle of the Linnaean “artificial” system of botanical classification • Stoever, the biographer of Carolus Linnaeus • Pultenay, a Linnaean • Carolus Linnaeus (in February 1852) • Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyramus de Candolle, apostle of the Linnaean “artificial” system of botanical classification (later) • Louis Agassiz and Augustus A. Gould’s revised edition of their 1848 PRINCIPLES OF ZOÖLOGY: TOUCHING THE STRUCTURE, DEVELOPMENT, DISTRIBUTION AND NATURAL ARRANGEMENT OF THE RACES OF ANIMALS, LIVING AND EXTINCT; WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS. FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES. PT. I. COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGY AGASSIZ & GOULD 1851 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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CAPE COD: The Greeks would not have called the ocean or unfruitful, though it does not produce wheat, if they had viewed it by the light of modern science, for naturalists now assert that “the sea, and not the land, is the principal seat of life,”– though not of vegetable life. Darwin affirms that “our most thickly inhabited forests appear almost as deserts when we come to compare them with the corresponding regions of the ocean.” Agassiz and Gould tell us that “the sea teems with animals of all classes, far beyond the extreme limit of flowering plants”; but they add, that “experiments of dredging in very deep water have also taught us that the abyss of the ocean is nearly a desert”; –“so that modern investigations,” to quote the words of Desor, “merely go to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated by the ancient poets and philosophers, that the Ocean is the origin of all things.” Yet marine animals and plants hold a lower rank in the scale of being than land animals and plants. “There is no instance known,” says Desor, “of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after having lived in its lower stage on dry land,” but as in the case of the tadpole, “the progress invariably points towards the dry land.” In short, the dry land itself came through and out of the water on its way to the heavens, for, “in going back through the geological ages, we come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with water.” We looked on the sea, then, once more, not as , or unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the “laboratory of continents.”

PIERRE JEAN ÉDOUARD DESOR AGASSIZ & GOULD CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 27, Thursday (to March 3): Henry Thoreau would be surveying, during this period, for Cyrus Stow, a Pine Hill woodlot in the east part of Concord, in the rear of Joseph Merriam’s house off Old Bedford Road.

(The invoice for this work has been preserved in the Thoreau Collection at Middlebury College.)

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/137.htm

February 27, Thursday: Saw today on Pine Hill behind Mr. Joseph Merriam’s House a Norway pine. The first I have seen in Concord– Mr Gleason pointed it out to me as a singular pine which he did not know the name of. It was a very handsome tree about 25 feet high. E Wood thinks that he has lost the surface of 2 acres of his meadow by the ice.– Got 15 cartloads out of a hummock left on another meadow Blue joint was introduced into the first meadow where it did not grow before. Of two men, one of whom knows nothing about a subject, and what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing –and the other really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all– What great advantage has the latter over the former? Which is the best to deal with? I do not know that knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel & grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before. An indefinite sence of the grandeur & glory of the Universe. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun But man cannot be said to know in any higher sense, than he can look serenely & with impunity in the face of ASTRONOMY the sun. A culture which imports much muck from the meadows & deepens the soil –not that which trusts to heating manures & improved agricultural implements only. How when a man purchases a thing he is determined to get & get hold of it using how many expletives & how long a string of synonomous or similiar terms signifying possession –in the legal process– What’s mine’s my own. An old Deed of a small piece of swamp land which I have lately surveyed at the risk of being mired past recovery says “that the said Spaulding his Heirs & Assigns, shall and may from time, & at all times forever hereafter, by force & virtue of these presents, lawfully, peaceably and quietly have, hold, use, occupy, possess and enjoy the said swamp &c” Magnetic iron being anciently found in Magnesia hence –magnes or magnet employed by Pliny & others– Chinese appear to have discovered the magnet very early A D 121 & before? used by them to steer ships in 419 –mentioned by an Icelander 1068 –in a French poem 1181 In Torfaeus Hist of Norway 1266 –used by PLINY DeGama in 1427 leading stone hence load stone The peroxide of hydrogen or ozone at first thought to be a chemical curiosity merely is found to be very generally diffussed through nature. The following bears on the floating ice which has risen from the bottom of the meadows– Robert Hunt says “Water conducts heat downward but very slowly; a mass of ice will remain undissolved but a few inches under water, on the surface of which, ether, or any other inflammable body, is burning. If ice swam beneath the surface, the summer sun would scarcely have power to thaw it; and thus our lakes & seas would be gradually converted into solid masses”26 The figures of serpents of griffins flying dragons and other embellishments of heraldry –the eastern idea of the world on an elephant that on a tortoise & that on a serpent again &c usually regarded as mythological in the 26. Wouldn’t Henry have been fascinated to learn that Walden Pond originated as a mass of buried, slowly melting ice left behind by glaciation? THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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com. sense of that word –are thought by Hunt? to “indicate a faint & shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence” –such as geology partly reveals. The fossil tortoise has been found in Asia large enough to support an elephant. Ammonites, snake-stones, or petrified snakes have been found from of old –often decapitated. In the N part of Grt Britain the fossil remains of encrinites are called “St. Cuthbert’s beads.” –“fiction dependant on truth.” Westward is Heaven or rather heavenward is the west. The way to heaven is from east to west around the ASTRONOMY earth The sun leads & shows it The stars too light it. Nature & man Some prefer the one others the other; but that is all dè gustibus– It makes no odds at what well you drink, provided it be a well-head. Walking in the woods it may be some afternoon the shadow of the wings of a thought flits across the landscape of my mind And I am reminded how little eventful is our lives What have been all these wars & survivors of wars and modern discoveries & improvements so called a mere irritation in the skin. But this shadow which is so soon past & whose substance is not detected suggests that there are events of importance whose interval is to us a true historic period. The lecturer is wont to describe the 19th century –the American the last generation in an offhand & triumphant strain –wafting him to Paradise spreading his fame by steam & telegraph –recounting the number of wooden stopples he has whittled But who does not perceive that this is not a sincere or pertinent account of any man’s or nation’s life. It is the hip hip hurrah & mutual admiration society style. Cars go by & we know their substance as well as their shadow. They stop & we get into them. But those sublime thoughts passing on high do not stop & we never get into them. Their conductor is not like one of us. I feel that the man who in his conversation with me about the life of man in New England lays much stress on rail-roads telegraphs & such enterprises does not go below the surface of things– He treats the shallow & transitory as if it were profound & enduring in one of the minds avatars in the intervals between sleeping & waking –aye even in one of the interstices of a Hindoo dynasty perchance such things as the 19th century with all its improvements may come & go again. Nothing makes a deep & lasting impression but what is weighty Obey the law which reveals and not the law revealed. I wish my neighbors were wilder. A wildness whose glance no civilization could endure. He who lives according to the highest law –is in one sense lawless That is an unfortunate discovery certainlly that of a law which binds us where we did not know that we were bound. Live free –child of the mist. He who for whom the law is made who does not obey the law but whom the law obeys –reclines on pillows of down and is wafted at will whither he pleases –for man is superior to all laws both of heaven & earth. (when he takes his liberty.) Wild as if we lived on the marrow of antelopes devourd raw There would seem to be men in whose lives there have been no events of importance more than in the beetles which crawls in our path. ARTIST OF KOUROO

One of the things we can become aware of from the above is that Thoreau was still processing the information in the materials he checked out last December from Stacy’s Circulating Library in Concord, Roualeyn George Gordon-Cumming’s account of FIVE YEARS OF A HUNTER’S LIFE IN THE FAR INTERIOR OF SOUTH AFRICA. WITH NOTICES OF THE NATIVE TRIBES, AND ANECDOTES OF THE CHASE OF THE LION, ELEPHANT, HIPPOPOTAMUS, GIRAFFE, RHINOCEROS, &C. (New York: Harper & brothers). FIVE YEARS IN AFRICA, I FIVE YEARS IN AFRICA, II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 1, Friday: We learn from a couple of incidental mentions in the journal, that at this point Henry Thoreau was in the process of studying the 16 volumes of the Baron Cuvier’s THE ANIMAL KINGDOM,27 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 1 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 2 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 3 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 4 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 5 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 6 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 7 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 8 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 9 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 10 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 11 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 12 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 13 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 14 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 15 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 16 Louis Agassiz and Augustus A. Gould’s PRINCIPLES OF ZOOLOGY, and Peter Kalm’s TRAVELS INTO NORTH AMERICA. He stopped by the Boston Society of Natural History to return 2 books, one of them Volume I of the MEMOIRS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, new series, and check out the MEMOIRS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, Volume IV, Part 1, and Friend William Bartram’s botanical TRAVELS THROUGH NORTH AND SOUTH CAROLINA, GEORGIA, EAST AND WEST FLORIDA, THE CHEROKEE COUNTRY, THE EXTENSIVE TERRITORIES OF THE MUSCOGULGES, OR CREEK CONFEDERACY, AND HDT WHAT? INDEX

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27. In 1827 the initial five volumes were printed, the 1st four as THE CLASS MAMMALIA / ARRANGED BY THE BARON CUVIER, WITH SPECIFIC DESCRIPTIONS BY EDWARD GRIFFITH, CHARLES HAMILTON SMITH AND EDWARD PIDGEON and the 5th as SYNOPSIS OF THE SPECIES OF THE CLASS MAMMALIA, AS ARRANGED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR ORGANIZATION BY CUVIER AND OTHER NATURALISTS: WITH SPECIFIC CHARACTERS, SYNONYMA, &C. &C. In 1829 volumes 6, 7, and 8 appeared as THE CLASS AVES / ARRANGED BY THE BARON CUVIER, WITH SPECIFIC DESCRIPTIONS BY EDWARD GRIFFITH AND EDWARD PIDGEON, THE ADDITIONAL SPECIES INSERTED IN THE TEXT OF CUVIER BY JOHN EDWARD GRAY. In 1830 the 11th volume appeared out of sequence, as THE FOSSIL REMAINS OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM / BY EDWARD PIDGEON. In 1831 the 9th volume appeared as THE CLASS REPTILIA / ARRANGED BY THE BARON CUVIER, WITH SPECIFIC DESCRIPTIONS BY EDWARD GRIFFITH AND EDWARD PIDGEON. In 1832 the 14th and 15th volumes appeared out of sequence, as THE CLASS INSECTA / ARRANGED BY THE BARON CUVIER, WITH SUPPLEMENTARY ADDITIONS TO EACH ORDER BY EDWARD GRIFFITH AND EDWARD PIDGEON, AND NOTICES OF NEW GENERA AND SPECIES BY GEORGE GRAY. In 1833 the 13th volume appeared out of sequence, as THE CLASSES ANNELIDA, CRUSTACEA, AND ARACHNIDA / ARRANGED BY THE BARON CUVIER, WITH SUPPLEMENTARY ADDITIONS TO EACH ORDER BY EDWARD GRIFFITH AND EDWARD PIDGEON. In 1834 the 10th volume appeared as THE CLASS PISCES / ARRANGED BY THE BARON CUVIER, WITH SUPPLEMENTARY ADDITIONS BY EDWARD GRIFFITH AND CHARLES HAMILTON SMITH and the 12th volume appeared as THE MOLLUSCA AND RADIATA / ARRANGED BY THE BARON CUVIER, WITH SUPPLEMENTARY ADDITIONS TO EACH ORDER BY EDWARD GRIFFITH AND EDWARD PIDGEON. The final, 16th, volume of the set, of which I am unable at present to provide electronic copy, was unnumbered and undated and bore the title A CLASSIFIED INDEX AND SYNOPSIS OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM ARRANGED IN CONFORMITY WITH ITS ORGANIZATION, BY THE BARON CUVIER ..., WITH SUPPLEMENTARY ADDITIONS TO EACH ORDER, BY EDWARD GRIFFITH ... AND OTHERS (this final volume included “A tabular view of the classification of animals adopted by the Baron Cuvier; with specific examples”). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE COUNTRY OF THE CHACTAWS.

PEOPLE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: The customs of some savage nations might, perchance be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a “busk,” or “feast of first fruits,” as Bartram describes to have been the custom of the Mucclasse Indians? “When a town celebrates the busk,” says he, “having previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town, of their filth, which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in town is extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the gratification of every appetite and passion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return to their town.–” “On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame.” They then feast on the new corn and fruits and dance and sing for three days, “and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like manner purified and prepared themselves.” The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come to an end. I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the dictionary defines it, “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” than this, and I have no doubt that they were originally inspired directly from Heaven to do thus, though they have no biblical record of the revelation.

AUGUSTINE WILLIAM BARTRAM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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NOAH WEBSTER

WM. BARTRAM’S BOOK

left at 9 AM Aug. 1st After Kingston –came Plympton Halifax & Hanson all level with frequent cedar swamps especially the last – also in Weymouth. Desor & Cabot think the jelly-fish (oceania tubulosa are buds from a polyp of Genus Lyncoryne.) Desor accounting for suspended moisture or fogs over sand banks (or shoals) says the heat being abstracted by radiation the moisture is condensed in form of fog. Lieut Walsh lost his lead & wire when 34,200 or more than 6 statute miles had run out perpendicularly. I could make a list of things ill-managed– We Yankees do not deserve our fame. viz: I went to a menagerie the other day. The proprietors had taken wonderful pains to collect rare and interesting animals from all parts of the world. And then placed by them –a few stupid and ignorant fellows who knew little or nothing about the animals & were unwilling even to communicate the little they knew. You catch a rare creature interesting to all mankind & then place the first biped that comes along with but a grain more reason in him to exhibit & describe the former– At the expense of Millions this rare quadruped from the sun is obtained, and then Jack Halyard or Tom Coach Whip is hired to explain it. Why all this pains taken to catch in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Africa –and no pains taken to exhibit in America? Not a cage was labelled– There was nobody to tell us how or where the animals were caught –or what they were– Probably the proprietors themselves do not know –or what their habits are– But hardly had we been ushered into the presence of this choice this admirable collection –than a ring was formed for Master Jack & the poney. Were they animals then who had caught and exhibited these –& who had come to see these? Would it not be worth the while to learn something? to have some information imparted? The absurdity of importing the behemoth & then instead of somebody appearing tell which it is –to have to while away the time –though your curiosity is growing desperate –to learn one fact about the creature –to have Jack and the poney introduced!!! GEORGES CUVIER Why I expected to see some descendant of Cuviers there to improve this opportunity for a lecture on Nat. Hist. That is what they should do make this an –occasion for communicating some solid information –that would be fun alive that would be a sunny day –a sun day in one’s existence not a secular day of shetland ponies –not jack and his poney & a tintimmara of musical instruments –and a man with his head in the lions mouth. I go not there to see a man hug a lion –or fondle a tiger –but to learn how he is related to the wild beast– There’ll be All-fool days enough without our creating any intentionally. The presumption is that men wish to behave like reasonable creatures –that they do not need and are not seeking relaxation –that they are not dissipated. Let it be a travelling zoological garden –with a travelling professor to accompany it– At present foolishly the professor goes alone with his poor painted illustrations of animated– While the menagerie takes another road without its professor only its keepers. I see June & co or Van Amberg & Co –are engaged in a pecuniary speculation in which certain wild beasts are used as the counters Cuvier & co are engaged in giving a course of lectures on Nat. History. Now why could they not put head & means together for the benefit of mankind –and still get their living. The present institution is imperfect precisely because its object is to enrich Van amburg & co –& their low aim unfits them for rendering any more valuable service –but no doubt the most valuable course would also be the most valuable in a pecuniary sense– No doubt a low self interest is a better motive force to these enterprises than no interest at all but a high self interest –which consists with the greatest advantage of all would be a better still. Item 2nd Why have we not a decent pocket map of the State of Mass? There is the large map why is it not cut into half a dozen sheets & folded into a small cover for the pocket? Are there no travellers to use it? Well to tell the truth there are but few, & that’s the reason why. Men go by rail road –& state maps hanging in bar rooms are small enough– The state has been admirably surveyed at a great cost –and yet Dearborne’s Pocket map is the best one –we have! PIERRE JEAN ÉDOUARD DESOR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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CAPE COD: The Greeks would not have called the ocean or unfruitful, though it does not produce wheat, if they had viewed it by the light of modern science, for naturalists now assert that “the sea, and not the land, is the principal seat of life,”– though not of vegetable life. Darwin affirms that “our most thickly inhabited forests appear almost as deserts when we come to compare them with the corresponding regions of the ocean.” Agassiz and Gould tell us that “the sea teems with animals of all classes, far beyond the extreme limit of flowering plants”; but they add, that “experiments of dredging in very deep water have also taught us that the abyss of the ocean is nearly a desert”; –“so that modern investigations,” to quote the words of Desor, “merely go to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated by the ancient poets and philosophers, that the Ocean is the origin of all things.” Yet marine animals and plants hold a lower rank in the scale of being than land animals and plants. “There is no instance known,” says Desor, “of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after having lived in its lower stage on dry land,” but as in the case of the tadpole, “the progress invariably points towards the dry land.” In short, the dry land itself came through and out of the water on its way to the heavens, for, “in going back through the geological ages, we come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with water.” We looked on the sea, then, once more, not as , or unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the “laboratory of continents.”

PIERRE JEAN ÉDOUARD DESOR AGASSIZ & GOULD CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 11, Monday: Henry Thoreau and Bronson Alcott took the train to Cambridge and passed the forenoon in Harvard Library. Bronson looked at the section of English poetry of the Elizabethan age but couldn’t find any book he wanted to check out. Henry returned the books he had checked out on August 1st and checked out Volume I of the Second Series of the COLLECTIONS OF THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, which contains EXTRACTS FROM THE NEW WORLD, OR, A DESCRIPTION OF THE WEST INDIES. BY JOHN DE LAET, DIRECTOR OF THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY, &C. TRANSLATED TR. FROM THE ORIGINAL DUTCH, BY THE EDITOR [George Folsom]).28 THE ENTIRE VOLUME

JOHANNES DE LAET

In addition, he checked out the first three volumes of Peter Kalm’s TRAVELS INTO NORTH AMERICA; CONTAINING ITS NATURAL HISTORY, AND A CIRCUMSTANTIAL ACCOUNT OF ITS PLANTATIONS AND AGRICULTURE IN GENERAL ... (English version of 1770; Thoreau had evidently already been reading Kalm in volumes obtained from the library of the Boston Society of Natural History). PETER KALM’S TRAVELS PETER KALM’S TRAVELS

Later, Henry dined with the Alcotts and borrowed Bronson’s copy of REI RUSTICAE AUCTORES LATINE VETERES, M. CATO, M. VARRO, L. COLVMELLA, PALLÂDIVS: PRIORES TRES, E VETUSTISS. EDITIONIBUS; QUARTUS, E VETERIBUS MEMBRANIS ALIQUAMMULTIS IN LOCIS EMENDATIORES: CUM TRIBUS INDICUBUS, CAPITUM, AUCTORUM, & RERUM AC VERBORUM MEMORABILIUM …. REI RUSTICAE AUCTORES...

“There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away” — Emily Dickinson

28. He would place his notes from this reading in his Canadian Notebook and in his Indian Notebook #5. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(I should mention at some point, and therefore will insert the material arbitrarily at this point in the Kouroo Contexture, that Thoreau had in his personal library one of the editions of a very expansive Latin/English lexicon that was being published regularly over the years by Harper & Brothers of New-York, A COPIOUS AND CRITICAL LATIN-ENGLISH LEXICON: FOUNDED ON THE LARGER LATIN-GERMAN LEXICON OF DR. WILLIAM FREUND; WITH ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS FROM THE LEXICONS OF GESNER, FACCIOLATI, SCHELLER, GEORGES, ETC, by Professor Ethan Allen Andrews. We do not know which edition it was that Thoreau owned, but it is the 1851 edition that is presently offered online by Google Books: .)

Thoreau commented in WALDEN that old Marcus Porcius Cato the Censor’s DE RE RUSTICA was his “Cultivator.” Compare this antique text that he at this point borrows from Alcott’s library, therefore, with a “Pictorial Cultivator” magazine being produced monthly for the farmers of Thoreau’s own era: PICTORIAL CULTIVATOR

WALDEN: Old Cato, whose “De Re Rusticâ” is my “Cultivator,” says, and the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, “When you think of getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good.” I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Marcus Porcius Cato (the Elder) (the Censor) 234-149 BCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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There were a great many holidays at Plumfield, and one of the most delightful was the yearly apple-picking, — for then the Marches, Laurences, Brookes, and Bhaers turned out in full force, and made a day of it. Five years after Jo’s wedding, one of these fruitful festivals occurred. — A mellow October day, when the air was full of an exhilarating freshness which made the spirits rise and the blood dance healthily in the veins. The old orchard wore its holiday attire; golden-rod and asters fringed the mossy walls; grasshoppers skipped briskly in the sere grass, and crickets chirped like fairy pipers at a feast. Squirrels were busy with their small harvesting; birds twittered their adieux from the alders in the lane; and every tree stood ready to send down its shower of red or yellow apples at the first shake. Everybody was there, — everybody laughed and sang, climbed up and tumbled down; everybody declared that there never had been such a perfect day or such a jolly set to enjoy it, — and every one gave themselves up to the simple pleasures of the hour as freely as if there were no such things as care or sorrow in the world. Mr. March strolled placidly about, quoting Tusser, Cowley, and COLUMELLA Columella to Mr. Laurence, while enjoying “The gentle apple’s winey juice.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

Thoreau also went to the Society of Natural History, and looked at Louis Agassiz and Augustus A. Gould’s PRINCIPLES OF ZOÖLOGY in its new edition. AGASSIZ & GOULD 1851

(He also looked through the 16 volumes of the Baron Cuvier’s THE ANIMAL KINGDOM.) ANIMAL KINGDOM, 1 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 2 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 3 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 4 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 5 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 6 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 7 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 8 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 9 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 10 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 11 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 12 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 13 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 14 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 15 ANIMAL KINGDOM, 16

August 19, Tuesday: Clematis Virginiana –Calamint –Lycopus Europeus water horehound This is a world where there are flowers. Now at 5 AM the fog which in the west looks like a wreath of hard rolled cotton batting –is rapidly dispersing. The echo of the railroad whistle is heard the horizon round –the gravel train is starting out. The farmers are cradling oats in some places. For some days past I have noticed a red maple or two about the pond though we have had no frost. The grass is very wet with dew this morning. The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them & out of themselves HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

reminds me of those monkies which cling by their tails –aye whose tails contract about the limbs –even the dead limbs of the forest and they hang suspended beyond the hunters reach long after they are dead It is of no use to argue with such men They have not an apprehensive intellect but merely as it were a prehensile tail. Their intellect possesses merely the quality of a prehensile tail. The tail itself contracts around the dead limb even after they themselves are dead –and not till corruption takes place do they fall. The black howling monkey, or Caraya –according to Azara it is extremely dif. to get at them for “When mortally wounded they coil the tail round a branch, and hang by it with the head downwards for days after death, CUVIER and until, in fact, decomposition begins to take effect.”– The commenting Naturalist says “a singular peculiarity of this organ is to contract at its extremity of its own accord as soon as it is extended to its full length.” I relinquish argument, I wait for decomposition to take place, for the subject is dead. as I value the hide for museums. They say “though you’ve got my soul, you shan’t have my carcass.”

PM to Marlboro Road via Clamshell Hill –Jenny Dugan’s –Round Pond Canoe Birch road (Dea Dakins) &White Pond.–

How many things concur to keep a man at home, to prevent his yielding to his inclination to wander. If I would extend my walk a hundred miles I must carry a tent on my back for shelter at night or in the rain, or at least I must carry a thick coat to be prepared for a change in the weather. So that it requires some resolution as well as energy and foresight to undertake the simplest journey. Man does not travel as easily as the birds migrate– He is not everywhere at home like flies. When I think how many things I can conveniently carry, I am wont to think it most convenient to stay at home. My home then to a certain extent is the place where I keep my thick- coat & my tent & some books which I can not carry. Where next I can depend upon meeting some friends– And where finally I even I have established myself in business– But this last in my case is the least important qualification of a home. The poet must be continually watching the moods of his mind as the astronomer watches the aspects of the heavens. What might we not expect from a long life faithfully spent in this wise –the humblest observer would see some stars shoot.– A faithful description as by a disinterested person of the thoughts which visited a certain mind in 3 score years & 10 as when one reports the number & character of the vehicles which pass a particular point. As travellers go round the world and report natural objects & phenomena –so faithfully let another stay at home & report the phenomena of his own life. Catalogue stars –those thoughts whose orbits are as rarely calculated as comets It matters not whether they visit my mind or yours –whether the meteor falls in my field or in yours –only that it came from heaven. (I am not concerned to express that kind of truth which nature has HDT WHAT? INDEX

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expressed. Who knows but I may suggest some things to her. Time was when she was indebted to such suggestions from another quarter –as her present advancement shows. I deal with the truths that recommend themselves to me please me –not those merely which any system has voted to accept.) A meteorological journal of the mind– You shall observe what occurs in your latitude, I in mine. Some institutions –most institutions, indeed, have had a divine origin. But of most that we see prevailing in society nothing but the form, the shell, is left –the life is extinct –and there is nothing divine in them. Then the reformer arises inspired to reinstitute life –& what ever he does or causes to be done is a reestablishment of that same or a similar divineness. But some who never knew the significance of these instincts –are by a sort of false instinct found clinging to the shells. Those who have no knowledge of the divine appoint themselves defenders of the divine –as champions of the church &c I have been astonished to observe how long some audiences can endure to hear a man speak on a subject which he knows nothing about –as religion for instance –when one who has no ear for music might with the same propriety take up the time of a musical assembly with putting through his opinions on music. This young man who is the main pillar of some divine institution –does he know what he has undertaken. If the saints were to come again on earth would they be likely to stay at his house –would they meet with his approbation even? Ne sutor ultra crepidam. They who merely have a talent for affairs –are forward to express their opinions– A Roman soldier sits there to decide upon the righteousness of Christ– The world does not long endure such blunders –though they are made every day. The weak-brained & pusilanimous farmers would fain abide by the the institutions of their fathers. their argument is they have not long to live, and for that little space let them not be disturbed in their slumbers –blessed are the peace makers –let this cup pass from me &c How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move my thoughts begin to flow –as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end & consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper. A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought –burst forth & fertilise my brain. you need to increase the draught below –as the owners of meadows on C. river say of the Billerica Dam. Only while we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical wooden dull to read. The grass in the high pastures is almost as dry as hay– The seasons do not cease a moment to revolve and therefore nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant the summer may go by & you not see it. How much of the year is spring & fall –how little can be called summer! The grass is no sooner grown than it begins to wither– How much nature herself suffers from drought! It seems quite as much as she can do to produce these crops The most inattentive walker can see how the science of geology took its rise. The inland hills & promontories betray the action of water on their rounded sides as plainly as if the work were completed yesterday. He sees it with but half an eye as he walks & forgets his thought again. Also the level plains & more recent meadows & marine shells found on the tops of hills– The Geologist painfully & elaborately follows out these suggestions –& hence his fine spun theories. The gold finch [American Goldfinch Carduleis tristis] –though solitary is now one of the commonest birds in the air. What if a man were earnestly & wisely to set about recollecting & preserving the thoughts which he has had! How many perchance are now irrecoverable!– Calling in his neighbors to aid him. I do not like to hear the name of particular states given to birds & flowers which are found in all equally– Maryland yellow throat [Common Yellowthroat Geothlypis trichas] &c &c The Canadenses & virginicas may be suffered to pass for the most part for there is historical reason at least for them Canada is the peculiar country of some & the northern limit of many more plants And Virginia which was originally the name for all the Atlantic shore has some right to stand for the south. The fruit of the sweet gale by nut-meadow brook is of a yellowish green now & has not yet its greasy feel. The little red streaked & dotted excresences on –the shrub oaks I find as yet no name for. Now for the pretty red capsules or pods of the Hypericum Canadense White golden rod is budded along the Marlboro Road Chicadees [Black-capped Chicadee Parus Atricapillus] & jays [Blue Jay Cyanocitta cristata] never fail– The cricket’s is a note which does not attract you to itself. It is not easy to find one I fear that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct & scientific– That in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope– I see details not wholes nor the shadow of the whole. I count some parts, & say ‘I know’. The cricket’s chirp now fills the air in dry fields near pine woods. Gathered our first watermelon today. By the Marl. Road I notice the richly veined leaves of the Neottia pubescens or veined Neottia Rattle-snake plantain. I like this last name very well though it might not be easy to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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convince a quibbler or proser of its fitness. We want some name to express the mystic wildness of its rich leaves. Such work as men imitate in their embroidery –unaccountably agreeable to the eye –as if it answered its end only when it met the eye of man –a reticulated leaf –visible only on one side –little strings which make one pause in the woods –take captive the eye. Here is a bee’s or wasp’s nest in the sandy mouldering bank by the road side –4 inches in diameter –as if made of scales of striped brown paper. It is singular if indeed man first made paper & then discovered its resemblance to the work of the wasps & did not derive the hint from them. Canoe birches by road to Dakins’ –Cuticle stripped off –inner bark dead & scaling off –new (inner) bark formed The solomans seals are fruited now with finely red-dotted berries There was one original name well given Buster Kendal. The fragrance of the clethra fills the air by water sides. In the hollows where in winter is a pond the grass is short thick & green still –and here & there are tufts pulled up as if by the mouth of cows. Small rough sunflower by side of road between Canoe birch & white pond. Helianthus divaricatus. Lespedeza capitata, shrubby Lespedeza White pond road & Marl. road “ Polystachya, Hairy “ Corner Road beyond Hub’s Bridge.29

29.The poet W.H. Auden has in 1962 brought forward a snippet from this day’s entry as:

THE VIKING BOOK OF APHORISMS, A PERSONAL SELECTION BY W.H. AUDEN...

Pg Topic Aphorism Selected by Auden out of Thoreau

277 Writers and Readers How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1852

February 3, Tuesday: Queen Victoria opened Parliament, officially inaugurating the completed houses at Westminster that had been designed by Sir Charles Barry.

In Argentina, insurgents supported by Brazil and Uruguay fought at Caseros and brought about the overthrow of Governor Juan Manuel de Rosas.

In the Sophiensaal of Vienna, Fünf Paragraphe aus dem Walzer-Codex op.105 by Johann Baptist Strauss was performed for the initial time.

Professor Robert M. Thorson points up the remarkable fact that in his journal entry for this day “Thoreau narrated an astonishingly accurate vision for the ice-sheet glaciation of Concord”: “Who can believe that this is the habitable globe. The scenery is wholly arctic. Fair Haven Pond is a Baffin’s Bay. Man must have ascertained the limits of the winter before he ventured to withstand it & not migrate with the birds. No cultivated field – no house – no candle. All is as dreary as the shores of the Frozen Ocean. I can tell where there is wood & where open land for many miles in the horizon by the darkness of the former & whiteness of the latter. The trees especially the young oaks covered with leaves stand out distinctly in this bright light from contrast with the snow – It looks as if the snow & ice of the arctic world. travelling like a glacier had crept down southward and overwhelmed & buried New England.” He wonders what Henry might have been able to accomplish for the new science of Paleoclimatology, if the naturalists of his generation had not been so entirely misled by the likes of Lidian Jackson Emerson’s brother the “I-discovered-this-and-discovered-that-as-well” pretender Charles T. Jackson, and the natural theologian the Reverend Edward Hitchcock (whose fantasies are described in CAPE COD). THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 3, Tuesday: When I review the list of my acquaintances from the most impartial point of view, and consider each ones excesses & defects of character – which are the subject of mutual ridicule astonishment and pity –, and I class myself among them – I cannot help asking myself if this is the sane world, what must a mad-house be? It is only by a certain flattery, and an ignoring of their faults that even the best are made available for society. I have been to the Libraries (yesterday) at Cambridge & Boston. It would seem as if all things compelled us to originality. How happens it that I find not in the country, in the field & woods the works even of like minded naturalists & poets – Those who have expressed the purest & deepest love of nature – have not recorded it on the bark of the trees with the lichens – they have left no memento of it there – but if I would read their books I must go to the city – so strange & repulsive both to them & to me – & deal with men & institutions with whom I have no sympathy. When I have just been there on this errand, it seems too great a price to pay, for access even to the works of Homer or Chaucer – or Linnaeus. Greece & Asia Minor should henceforth bear Iliads & Odysseys as their trees lichens. But no! If the works of nature are in any sense collected in the forest – the works of man are to a still greater extent collected in the city. I have sometimes imagined a library i.e. a collection of the works of true poets philosophers naturalists &c deposited not in a brick or marble edifice in a crowded & dusty city – guarded by cold-blooded & methodical officials – & preyed on by bookworms – In which you own no share, and are not likely to – but rather far away in the depths of a primitive forest – like the ruins of central America – where you can trace a series of crumbling alcoves – the older books protecting the more modern from the elements – partially buried by the luxuriance of nature – which the heroic student could reach only after adventures in the wilderness, amid wild beasts & wild men – That to my imagination seems a fitter place for these interesting relics, which owe no small part of their interest to their antiquity – and whose occasion is nature – than the well preserved edifice – with its well preserved officials on the side of a city’s square – More terrible than lions & tigers these Cerberuses. Access to nature for original observation is secured by one ticket – by one kind of expense – but access to the works of your predecessors by a very different kind of expense – All things tend to cherish the originality of the original. Nature at least takes no pains to introduce him to the works of his predecessors – but only presents him with her own Opera Omnia. Is it the lover of nature who has access to all that has been written on the subject of his favorite studies? No; he lives far away from this. It is the lover of books & systems – who know nature chiefly at 2nd hand. The botanists have a phrase – Mantissa – as Mantissa Plantarum (Lin.) which I suppose means an over-measure or additional matter about. A convenient term. – Also Prodromus – as a forerunner or preparer of the way. Suent is an expressive word applied to machinery whose joints are worn – which has got into working order – apparently from sueo – to be accustomed. So of the writers faculties. About 6 Pm walked to Cliffs via RR. The sun had set without a cloud in the sky – a rare occurence – but I missed the clouds – which make the glory of evening – The sky must have a few clouds – as the mind a few moods – nor is the evening the less serene for them. There is only a tinge of red along the horizon. The moon is nearly full tonight30 – and the moment is passed when the light in the east (i.e. of the moon) balances the light in the west. With the Latins apparently there was afternoon – tempus pomeridianum or post meridien – then perhaps sunset sole occidente when sol inclinat vel decedit then perhaps evening – when the evening star reigns vespera  ? (spelling) vesperascit the evening approaches. (By the way a studying (or working) by candlelight is a lucubratio a luce – study all night is elucubratio also labor vespertinus. Serotinus also means in the evening – & more than that for Pliny says Praecocibus brevior [vita] quam serotinis. which cannot be expressed so elegantly in English) After sundown I should have put twilight – crepusculum (crepera lux or doubtful light) Then comes decided night or Nox – multa nox – Staying up all night pervigilium or pervigilatio The night far spent – Nox adulta – Midnight Nox silens vel profunda – Meridies noctis – A starlight night Nox sideria – Night- shining noctulucens – Night tripping noctu cursitans I would not be a mere tenebrio or lucifugus – shunning the day-light & delighting to skulk in darkness – but simply I am a noctivagus – My walk may be pernox but not perniciosus. They are Vigiliae Nocturnae. That little bird that I hear & call the night-warbler – may be trans. Noctu suave canens When the moon does not shine all night it is not a pernox luna Selenites “is a stone (as is said) in Arabia, wherein is a white, which decreases & increases with the moon” Dict. My summer journal was selenitic in this sense. It had this white spot in it. VENUS Venus is now like a little moon in the west – & the lights in the village twinkle like stars. It is perfectly still – & not very cold. The shadows of the trees on the snow are more minutely distinct than at any other season – not dark masses merely – but finely reticulated each limb & twig represented – as cannot be in summer, both from the leaves & the inequality & darkness of the ground. The heavens appear less thickly starred & less habitable than in summer. rather a few bright stars – brought nearer by this splendid twinkling – than countless points in 30. It would be full on the night of the 4th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the warm deeps. I hear my old acquaintance the owl [Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus] from the Causeway. The reflector of the cars as I stand over the deep cut – makes a large & dazzling light in this air – The cars do not make much noise – or else I am used to it and now whizzes the boiling sizzling kettle by me – in which the passengers make me think of potatoes – which a fork would show to be done by this time. The steam is denser for the cold & more white – like the purest downy clouds in the summer sky its volumes roll up between me & the moon. And far behind when the cars are a mile off it still goes shading the fields with its wreathes. The breath of the panting traveller. I now cross from the RR to the road. This snow, which fell day before yesterday is nearly 2 feet deep – pure & powdery – there is but little on the trees except the Pitch pines. From a myriad little crystal mirrors the moon is reflected which is the untarnished sparkle of its surface – I hear a gentle rustling of the oak leaves as I go through the woods. – but this snow has yet no troops of leaves on its surface – The snow evidently by its smooth crust assists in the more equal dispersion & distribution of the leaves which course over it blown by the & perchance for this reason the oak leaves & some others hang on. Now through the Spring woods & up Fair Haven Hill – Here in the midst of a clearing where the choppers have been leaving the woods in pieces today – and the tops of the pine trees are strewn about half buried in snow, only the saw logs being carried off – it is stiller & milder than by day & I think the chopper might work here more comfortably in some respects now – but he is at home in the village getting rest or recreation. Instead of the sound of his axe, I hear the hooting of an owl – nocturnus ululatus – whose haunts he is laying waste. The ground is all pure white powdery snow which his sled &c has stirred up – except the scattered twigs & pine plumes – I can see every track distinctly where the teamster drove his oxen to the chopper’s piles & loaded his sled, & even the tracks of his dog in the moonlight – & plainly to write this. The moonlight now is very splendid in the untouched pine woods above the Cliffs – alternate patches of shade & light – the light has almost the brightness of sunlight – the fulgor – The stems of the trees are more obvious than by day being simple black against the moonlight & the snow. The sough of the breeze in the pine tops sounds far away like the surf on a distant shore – & for all sound beside there is only the rattling or chafing of little dry twigs – perchance a little snow falling on them – or they are so brittle that they break & fall with the motion of the trees. My owl [Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus] soundshoo hoo hoo—hoo The landscape covered with snow seen by moonlight from these Cliffs – encased in snowy armor two feet thick – gleaming in the moon & of spotless white. Who can believe that this is the habitable globe. The scenery is wholly arctic. Fair Haven Pond is a Baffin’s Bay. Man must have ascertained the limits of the winter before he ventured to withstand it & not migrate with the birds. No cultivated field – no house – no candle. All is as dreary as the shores of the Frozen Ocean. I can tell where there is wood & where open land for many miles in the horizon by the darkness of the former & whiteness of the latter. The trees especially the young oaks covered with leaves stand out distinctly in this bright light from contrast with the snow – It looks as if the snow & ice of the arctic world. travelling like a glacier had crept down southward and overwhelmed & buried New England – And see if a man can think his summer thoughts now – But the evening star is preparing to set – & I will return – Flowndering through snow sometimes up to my middle. Is not the sky unusually blue tonight? dark blue? Is it not always bluer when the ground is covered with snow in the winter – than in summer? The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience – He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person. Head calls the “sough” an aeolian murmur” That is a good mythological incident told of the wounded farmer – who his foot being lacerated & held fast between his plough & a fallen tree in a forest clearing – drew his oxen to him – with difficulty smeared their horns with blood which the mosquitoes had sucked from his bare arms – & cutting the reins sent them home as an advertisement to his family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(George Edwards’s A NATURAL HISTORY OF UNCOMMON BIRDS, 1745)

Professor Thorson explains the harmful influence of Dr. Charles Jackson and the Reverend Edward Hitchcock on naturalists of Thoreau’s generation as follows: Lamentably, his career as a nature writer coincided with one of the greatest goofs in the history of American science: the official rejection of the glacial theory between 1842 and 1862 ... [u]nder the leadership of Dr. Charles T. Jackson (Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother in law) and Reverend Edward Hitchcock (New England’s leading natural theologian).... So, instead of adopting the now obvious concept of ice-sheet glaciation, these self-appointed New England “Men of Science” clung steadfast to [the] idea that the salient features of New England’s physical landscape were created by debris-laden icebergs. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

Alfred Russel Wallace’s PALM TREES OF THE AMAZON (an ethnobotanical study based in part on drawings he had managed to save from fire and shipwreck) and A NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS ON THE AMAZON AND RIO NEGRO. BOTANIZING

In this year and the following one, at Crystal Palace Park, under the supervision of Sir Richard Owen, the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins would be constructing full-scale concrete restorations of the prehistoric reptiles known to that time. —For the very biggest and newest, what but the very biggest and oldest? Three of the replicas would be of the dinosaurs: Iguanodon, Hylaeosaurus, and Megalosaurus.31 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 31, Saturday: Richard Owen hosted a dinner party in the bowels of the beast: inside the partially completed model of Iguanodon, which was being prepared under his direction by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins for display in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Owen got to sit at the head of the table, which was inside the beast’s head, and eleven others were seated at this table. (There was an adjoining table, outside the model, that seated another ten guests. Had Owen been aware of the true size of Iguanodon, this other table would have fitted inside the model as well.)

By the way, it was Owen’s agenda to use the dinosaurs to argue against that new scientistic theory, the one about “evolution.” The magnificence and perfection of these terrible lizards was a central part of his argument from design. an Iguanodon another Iguanodon

31. Although the Crystal Palace would burn down in 1936 these early models of dinosaur are still standing around in Sydenham Park south of London: to the left two Iguanodon, at the center the Hylaeosaurus, and to the right the Megalosaurus. Don’t make a special trip. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I wonder, would the menu that night have included iguana? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

May: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had been commissioned in 1853 to construct, for the relocated Crystal Palace, full-scale concrete restorations of the prehistoric reptiles known to that time. —For the very biggest and newest, what but the very biggest and oldest? With the replicas installed on the grounds of Sydenham Park to the south of London, Hawkins presented a paper before the Society of Arts in which he described the conceptual problems of restoring a creature for which the evidence was piecemeal, as well as the technical problems of casting a replica that contained, as he put it, 640 bushels of artificial stone. He displayed a drawing showing all his restorations, including the marine reptiles, in their park settings. To the left he depicts his two Iguanodon, at the center his Hylaeosaurus, and to the right his Megalosaurus.32

32. Although the Crystal Palace would burn down in 1936 these early models of dinosaur are still standing around to the south of London. (They’ll be there even if you don’t visit them.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

Arnold Henri Guyot founded at Princeton University what is now the Princeton Museum of Natural History, and would continue to contribute specimens to it until his death. In Guyot Hall also are his handwritten labels of the glacial erratic stones he collected in the 1840s in Switzerland (the specimens themselves have disappeared). While Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard University, a fair-weather Unitarian, in ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION advocated a theory of multiple creations that contradicted both evolution and the story of Noah’s ark, calling for a virtual infinitude of miracles, Guyot, an evangelical Presbyterian, insisted that God had made only three-count-’em-three intrusions into the natural order, specially creating matter –then life – then humans. The Presbyterian geologist John William Dawson followed his mentor Charles Lyell in positing successive creations in various “centres” but stopped short of insisting that “all groups of individual animals, which naturalists may call species, have been separate products of creation.” Professor Agassiz would on more than one occasion frustrate his scientific colleagues by refusing to speculate on how any species might have come into existence. Agassiz’s Harvard colleague Jeffries Wyman would once demand of him, “When a mammal was created, did the oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon of the air, and the lime, soda, phosphorus, potash, water, etc., from the earth come together and on the instant combine into a completely formed horse, lion, elephant, or other animal?” — observing that if the answer to such a question were yes, then “it will be easily seen that the answer is entirely opposed by the observed analogies of nature.” The ichthyologist Theodore N. Gill, likewise complaining about the “vague and evasive” responses which these non-evolutionists were providing, demanded that they answer the following questions: “Did elemental atoms flash into living tissues? Was there vacant space one moment and an elephant apparent the next? Or did a laborious God mould out of gathered earth a body to then endue with life?”

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Paleontology “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A human skull quite different from Cro-Magnon skulls, having distinctively shaped bones of the inner ear, an exceedingly prominent brow ridge, and a “bun” formation at the center of the back of the head, the 1st known example of what come to be known as the “Neanderthals” (the “th” German spelling is pronounced like “t” as in “tall”) was found in a limestone grotto of the valley of the river Neander near Düsseldorf, by Johann C. Fuhrott. Although the surgeon Rudolph Virchow would claim the remains were modern, the physician Paul Broca, an internationally recognized expert on skull structure, would maintain correctly that the skull derived from an early form of humans. Because of the site of its discovery, it would come to represent a type of extinct early human now termed the Neanderthal man.33 BIOLOGY

Professor Louis Agassiz published an ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION advocating a theory of multiple creations that would controvert not only evolution but also the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark.

33. In 1997, re-examining this skull, it would be announced that it had become possible to determine from fragments of mitochondrial DNA buried deep inside the bone that there was virtually no likelihood that the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons had interbred during the period in which they had lived simultaneously on the European subcontinent (however, more recently, it would be revealed, by the same means of investigation, that they had interbred extensively — although it may well have been that males produced by such interbreeding were either sterile like mules, or of diminished fertility). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

Professor Louis Agassiz persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to make a large grant, without strings but to a group of special trustees rather than to the Corporation of Harvard College, for the creation of a museum of natural history.

Although he used different terminology, Alfred Russel Wallace independently reached the same conclusion as Charles Robert Darwin: that the driving force accounting for the reality of evolution was natural selection. Wallace’s and Darwin’s papers were both read at the same Linnean Society meeting.

Rudolf Virchow finalized the cell theory originally announced by Schleiden and Schwann 11 years earlier, by declaring that cells were the basic units of all living things, and that all cells get formed by the division of existing cells.

A geologist at Amherst College, Edward Hitchcock, published a sumptuous review of the footprints of Triassic dinosaurs to be found in the stone slabs of the valley of the Connecticut River. The slabs had been there of course all along, and had been known to uneducated white people since 1802. This chromolithograph depicts the Moody Footmark Quarry in South Hadley:

In the very year of the publication of this scholarly demonstration, entitled ICHNOLOGY OF NEW ENGLAND: AREPORT ON THE SANDSTONE OF THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY, ESPECIALLY ITS FOSSIL FOOTMARKS (Boston: William White), a demonstration that these have gotta be the tracks of some humongous birds, the first relatively complete dinosaur skeleton, Hadrosaurus foulkii, a bipedal dinosaur, was being uncovered in New Jersey by Joseph Leidy. Sorry, Prof, it seems you weren’t playing with a full deck of cards. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February: At Ternate in the Moluccas in the South Pacific, in a state of delirium due to illness, Alfred Russel Wallace finished his paper “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type” connecting the theories of Thomas Robert Malthus on the limits to population growth with a biological mechanism that might ensure long-term organic change, and sent it off to Charles Darwin in England for comment.34Although BIOLOGY

he employed different terminology, and although he had been unable to theorize the mechanism that was driving this biological process, Wallace was independently able to arrive at the same conclusion as Darwin: that the driving force behind the evolution of new species was natural selection. Wallace’s and Darwin’s papers would therefore be read together at a Linnaean Society meeting despite the fact that Wallace would remain for the time being on the other side of the earth.

Summer: The elderly half-breed or quarter-breed furtrader George Gladman’s expedition into the Canadian prairies, having in the previous season explored the valleys of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, would in this season explore the valleys of the Assiniboine, Souris, Qu’Appelle, and South Saskatchewan Rivers. Henry Youle Hind and Simon James Dawson had been so derogatory toward the old man that he withdrew from the expedition, with Hind taking over leadership.

In this year was published Hind’s RAPPORT SUR L’EXPLORATION DE LA CONTRÉE SITUÉ ENTRE LE LAC SUPÉRIEUR ET LES ÉTABLISSEMENTS DE LA RIVIÈRE ROUGE.... (Toronto: S. Derbishire & G. Desbarats). This report would be in the personal library of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn and would be consulted by Henry Thoreau in 1860. Thoreau would copy some of the information into his 2d Commonplace Book.

34. Exactly, he wasn’t on Ternate, but on an island nearby that Europeans had not much heard of — so when he wrote about this, he alleged that he was on Ternate knowing that this more familiar placename would give his audience the general idea. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A landowner, John Estaugh Hopkins, showed a vacationing Philadelphia lawyer and member of the Academy of Natural Sciences, William Parker Foulke, the site on his extensive properties near Haddonfield, New Jersey where, several decades before, some big bones had been dug up and carried off. Excavating this site, Foulke extracted back and tail vertebrae, pieces of ribs, hip structures, most of a hind leg, a forelimb, and jaw fragments of an enormous size. Taking these finds back to Philadelphia, he showed them to Professor Joseph Leidy who recognized them as the sort of bones to which the British naturalist Richard Owen had in 1841 assigned the name dinosaur meaning “large lizard.” The name Hadrosaurus foulkii or “Foulke’s humongous lizard” was assigned to these remains, which seemed to have been remarkably well preserved because the carcass had drifted out to sea and been scavenged down to the bones by surface feeders, before it sank to the bottom in one contiguous piece and become encased in marine floor sediments. This skeleton would be used by Thomas Henry Huxley as support for a theory that modern birds are descended from these giant reptiles, a view which although for a long while in poor repute has now been widely accepted. The actual bones are in storage, but one may view adequate reproductions on display at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia PA and at the State Museum in Trenton NJ. THE SCIENCE OF 1858 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

Father Jean-Jacques Pouech described fossil eggshell fragments that would eventually be identified as the eggs of a dinosaur.

An exceptionally well-preserved birdlike dinosaur skeleton was discovered in Bavaria that would be identified as Compsognathus, “dainty jaw.” THE SCIENCE OF 1859

With funding from the Massachusetts legislature, the opening of Professor Louis Agassiz’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (FANFARE, APPLAUSE). But Harvard College’s department of natural history was under the control of Professor Asa Gray.

In this year Professor Gray published his idea that the north American and Eurasian floras had at one time been BOTANY homogeneous. He proposed that Pleistocene glaciation had separated the floras, and during this period of separation, through evolution (a new concept he had learned through personal correspondence with Charles Darwin), the species had become distinct. Gray would become Darwin’s leading advocate in US debates.

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Meanwhile, at the end of this year, Darwin was publishing his ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE. As BIOLOGY explained by Darwin, evolution is a simple change in the overall character of a population of either plants or animals. Gradual change over countless generations can lead to origination of a population sufficiently different to be called a new species. The impact of Darwin’s work has been significant in all areas of biology, including the search for natural relationships of plants and interpretations of plant adaptations and ecology.

This year would mark the publication not only of the above science but also of Edward J. Fitzgerald’s very free “translation” known as THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM. Did Henry Thoreau have an opportunity to read the following? Into this Universe, and Why not knowing, Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing: And out of it, as Wind along the Waste I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This version of the “quatrains” or rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam would attract little attention until it was discovered by other artists and literary figures, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1860. The original verses from which Fitzgerald had drawn his inspiration consist of a collection of isolated and separate “quatrains” or robái which resemble the Japanese haiku in function, if not in form. This robái form which is the only form of poetry attributed to Khayyám has remained popular in Persian poetry and nearly every poet who has ever written in Farsi –there happen to have been one whole lot of poets who have written in Farsi– has written some at one time or another.35 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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35. Fitzgerald’s RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM, THE ASTRONOMER-POET OF PERSIA. TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE (London: Bernard Quaritch, Castle Street, Leicester Square. G. Norman, Printer, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London. Small quarto. Brown paper wrappers, 75 quatrains, 22 notes). By way of contrast, here is the most recent publication of these quatrains, by Ali Taghdarreh, done in 2008: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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OMAR KHAYYAM,

THE ASTRONOMER-POET OF PERSIA.

BY

EDWARD J. FITZGERALD

(1859; REVISED IN 1868, 1872, AND 1879)

Omar Khayyam was born at Naishapur in Khorassan in the latter half of our Eleventh, and died within the First Quarter of our Twelfth Century. The Slender Story of his Life is curiously twined about that of two other very considerable Figures in their Time and Country: one of whom tells the Story of all Three. This was Nizam ul Mulk, Vizier to Alp Arslan the Son, and Malik Shah the Grandson, of Toghrul Beg the Tartar, who had wrested Persia from the feeble Successor of Mahmud the Great, and founded that Seljukian Dynasty which finally roused Europe into the Crusades. This Nizam ul Mulk, in his Wasiyat –or Testament– which he wrote and left as a Memorial for future Statesmen — relates the following, as quoted in the Calcutta Review, No. 59, from Mirkhond’s HISTORY OF THE ASSASSINS. One of the greatest of the wise men of Khorassan was the Imam Mowaffak of Naishapur, a man highly honored and reverenced, — may God rejoice his soul; his illustrious years exceeded eighty-five, and it was the universal belief that every boy who read the Koran or studied the traditions in his presence, would assuredly attain to honor and happiness. For this cause did my father send me from Tus to Naishapur with Abd-us-samad, the doctor of law, that I might employ myself in study and learning under the guidance of that illustrious teacher. Towards me he ever turned an eye of favor and kindness, and as his pupil I felt for him extreme affection and devotion, so that I passed four years in his service. When I first came there, I found two other pupils of mine own age newly arrived, Hakim Omar Khayyam, and the ill-fated Ben Sabbah. Both were endowed with sharpness of wit and the highest natural powers; and we three formed a close friendship together. When the Imam rose from his lectures, they used to join me, and we repeated to each HDT WHAT? INDEX

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other the lessons we had heard. Now Omar was a native of Naishapur, while Hasan Ben Sabbah’s father was one Ali, a man of austere life and practise, but heretical in his creed and doctrine. One day Hasan said to me and to Khayyam, “It is a universal belief that the pupils of the Imam Mowaffak will attain to fortune. Now, even if we all do not attain thereto, without doubt one of us will; what then shall be our mutual pledge and bond?” We answered, “Be it what you please.” “Well,” he said, “let us make a vow, that to whomsoever this fortune falls, he shall share it equally with the rest, and reserve no pre-eminence for himself.” “Be it so,” we both replied, and on those terms we mutually pledged our words. Years rolled on, and I went from Khorassan to Transoxiana, and wandered to Ghazni and Cabul; and when I returned, I was invested with office, and rose to be administrator of affairs during the Sultanate of Sultan Alp Arslan. He goes on to state, that years passed by, and both his old school-friends found him out, and came and claimed a share in his good fortune, according to the school-day vow. The Vizier was generous and kept his word. Hasan demanded a place in the government, which the Sultan granted at the Vizier’s request; but discontented with a gradual rise, he plunged into the maze of intrigue of an oriental court, and, failing in a base attempt to supplant his benefactor, he was disgraced and fell. After many mishaps and wanderings, Hasan became the head of the Persian sect of the Ismailians, a party of fanatics who had long murmured in obscurity, but rose to an evil eminence under the guidance of his strong and evil will. In A.D. 1090, he seized the castle of Alamut, in the province of Rudbar, which lies in the mountainous tract south of the Caspian Sea; and it was from this mountain home he obtained that evil celebrity among the Crusaders as the OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS, and spread terror through the Mohammedan world; and it is yet disputed where the word Assassin, which they have left in the language of modern Europe as their dark memorial, is derived from the hashish, or opiate of hemp-leaves (the Indian bhang), with which they maddened themselves to the sullen pitch of oriental desperation, or from the name of the founder of the dynasty, whom we have seen in his quiet collegiate days, at Naishapur. One of the countless victims of the Assassin’s dagger was Nizam ul Mulk himself, the old school-boy friend.36

Omar Khayyam also came to the Vizier to claim his share; but not to ask for title or office. “The greatest boon you can confer on me,” he said, “is to let me live in a corner under the shadow of your fortune, to spread wide the advantages of Science, and pray for your long life and prosperity.” The Vizier tells us, 36. Some of Omar’s Rubaiyat warn us of the danger of Greatness, the instability of Fortune, and while advocating Charity to all Men, recommending us to be too intimate with none. Attar makes Nizam-ul-Mulk use the very words of his friend Omar [Rub. xxviii.], “When Nizam-ul-Mulk was in the Agony (of Death) he said, ‘Oh God! I am passing away in the hand of the wind.’” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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that when he found Omar was really sincere in his refusal, he pressed him no further, but granted him a yearly pension of 1200 mithkals of gold from the treasury of Naishapur.

At Naishapur thus lived and died Omar Khayyam, “busied,” adds the Vizier, “in winning knowledge of every kind, and especially in Astronomy, wherein he attained to a very high pre-eminence. Under the Sultanate of Malik Shah, he came to Merv, and obtained great praise for his proficiency in science, and the Sultan showered favors upon him.”

When the Malik Shah determined to reform the calendar, Omar was one of the eight learned men employed to do it; the result was the Jalali era (so called from Jalal-ud-din, one of the king’s names) — “a computation of time,” says Gibbon, “which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian style.” He is also the author of some astronomical tables, entitled “Ziji-Malikshahi,” and the French have lately republished and translated an Arabic Treatise of his on Algebra.

His Takhallus or poetical name (Khayyam) signifies a Tent-maker, and he is said to have at one time exercised that trade, perhaps before Nizam-ul-Mulk’s generosity raised him to independence. Many Persian poets similarly derive their names from their occupations; thus we have Attar, “a druggist,” Assar, “an oil presser,” etc.37 Omar himself alludes to his name in the following whimsical lines: — “’Khayyam, who stitched the tents of science, Has fallen in grief’s furnace and been suddenly burned; The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life, And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!’

We have only one more anecdote to give of his Life, and that relates to the close; it is told in the anonymous preface which is sometimes prefixed to his poems; it has been printed in the Persian in the Appendix to Hyde’s VETERUM PERSARUM RELIGIO, p. 499; 38 and D’Herbelot alludes to it in his BIBLIOTHEQUE, under Khiam. — It is written in the chronicles of the ancients that this King of the Wise, Omar Khayyam, died at Naishapur in the year of the Hegira, 517 (A.D. 1123); in science he was unrivaled, — the very paragon of his age. Khwajah Nizami of Samarcand, who was one of his pupils, relates the following story: “I often used to hold conversations with my teacher, Omar Khayyam, in a garden; and one day he said to me, ‘My tomb shall be in a spot where the north wind may scatter roses over it.’ I wondered at the words he spake, but I knew that his were no idle words.39 Years after, when I chanced to revisit Naishapur, I went to his final resting-place, and lo! it was just outside 37. Though all these, like our Smiths, Archers, Millers, Fletchers, etc., may simply retain the Surname of an hereditary calling. 38.“Philosophe Musulman qui a vecu en Odeur de Saintete dans sa Religion, vers la Fin du premier et le Commencement du second Siecle,” no part of which, except the “Philosophe,” can apply to our Khayyam. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a garden, and trees laden with fruit stretched their boughs over the garden wall, and dropped their flowers upon his tomb, so that the stone was hidden under them.” Thus far –without fear of Trespass– from the Calcutta Review. The writer of it, on reading in India this story of Omar’s Grave, was reminded, he says, of Cicero’s ACCOUNT OF FINDING A RCHIMEDES’ TOMB AT SYRACUSE, buried in grass and weeds. I think Thorwaldsen desired to have roses grow over him; a wish religiously fulfilled for him to the present day, I believe. However, to return to Omar.

Though the Sultan “shower’d Favors upon him,” Omar’s Epicurean Audacity of Thought and Speech caused him to be regarded askance in his own Time and Country. He is said to have been especially hated and dreaded by the Sufis, whose Practise he ridiculed, and whose Faith amounts to little more than his own, when stript of the Mysticism and formal recognition of Islamism under which Omar would not hide. Their Poets, including Hafiz, who are (with the exception of Firdausi) the most considerable in Persia, borrowed largely, indeed, of Omar’s material, but turning it to a mystical Use more convenient to Themselves and the People they addressed; a People quite as quick of Doubt as of Belief; as keen of Bodily sense as of Intellectual; and delighting in a cloudy composition of both, in which they could float luxuriously between Heaven and Earth, and this World and the Next, on the wings of a poetical expression, that might serve indifferently for either. Omar was too honest of Heart as well of Head for this. Having failed (however mistakenly) of finding any Providence but Destiny, and any World but This, he set about making the most of it; preferring rather to soothe the Soul through the Senses into Acquiescence with Things as he saw them, than to perplex it with vain disquietude after what they might be. It has been seen, however, that his Worldly Ambition was not exorbitant; and he very likely takes a humorous or perverse pleasure in exalting the gratification of Sense above that of the Intellect, in which he must have taken great delight, although it failed to answer the Questions in which he, in common with all men, was most vitally interested.

For whatever Reason, however, Omar as before said, has never been popular in his own Country, and therefore has been but scantily transmitted abroad. The MSS. of his Poems, mutilated beyond the average Casualties of Oriental Transcription, are so rare in the East as scarce to have reacht Westward at all, in spite of all the acquisitions of Arms and Science. There is no 39. The Rashness of the Words, according to D’Herbelot, consisted in being so opposed to those in the Koran: “No Man knows where he shall die.” –This story of Omar reminds me of another so naturally –and when one remembers how wide of his humble mark the noble sailor aimed –so pathetically told by Captain Cook –not by Doctor Hawkworth –in his Second Voyage (i. 374). When leaving Ulietea, “Oreo’s last request was for me to return. When he saw he could not obtain that promise, he asked the name of my Marai (burying-place). As strange a question as this was, I hesitated not a moment to tell him ‘Stepney’; the parish in which I live when in London. I was made to repeat it several times over till they could pronounce it; and then ‘Stepney Marai no Toote’ was echoed through an hundred mouths at once. I afterwards found the same question had been put to Mr. Forster by a man on shore; but he gave a different, and indeed more proper answer, by saying, ‘No man who used the sea could say where he should be buried.’” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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copy at the India House, none at the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris. We know but of one in England: No. 140 of the Ouseley MSS. at the Bodleian, written at Shiraz, A.D. 1460. This contains but 158 Rubaiyat. One in the Asiatic Society’s Library at Calcutta (of which we have a Copy), contains (and yet incomplete) 516, though swelled to that by all kinds of Repetition and Corruption. So Von Hammer speaks of his Copy as containing about 200, while Dr. Sprenger catalogues the Lucknow MS. at double that number.40 The Scribes, too, of the Oxford and Calcutta MSS. seem to do their Work under a sort of Protest; each beginning with a Tetrastich (whether genuine or not), taken out of its alphabetical order; the Oxford with one of Apology; the Calcutta with one of Expostulation, supposed (says a Notice prefixed to the MS.) to have arisen from a Dream, in which Omar’s mother asked about his future fate. It may be rendered thus: — “O Thou who burn’st in Heart for those who burn In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn, How long be crying, ‘Mercy on them, God!’ Why, who art Thou to teach, and He to learn?” The Bodleian Quatrain pleads Pantheism by way of Justification. “If I myself upon a looser Creed Have loosely strung the Jewel of Good deed, Let this one thing for my Atonement plead: That One for Two I never did misread.”

The Reviewer,41 to whom I owe the Particulars of Omar’s Life, concludes his Review by comparing him with Lucretius, both as to natural Temper and Genius, and as acted upon by the Circumstances in which he lived. Both indeed were men of subtle, strong, and cultivated Intellect, fine Imagination, and Hearts passionate for Truth and Justice; who justly revolted from their Country’s false Religion, and false, or foolish, Devotion to it; but who fell short of replacing what they subverted by such better Hope as others, with no better Revelation to guide them, had yet made a Law to themselves. Lucretius indeed, with such material as Epicurus furnished, satisfied himself with the theory of a vast machine fortuitously constructed, and acting by a Law that implied no Legislator; and so composing himself into a Stoical rather than Epicurean severity of Attitude, sat down to contemplate the mechanical drama of the Universe which he was part Actor in; himself and all about him (as in his own sublime description of the Roman Theater) discolored with the lurid reflex of the Curtain suspended between the Spectator and the Sun. Omar, more desperate, or more careless of any so complicated System as resulted in nothing but hopeless Necessity, flung his own Genius and Learning with a bitter or humorous jest into the general Ruin which their insufficient glimpses only served to reveal; and, pretending sensual pleasure, as the serious purpose of Life, only diverted himself

40. “Since this paper was written” (adds the Reviewer in a note), “we have met with a Copy of a very rare Edition, printed at Calcutta in 1836. This contains 438 Tetrastichs, with an Appendix containing 54 others not found in some MSS.” 41. Professor Cowell. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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with speculative problems of Deity, Destiny, Matter and Spirit, Good and Evil, and other such questions, easier to start than to run down, and the pursuit of which becomes a very weary sport at last!

With regard to the present Translation. The original Rubaiyat (as, missing an Arabic Guttural, these Tetrastichs are more musically called) are independent Stanzas, consisting each of four Lines of equal, though varied, Prosody; sometimes all rhyming, but oftener (as here imitated) the third line a blank. Somewhat as in the Greek Alcaic, where the penultimate line seems to lift and suspend the Wave that falls over in the last. As usual with such kind of Oriental Verse, the Rubaiyat follow one another according to Alphabetic Rhyme — a strange succession of Grave and Gay. Those here selected are strung into something of an Eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal proportion of the “Drink and make-merry,” which (genuine or not) recurs over- frequently in the Original. Either way, the Result is sad enough: saddest perhaps when most ostentatiously merry: more apt to move Sorrow than Anger toward the old Tentmaker, who, after vainly endeavoring to unshackle his Steps from Destiny, and to catch some authentic Glimpse of TO-MORROW, fell back upon TO- DAY (which has outlasted so many To-morrows!) as the only Ground he had got to stand upon, however momentarily slipping from under his Feet.

Edward J. Fitzgerald42

November: Alfred Russel Wallace’s paper “On the Zoological Geography of the Malay Archipelago,” the paper describing “Wallace’s Line,” was read before the Linnaean Society.

Mr. Charles Darwin. M.A.’s ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVOURED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE was published at London by John Murray BIOLOGY of Albemarle Street. The author courteously sent a complementary copy to Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard College with a note: I have ventured to send you a copy of my Book ... on the origin of species.

42. Actually I took this from the 3d Edition, not of 1859 but of 1872. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Well might he describe this as a “venture,” for we know from his letters the extremely low opinion Darwin had of this colleague’s intellect. (As it would turn out, he needn’t have bothered to send along a copy of his monograph. As this biologist would go through the green volume, he would be making resistant notes in the margin such as “What does this prove ...?” and “This is truly monstrous!”)

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (With the benefit of the hindsight that comes from the accumulation of our political and scientific experience since the US Civil War we can understand, very clearly, that here Professor Agassiz’s native politics were once again sadly getting in the way of his native wit.)

November 24, Thursday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Calvin H. Greene. Concord Nov. 24. ’59

Dear Sir, The lectures which you refer to were reported in the newspaper, af- ter a fashion, the last one in some half dozen of them, and if I pos- sessed one, or all, of those reports I would send them to you, bad as HDT WHAT? INDEX

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they are. The best, or at least longest one of the Brown Lecture was in the Boston “Atlas & Bee” of Nov 2d. May be half the whole— There were others in the Traveller— The Journal &c of the same date.

I am glad to know that you are interested to see my things, & I wish that I had them in a printed form to send to you. I exerted myself con- siderably to get the last discourse printed & sold for the benefit of Brown’s family—but the publishers are afraid of pamphlets & it is now too late.

I return the stamp which I have not used.

I shall be glad to see you if I ever come your way

[One-third page missing]

Yrs truly Henry D. Thoreau

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE was published to acclaim and controversy by a gentleman naturalist with whose work Thoreau was already familiar. Have you ever wondered how Charles Darwin ever got his ORIGIN book, with its so utterly novel and abhorrent thesis, through the London presses? The standard accounts merely say that he sent off his MS and it was published.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

But what actually happened was that Charles Lyell fronted for him with a publisher, John Murray, and based on this recommendation Murray, being himself an amateur geologist, accepted the MS sight unseen. Once he got his hands on the actual manuscript, he became quite disenchanted at what he had committed himself to. He commented, in fact, that this new theory of descent with modification was like “contemplating the fruitful union of a poker and a rabbit.” The new theory was “absurd.” Pointing out to Darwin that “everybody is HDT WHAT? INDEX

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interested in pigeons,” he urged that the MS be entirely rewritten to limit the author’s remarks to pigeons, with only a brief reference to general principles. His recommendation, he confessed, was based upon a standard publishers’ fantasy, that of placing a copy of his book on the tea-table of every pigeon-fancier in Britain. The publisher was willing to put out only an edition of 1,250 copies, which at fifteen shillings was quickly sold out.

The argument about this had driven Darwin to one of those English water-resorts for “the cure.” While at this resort he was reading a new novel, ADAM BEDE, and on the evening of this day on which ORIGIN came out, George Eliot (Herbert Spencer’s girlfriend, sort of, although we have room to hope that they were never intimate) read Darwin’s book.

We don’t know either what he thought of her fiction or what she thought of his nonfiction. We do know that the publisher’s trepidations would prove to have been unwarranted, that two pirate editions would quickly roll off the American presses without the formality of permission or the forwarding of any royalties — and that at Cambridge College, William Whewell would not tolerate such a treatise as the ORIGIN to be placed in the library stacks.

The natural history encyclopedias of the 19th Century rarely included extinct animals. An exception was Samuel Goodrich’s ILLUSTRATED NATURAL HISTORY published in this year, in which, upon a notice of the common chameleon, the audience suddenly found itself in the presence of “fossil lizards.” Below is its woodcut of the Hylaeosaurus. Other illustrations show the Iguanodon, the Megalosaurus, and a collection of marine reptiles such as Ichthyosaurus. All these illustrations had been copied from the Crystal Palace concretions. Hylaeosaurus had been discovered by Gideon Mantell in 1832 and had been announced in his GEOLOGY OF THE SOUTHEAST OF ENGLAND in 1833. It was one of Richard Owen’s original three dinosaurs and stood proud on the relocated Crystal Palace’s grounds: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Friend Daniel Ricketson’s journal for this day reads:

1 Clear and fine for the season. Left Concord at 8 /2 A.M. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Frederick Douglass’s ship was arriving on this day in Liverpool harbor.

In a private letter, the Reverend Theodore Parker, who was entirely unfamiliar with evolutionary theory, confessed on this day to Francis Jackson (the namesake grandfather of the mentally imbalanced Francis Jackson Meriam of the Harpers Ferry raid whom Thoreau would help escape, supposedly toward Canada) that the reason he did not like slavery was, that if these inferior colored people were allowed to have any place at all in human society, they would merely take the opportunity to fecundate. To be kind to them was merely to create more of them that one would need to be kind to. The Reverend was an Aryan possessed of Aryan common sense, a veteran of preaching in downtown Boston to other Aryans possessed of Aryan common HDT WHAT? INDEX

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sense, and so of course he belabored the obvious, that:

An Anglo-Saxon with common sense does not like this Africanization of America.

Brit horrified at slavery USer horrified at slavery Confusing Darwinism with Spencerism and triumphalism (that is, with “Social Darwinism,” as is so very usual), the Reverend Parker would eventually get around to congratulating himself that on account of his deeply ingrained racism he had been “Darwinian before Darwin” (actually, in this “Anglo-Saxon” Aryan race- soulism of his, what he was in fact was Hitlerian before Hitler).43

November 24. The river has risen considerably, at last, owing to the rain of the 22d. Had been very low before. See, on the railroad-slope by the pond, and also some days ago, a flock of goldfinches eating the seed of the

43. Adolf Hitler, a Catholic, understood something about Christianity which few Christians are able to accept. “Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature” (HITLER’S TABLE TALK, Weidenfield and Nicolson, London 1963). Many German Christians supported Hitler because they had the spirit of Hitler within them while they supposed they had the spirit of Christ within them. Even today some Christians are unable to accept the truth of this remark, because they have the spirit of Hitler, or the Emperor Constantine, within them while they suppose they have the spirit of Christ within them. That sort of Christianity was in fact the only sort of Christianity which my mother in Indiana had ever known, which is why she could not consider me a Christian but needed to agonize over me as an “atheist” howevermuch I insisted that I was attempting to follow the way of Jesus as I construed it. If someone were to tell these “Constantinian” Christians that Hitler said that two plus two equals four, they would try to find some perversity in this remark by which to dismiss it (the guy lost a war, and that has forever discredited him as the leader of the state church), and if someone told them that the problem is not that Hitler did not know what true Christianity is, but that the actual problem is that they themselves do not know what true Christianity is, they .... My mother was in fact, like E.O. Wilson the Harvard sociobiologist, an admirer of Ronald Reagan. Wilson perceived President Reagan as the model of the “soft-core altruist,” which is the good because fake kind of altruist who does not qualify as a Christian “enemy of civilization” (Edward O. Wilson, ON HUMAN NATURE, Harvard UP, Cambridge MA 1978, page 157) because he does not operate out of a mere mindless death-wish. As Mary Midgley has pointed out, “Social Darwinism or Spencerism is the unofficial religion of the west. The official western religion, Christianity, is well known to be rather demanding and to have its eye on the next world rather than this one. In such situations, other doctrines step in to fill the gap. People want a religion for this world as well. They find it in the worship of individual success” (Mary Midgley, EVOLUTION AS A RELIGION: STRANGE HOPES AND STRANGER FEARS, Methuen, London 1985, page 140). The mock altruist is a person whose calculating “good behavior” is well rewarded. His “psychological vehicles are lying, pretense and deceit, including self-deceit, because the actor is most convincing who believes that his performance is real” (page 156). The real altruist, the hard-core one, “irrational,” would in fact be Social Darwinism’s enemy, sociobiology’s enemy, and the enemy of civilization. There were some German Christians, a few, to leaven Hitler’s loaf; they insisted on their right to die by way of the cross rather than the sword. There are some American Christians, a few, to leaven America’s loaf; they are of course condemned, but here they are. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Roman wormwood. At Spanish Brook Path. the witch-hazel (one flower) lingers. I observe that ferns grow especially where there is an abrupt or broken bank, as where, in the woods, sand has been anciently dug out of a hillside to make a dam with and the semicircular scar has been covered with a sod and shrubs again. The shelter and steepness are favorable when there is shade and moisture. How pretty amid the downy and cottony fruits of November the heads of the white anemone, raised a couple of feet from the ground on slender stalks, two or three together,–small heads of yellowish-white down, compact and regular as a thimble beneath, but, at this time, diffusive and bursting forth above, somewhat like a little torch with its flame,–a very neat object!

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Paleontology HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

John Phillips diagrammed the progressive but fluctuating diversity of life on earth based on the fossil record. His work evidenced massive extinctions at the end of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, and increased diversity in each subsequent age. THE SCIENCE OF 1860

Through the decade of the 1860s Dr. John Kimball de Laski compiled his observations of the Maine landscape into a book manuscript which would not be published in full during his lifetime (although pieces of it showed up in the Bangor Whig and Courier on September 7-11, 1847, and as a paper in the American Journal of Science). In his proposed preface to this book he wrote “In presenting the following pages to the public, I am actuated by the conviction that the views hitherto had of the ancient great Glacier of North America, by scientific men as well as by geological readers generally, have not come up to the magnitude of the mass, nor to the gigantic work which it has performed upon the floor of our continent.”44

THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

44. The Institute for Quaternary and Climate Studies (B70, Edward Bryand Global Science Center, University of Maine) now plans to publish de Laski’s book, along with a short biography of the man and a description of how his scientific endeavors fit into the historical development of ice age theories. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1861

A reasonably complete dinosaur skeleton, that of the birdlike Compsognathus longipes, was noticed in this year in the lithographic limestone of Solnhofen, Bavaria, and described and named in a paper by Wagner. The specimen was apparently a juvenile but even the adult form is not large. This discovery would shortly lead anatomists such as Thomas Henry Huxley to propose a close affinity between birds and dinosaurs, and the

near-simultaneous discovery of fossil Archaeopteryx lithographica in the stone quarries of Solnhofen would add weight to the argument (the find would be described in detail by Owen in 1864; affinities to dinosaurs would be discovered by Huxley in 1868). Wagner illustrated his description with a large folding lithograph of the fossil still emerging from its limestone matrix. Wagner failed to notice, or at least his drawing did not HDT WHAT? INDEX

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reveal, the presence of an even smaller reptile skeleton within the ribcage:

In his presidential address to the Geological Society of London, Leonard Horner proposed that the “creation” date of 4004 BCE be removed from the English Bible. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

July: In Bibliotheca Sacra (BSAC 020:79) the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock, emeritus geologist of Amherst College, used the spectre of an absence of miraculous interruptions and corrections of the natural order –and thus the absence of divine Providence and protection over our existence as humans– to quite refute Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. His “The Law of Nature’s Constancy Subordinate to the Higher Law of Change” described a cold and indifferent godless Darwinian world in which nobody cared what happened to us as being simply too much for a human scientist to contemplate. BIBLIOTHECA SACRA

The scientific history of our globe shows us that nature’s constancy has been several times interrupted by special miraculous intervention. We of course refer to the numerous new species of animals and plants that have been introduced upon the earth, either singly or by groups, since life was first manifested. In the proper place we have given a detail of the facts, perhaps sufficiently prolix, and also an account of the various modes by which some have endeavored to avoid the conclusion just stated. A summary of the points discussed will be all that we shall introduce in this place. One method by which it has been attempted to throw doubt over the miraculous origin of species, has been to maintain that the new ones have never been introduced by large groups, but singly from time to time, to replace old species, and probably by some unknown law of nature. The reply is, that such a mode of introducing the new species, that is singly at intervals, is admitted only occasionally by the ablest paleontologists. But if it were true, the creation of a single species would demand special divine intervention as really as that of a group. It is something above and beyond nature, and though the result of an unknown law, it must be a law of miracles, and not of nature; for her whole record shows no analogous power. Not satisfied with such views, not a few at the present day of philosophic mind, if they do not adopt the hypothesis of organic development, yet look with great respect upon it, and hope that it may prove true. Perhaps they pass over, as a delicate and difficult point, the origination of the first monad or primordial form. But assuming its existence, they think they can trace out the steps by which all the new species have been derived, one from another, in upward series, and all by natural law. The force of circumstances and natural selection are supposed capable of working out the most marvelous transmutations and adaptations, and there is no longer need of special divine intervention. Indeed it is not necessary that the Deity, if there be one, should have anything to do with the process except, as some would say, originally to ordain the law. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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And when a man has once brought himself to believe that all the wonderful diversity and mutual adaptation of organic nature has been the result of natural law, independent of any special acts of creative power, he will not long hesitate to adopt the dogma, no more improbable, that the primordial form might have been albumen, vitalized by electricity of some other natural force. But in spite of the great array of learning which has been adduced of late to sustain this hypothesis, very many who unite good common sense to strong reasoning powers, even though not unwilling to see religion undermined, cannot adopt as truth such dreamy speculations. Others, also, who by the study of the mathematical laws of the universe, have come to the conclusion that special interference with these laws, such as miracles suppose, is impossible, and yet feel the need of something more substantial than the transmutation hypothesis, have tried hard to devise some other mode of explaining the geological creations than by special intervention. At last they have made an appeal to our ignorance of the hidden powers of nature. True, we know of no natural law that can create new species, if we set aside the Development Hypothesis; but there may be some such law among nature’s arcana. The fact that these new creations are repeated at intervals, and seem to form a part of a series of operations, which we know to be natural, makes it quite probable that they also are natural. Perhaps this unknown law will by and by be discovered, as many new laws have been to explain phenomena once supposed to be miraculous because anomalous and inexplicable. We have gone into a somewhat extended examination of this new mode of setting aside the miraculous character of the geological creations. For though put forth hypothetically by most of its advocates, it is obvious that they rest upon it, and that it will undoubtedly become the resort of all who do not like to admit the miracles of successive creations, and cannot adopt the Development Hypothesis. Moreover, some sincere friends of revelation, and perhaps some theologians, have seemed favorable to such views, not aware, we apprehend, that they were thus yielding up the main argument for every kind of miracles. In discussing this subject we have endeavored to show that the advocates of this hypothesis labor under certain false notions as to miraculous intervention. In the first place, while they admit all that is essential to a miracle in the geological creations, viz. that they cannot be explained by the laws of nature, which indeed they contravene, they think their recurrence at the commencement of the different formations shows them to be subject to law, and that this idea destroys the notion of a miracle. We have replied by maintaining, first, that there is a law of miracles as well as of natural events, and that indeed the Deity never acts without law. But secondly, the geological creations are not exactly alike at different epochs; indeed no creation of this sort has ever been a repetition of one before it. The interval between them has probably never been twice the same, and since the organisms have always been wisely adapted to the changing conditions of the world, they never HDT WHAT? INDEX

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could have been the same at any two demiurgic periods. As the physical character of the world has been constantly improving, so have the animals and plants introduced been advancing from the simple to the complex, and the progress has always been at such a rate as to connect all the minor successive systems of life into one general system, harmoniously correlated in all its parts. On these several accounts, each creation must have been unlike and independent of all the rest, and therefore corresponding to the most common idea of a miracle, which regards it as an event different from everything that has preceded it. The vast intervals between these creations should also be taken into account. They occurred only at the commencement of the geological periods, as most geologists suppose; and who that is familiar with the subject will undertake to tell us their length as measured by years? They must heap myriads of years upon myriads to satisfy the conditions of the problem. If we suppose rational beings to have existed during each life-period, they could have witnessed no repetition of the miracle with which each of these periods was begun, not have had any evidence, unless revealed by the rocky strata, that it had been manifested in a previous period. Each successive creation must have appeared to such intelligences as an insulated interposition of almighty power, inexplicable by any natural law, and disconnected with anything anterior save divine energy, and therefore miraculous in the strictest sense. And even to a superior being, say an archangel, whose eye could run over the whole range of the successive creations, each interposition, for the reasons that have been given, must appear unlike every other, and therefore in reality an independent miracle. But is it contended that the connection of these creatures with so many series of natural operations affords a presumption that they also are natural. But on what ground is such an inference made? With what else but natural operations can any miracles be connected in this world? Such a connection alone enables us to prove that they are miracles, and that they were intended to subserve some benevolent purpose, and to meet exigencies which special divine intervention could alone supply. All the miracles of sacred history are connected in the same manner with natural operations, precisely as are the geological creations, so that if the latter are on this ground to be denied a miraculous character, the former must share the same fate. This is doubtless just what some who advocate these views are aiming at, but we cannot believe it of all. But why is it not as reasonable to suppose that some natural law will hereafter be discovered that will explain the geological creations, as it was a half century or a century since, to presume that eclipses, comets, the aurora borealis, and meteoric showers would be found to be the result of some undiscovered natural law? The difference is just here. The geological creations are not merely inexplicable by natural laws, but they contravene or modify those laws, and therefore must be the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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result of some force coming in to interfere with those laws, or at least to modify their power; whereas the phenomena alluded to show no such interference and want of harmony with nature, and therefore it was reasonable to wait to see if a more thorough acquaintance with the phenomena, and a better knowledge of the more hidden forces, of nature, such as electricity, galvanism, and affinity, would not furnish a rational explanation on natural principles, and the result has in a good measure justified such an anticipation. But what approach has been made, by all the discoveries of modern science, towards solving the phenomena of life and intellect by any natural law? Surely none unless we adopt in full the hypothesis of natural development. Let us illustrate this subject by an example. The most striking object in the last geological creation was man, with an organization somewhat superior to that of any other animal, and with mental powers far above all others, to which is superadded a moral nature, of which all others are entirely destitute. Geology shows us that man did not exist till a very late period in the world’s history; for his remains are found only in Alluvium, and though there is some diversity of views as to the exact part of Alluvium where he is first found, scarcely any one contends that he existed anterior to the alluvial period. All scientific men would agree in saying that he was among the very latest of the animals created, and that none nearer to him in character than the monkey preceded him. He was introduced suddenly in the full perfection of all his powers. Yet man was intimately connected with all the series of organisms that went before him, of whom he was the antitype, and with all the series that have followed. By one of the hypotheses we have been considering, therefore, man’s creation should not be regarded as a miracle, but as the result of some unknown natural law. His appearance, although inexplicable by any known law, should be regarded as the first appearance of a comet or a meteoric shower, and we should wait patiently for the physiologists to discover the hidden law of nature by which he was produced. Now, without saying anything of the biblical history of man’s creation, which represents it as the grandest of miracles, is there any man acquainted with the facts of science and the laws of philosophising, who would seriously teach or believe that the creation of such a being might be the result of some unknown natural law? Even though one might imagine some of the lowest forms on the scale of life to have such an origin, yet the case is altered when we have before us a being not only at the head of animal organization, but endowed with lofty intellectual and moral powers. Yet if the other geological creations were not miracles, man’s introduction must be placed in the same category. How much more consonant with philosophy and common sense the conclusion that they were all miracles! This we believe will be the ultimate version of science; and certainly that would be a strange theology which should reject the miraculous character of man’s creation. For a time, indeed, men of sceptical tendencies, who would gladly see all the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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miracles of revelation rejected, will strain their ingenuity to wipe them all out from the records of nature. For they know very well that if the latter are admitted, so must the former be, and if the one be rejected, so must the other be. The point in religion which is most vigorously assailed at the present day is, perhaps, the doctrine of miracles. Scientific sceptics are becoming fully aware of the necessity of making out the geological creations to be only natural events. Hence they resort to the absurd hypotheses that have been described, and which would really be subjects of ridicule were they not seriously propounded by learned men. But somehow or other they must silence the guns which their own labors have helped to place upon the ramparts and to supply with ammunition. We have little fear, however, that anything more than partial and temporary success will attend this crusade against religion. So far as Christianity is concerned, the doctrine of miracles is indeed articulus stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiae. But the geological record is too full and decided to be long obscured and mystified by physiological or transcendental speculations. Miracles! Why all the great chapters of nature’s history begin with them, and if the Christian dispensation were destitute of them, it would be out of harmony with the course of things in the natural world. Geology has, indeed, been supposed to lay open a fruitful magazine of weapons for the gladiatorship and tournaments of scepticism. But it is no longer easy to suborn or silence the testimony of that science. Not now throttled in the pillory of false philosophy, nor ventriloquized by a superficial scepticism, its free natural voice is found to blend in wonderful harmony with that of revelation.... Now, does the analogy of nature allow us to suppose that a principle which has hitherto been mightier than any other in the government and preservation of the universe and in promoting its happiness, will be dropped out from the economy of the new earth? We know, on the testimony of revelation, that this principle will make some of its most wonderful manifestations in bringing forth a new and a spiritual body from the grave, in changing the corruptible into the incorruptible, the mortal into the immortal, and in developing from the ruins of the present world a new heavens and a new earth wherein dwell righteousness. Will God, then, introduce everlasting monotony and permit no changes in heaven? Rather would analogy lead us to conclude that it may be a succession of higher and higher economies of life and enjoyment, into which the law of change shall introduce us. We conjecture not what these new developments may be, nor would we form so low an estimate of that world as to fancy them a repetition of the most beautiful flowers and fruits and gems and landscapes which earth now contains; but rather objects far more attractive and glorious; such as could not be understood and appreciated by our present powers, but such as an infinite God knows how to produce, and such an infinite benevolence will delight to scatter in rich profusion all along the upward pathway of our immortal existence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1865

John Lubbock’s PRE-HISTORIC TIMES, AS ILLUSTRATED BY ANCIENT REMAINS, AND THE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF MODERN SAVAGES (London: Williams & Norgate) divided what has previously been understood to be the Stone Age into two parts: the older Paleolithic and the newer Neolithic. His argument included a claim that modern Tasmanians and Fuegians were throwbacks to archaic humans. PRE-HISTORIC TIMES

Sir John William Dawson of McGill University identified “shells” of huge foraminiferal protozoans. Known as Eozoön canadense or “dawn animal of Canada,” this find would be used as an argument against evolution because it showed a relatively “modern” animal early in the fossil record (it would eventually be recognized, however, to have been merely a geologically young pseudofossil formed by heat and pressure on limestone). BIOLOGY

In this year Rudolf Clausius was able to infer the law that Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot had proclaimed in 1824, and create a definition of a new quantitative thingie, for which he would mine the Greek language and coin the term “entropy.” Entropy is destiny. Entropy is energy that has come to be in such a condition that it can no longer produce any useful work. It is a natural existence that is as quantifiable and as quantitatively measurable as such less problematic quantitatively measurable thingies as temperature, volume, and pressure. The “law of entropy” is that it is seldom possible to stir things apart — those who might attempt to do so –to stir things apart– are, in this universe, wasting our time and their effort. (Similarly, according to the “law of history,” it would be a chimera to suppose that one can explain prior events in terms of subsequent events — whatever it is, it didn’t happen that way because in this particular universe time runs forward rather than backward and in this particular universe the future doesn’t exist yet and therefore has no causative control over any situation.) He gave to the 2d Law of Thermodynamics its definitive present formulation, that entropy tends to increase in any isolated system. (The philosophical problem in this is a problem that has to do with our tendency toward future-worship. It has to do with the consequentialist attitude in ethics. This “heat death” thingie which began in 1824 and proceeded to this year was entirely incompatible with our moral consequentialism, our future-worship, because it pointed up the fact that eventually, inevitably, there won’t be any sort of livable future anymore, and nothing will be morally legitimate or illegitimate, and everything will be as if no human being had ever lived and struggled and hoped and dreamed and thought. The shit would really hit the fan in the popular mind when a 29-year-old would publish his first successful fiction, in 1895. This would be H.G. Wells and his science-fiction fantasy THE TIME MACHINE. The book would be suffused with the sadness of knowing that eventually our sun would be exploding, and then fading away, and that eventually, the entire universe would be reduced to a big dull blah. The only “inconvenient truth” that Al Gore is now adding is an awareness that since human civilization is inevitably subject to the “Law of the Most Limiting Condition,” our demise is bound to come a whole lot sooner than folks had, during the 19th Century, been imagining.) THE SCIENCE OF 1865 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1868

In March, Louis Lartet discovered 3 human skulls and other skeletal remains, roughly 30,000 years old, within a rock shelter called “Cro-Magnon” (which is not a very good name for a group of humans because it is merely Old French for “big hole in the ground”). THE SCIENCE OF 1868

Ernst Häckel’s NATÜRLICHE SCHÖPFUNGSGESCHICHTE subdivided humanity into 12 separate species and described evolution as consisting of 22 phases the 21st of which amounting to a “missing link” between apes and humans.

Thomas Henry Huxley’s ON THE ANIMALS WHICH ARE MOST NEARLY INTERMEDIATE BETWEEN BIRDS AND REPTILES argued that birds were descendants of dinosaurs (which would not be taken very seriously for another century). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1870

Henry Youle Hind’s “On two gneissoid series in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, supposed to be the equivalent of the Huronian (Cambrian) and Laurentian” (Geological Society of London, Quarterly Journal, 26: 468-78).

The rivalry between fossil collectors Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope turned ugly when Marsh publicly pointed out Cope’s error in reconstructing a fossil marine reptile (OK, an expert putting an animal’s head on the tip of its tail makes for fairly pleasant newspaper copy). Their rivalry was the public’s gain as they attempted to outdo each other in identifying new dinosaur species — over 130. THE SCIENCE OF 1870

Othniel Charles Marsh discovered, in chalk deposits in Kansas, the 1st North American pterosaur. He calculated the wingspan at 20 feet (during the following year he would collect more fossils to confirm this calculation). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1871

Charles Darwin’s THE DESCENT OF MAN: AND SELECTION IN RELATION TO SEX. THE DESCENT OF MAN, I THE DESCENT OF MAN, II

St. George Jackson Mivart, in ON THE GENESIS OF SPECIES, was so apeshit enraged at the very idea of human evolution that he was unable even to copy his quotations from Darwin’s writings with accuracy. He, like Alfred Russel Wallace, considered that the human species must be an exception to the biological laws that governed non-human courses of events. PALEONTOLOGY ON THE GENESIS OF SPECIES

An aggregation of American Passenger Pigeons Ectopistes migratorius nesting in Wisconsin occupied 750 square miles.

Lord Kelvin suggested that “the germs of life might have been brought to the earth by some meteorite” — a kick-the-can-down-the-road kind of argument that would still be being offered a century later. THE SCIENCE OF 1871 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1875

James Croll’s CLIMATE AND TIME, IN THEIR GEOLOGICAL RELATIONS provided a reasonably credible accounting for the causes of Ice Ages (although not everyone was as yet persuaded).

THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION Roberto Massimo Lawley donated a badly eroded Pliocene whale bone he had found near Pisa, Italy to a museum of paleontology in Florence (this specimen exhibits the boreholes of Osedax, a mouthless, gutless marine worm nicknamed “zombie,” that drills into bones to extract nutrients). PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1875

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Paleontology HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1876

Professor Asa Gray issued DARWINIANA.

Charles Darwin’s CROSS AND SELF FERTILIZATION IN THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM explained the concept of hybrid vigor, stimulating experiments and studies by other scientists. Though the basic concept of hybrid vigor had been discussed by various researchers during the earlier decades of this century, this was the first complete analysis and description. BOTANY

Charles Doolittle Walcott was able to find and describe legs of trilobite, putting to rest some speculation about how these creatures had moved about. PALEONTOLOGY

Robert Koch validates the germ theory of disease, postulated by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s, identifying a bacterium as the cause of anthrax.

Cesare Lombroso’s THE CRIMINAL MAN describing physical characteristics that identify inborn criminals. THE SCIENCE OF 1876 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1877

What has come to be termed the “Bone War” between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh war intensified, with the discovery of major dinosaur localities at Canon City, Morrison, and Como Bluff.

Comparative anatomy professor François Louis Paul Gervais undertook thin-section microscopy studies of fossil eggs (his work would largely be forgotten until Roy Chapman Andrews would discover dinosaur eggs in Mongolia during the 1920s).

A new Archaeopteryx fossil was discovered in Solnhofen, complete with a toothy jaw. This well-preserved fossil, which will become known as the Berlin Archaeopteryx, supported Thomas Henry Huxley’s previous observations about its reptilian affinities. PALEONTOLOGY

Karl August Möbius used the term biocoenosis to point up the fact that living beings do not live independently, but group themselves into plant and animal communities. THE SCIENCE OF 1877 ECOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1878

Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyramus de Candolle’s MONOGRAPHIAE PHANEROGAMARUM in nine volumes, with Alphonse’s son Casimir de Candolle. BOTANIZING

At about this point Charlotte Hill collected, from the Florissant Formation in Colorado, the well-preserved fossil of a butterfly to be designated Prodryas persephone. The formation was about 35,000,000 years old.

Entire skeletons of Iguanodon were discovered in Belgium, enabling a more accurate reconstruction of this dinosaur than those done by Owen and Waterhouse Hawkins during the 1850s (engineer-turned-paleontologist Louis Dollo would begin to publish on these fossils in 1882). THE SCIENCE OF 1878

Alexander Winchell’s SKETCHES OF CREATION cost him his job at the University of Vanderbilt, when readers noticed he had suggested that Adam descended from earlier humans (this was a perfect storm: found particularly outrageous was the author’s suggestion that these ancestors of Adam might have had dark skins). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1879

Alfred Russel Wallace wrote on the topic of free trade. He described the causes of disjunct distribution patterns.

He developed the 1st theory of the causes of continental glaciation that combined geographical with astronomical factors. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

He made early contributions to the systematic classification of island types. THE SCIENCE OF 1879

Charles Lapworth resolved a priority dispute between quarreling geologists by assigning some older rocks to the Cambrian (named by Adam Sedgwick) but some younger rocks to the Silurian (named by Roderick Murchison), and coining a new name “Ordivician” for any rocks that were in between.

The United States Geological Survey is formed.

On her father’s property in Spain, 8-year-old Maria de Sautuola found a Paleolithic cave drawing of bison. This was the oldest artwork yet discovered, but would for years be dismissed as a forgery since it was far too beautiful to have been the creation of some clutch of hoo-hoo prehistoric savages. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1880

When French geologist Le Mesle visited an Algerian site to verify local legends about tracks belonging to a giant bird, what he found caused him to concur (the tracks pertained to dinosaurs). PALEONTOLOGY

Charles Darwin and his son Francis published the results of studies on plant responses to light — phototropism (bending toward the light) was the result of light reaching the top of a plant’s shoot.

Professor Asa Gray, Harvard College’s Professor of BOTANY, was invited to deliver two lectures to the Harvard Divinity School, and these would result in a monograph entitled NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION: I AM invited to address you upon the relations of science to religion, -in reference, as I suppose, to those claims of natural science which have been thought to be antagonistic to ...religion, and to those assumptions connected with the Christian faith which scientific men in our day are disposed to question.... THE SCIENCE OF 1880

Intelligent Design: The descent of a concept.

By JAMES DAO, New York Times, December 25, 2005

WORDS evolve, even those coined by skeptics of evolution. Consider “intelligent design,” a phrase used for over a century by critics of Darwin but only recently bursting into prominence as both a concept and a movement intended to explain, its proponents say, the “irreducible complexity” of nature. According to the Discovery Institute, a group based in Seattle that promotes intelligent design as an alternative to natural selection, the phrase may have first been used by an Oxford scholar, F.C.S. Schiller, who in 1897 wrote, “It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of Evolution may be guided by an intelligent design.” But paradoxically, one of the most prominent 19th-century scientists to refer to God as an all-knowing designer was a staunch defender of Darwin, a renowned Harvard botanist named Asa Gray. Professor Gray, a confidant of Darwin’s and a deeply religious Christian, agreed with many of Darwin’s ideas, defending him against charges of atheism and favorably reviewing ON THE ORIGIN OF S PECIES. A New York Times review of Professor Gray’s 1880 book, NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION, said he had demonstrated “the harmony HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of evolution with a belief in intelligent design.” But Darwin and Professor Gray differed on a fundamental issue: where Darwin saw randomness in nature, Professor Gray saw divine design. He believed, the Times review said, that “variation does not always seem an accident, but often ‘guided in certain lines,’ as if by an intelligent power.” Sara Joan Miles, a science historian, wrote in 2001 that “Darwin could not reconcile the seeming randomness of certain particular events with an overall, foreordained plan.” Professor Gray, though, “knew from Scripture the attributes of God, and therefore could accept the errors, evil and suffering of Nature,” Professor Miles wrote. Flash forward to 2005. Once used by Asa Gray to reconcile the theory of natural selection with Christian theology, the concept of intelligent design is now presented as an alternative, a challenge really, to Darwin’s ideas. What changed? Professor Miles, the founding dean of Esperanza College in Philadelphia, says science and religion have become increasingly fearful of and defensive about each other. She recommends they study the cordial debates between Asa Gray and Darwin for clues about how to coexist, or at least talk. Indeed, in a letter to Professor Gray in 1860, Darwin, an agnostic, seemed to accept the possibility of an all-wise designer without softening his scientific skepticism. “I can see no reason why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws, and that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event and consequence,” he wrote. “But the more I think, the more bewildered I become; as indeed I probably have shown by this letter.”

Here, then, are Professor Gray’s two lectures:

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION

TWO LECTURES, DELIVERED TO THE THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL OF YALE COLLEGE

By ASA GRAY

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, 743 AND 745 BROADWAY

1880

LECTURE I. -SCIENTIFIC BELIEFS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I AM invited to address you upon the relations of science to religion, -in reference, as I suppose, to those claims of natural science which have been thought to be antagonistic to supernatural religion, and to those assumptions connected with the Christian faith which scientific men in our day are disposed to question or to reject. While listening weekly-I hope with edification -to the sermons which it is my privilege and duty to hear, it has now and then occurred to me that it might be well if an occasional discourse could be addressed from the pews to the pulpit. But, until your invitation reached me, I had no idea that I should ever be called upon to put this passing thought into practice. I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it; and in respect to the debatable land which lies along the borders of theology and natural science, and which as been harried by many a raid from both ides, I am not confident that I can be helpful in composing strifes or in the fixing of boundaries; nor that you will agree with me that some of the encounters were inevitable, and some of he alarm groundless. Indeed upon much that may have to say, I expect rather the charitable judgment than the full assent of those whose approbation I could most wish to win. But I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class-room. You ask a layman to speak from this desk because you would have a layman’s thoughts, expressed from a layman’s point of view; because you would know what a naturalist comes to think upon matters of common interest. And you would have him liberate his mind frankly, unconventionally, and with as little as may be of the technicalities of our several professions. Frankness is always commendable; but outspokenness upon delicate and unsettled problems, in the ground of which, cherished convictions are rooted, ought to be tempered with consideration. Now I, as a lay-man, may claim a certain license in this regard; and any over-free handling of sensitive themes should compromise no one but myself. As a student who has devoted an ordinary lifetime to one branch of natural history, in which he is supposed to have accumulated a fair amount of particular experience and to have gained a general acquaintance with scientific methods and aims, -as one, moreover, who has taken kindly to the new turn of biological study in these latter years, but is free from partisanship, -I am asked to confer with other and younger students, of another kind of science, in respect to the tendencies of certain recently developed doctrines, which in schools of theology are almost everywhere spoken against, but which are everywhere permeating the lay mind- whether for good or for evil- and are raising questions more or less perplexing to all of us. But our younger and middle- aged men must not think that such perplexities and antagonisms have only recently begun. Some of them are very old; some are old questions transferred to new ground, in which they spring to rankness of growth, or sink their roots till they touch deeper issues than before, -issues of philosophy rather than of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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science, upon which the momentous question of theism or non- theism eventually turns. Some on the other hand are mere survivals, now troublesome only to those who are holding fast to theological positions, which the advance of actual knowledge has rendered un- tenable, but which they do not well know how to abandon; yet which, in principle, have mostly been abandoned already. To begin with trite examples. Among the questions which disquieted pious souls in my younger days, but which have ceased to disquiet any of us, are those respecting the age and gradual development of the earth and of the solar system, which came in with geology and modern astronomy. I remember the time when it was a mooted question whether geology and orthodox Christianity were compatible; and I suppose that when, in these quarters, the balance inclined to the affirmative, it was owing quite as much to Professor Silliman’s transparent Christian character as to his scientific ability. One need not be an old man to know that Laplace was accounted an atheist because he developed the nebular hypothesis, and because of his remark that he had no need to postulate a Creator for the mathematical discussion of a physical theorem; for a venerable and most religious astronomer, still living, who adopted this hypothesis in his “Exposition of certain Harmonies of the Solar System,” published only five years ago, thought it needful to add an appendix, asking the question, “Is the nebular hypothesis, in any form, essentially atheistical in its character?” He answered it in the negative, but with the salvo, that “this hypothesis, having to do with a strictly azoic period, enforces no connection with ‘the development theory’ of the beginning or of the progress of life.” The great antiquity of the habitable world, and of existing races was the next question. It gave some anxiety fifty years ago; but is now, I suppose, generally acquiesced in, -in the sense that existing species of plants and animals have been in existence for many thousands of years; and, as to their associate, man, all agree that the length of his occupation is not at all measured by the generations of the biblical chronology, and are awaiting the result of an open discussion as to whether the earliest known traces of his presence are in quaternary or in the latest tertiary deposits. As connected with this class of questions, many of us remember the time when schemes for reconciling Genesis with Geology had an importance in the churches, and among thoughtful people, which few if any would now assign to them; when it was thought necessary -for only necessity could justify it -to bring the details of the two into agreement by extraneous suppositions and forced constructions of language, such as would now offend our critical and sometimes our moral sense. The change of view which we have witnessed amounts to this. Our predecessors implicitly held that Holy Scripture must somehow truly teach such natural science as it had occasion to refer to, or at least could never contradict it; while the most that is now intelligently claimed is, that the teachings of the, two, properly understood, are not incompatible. We may take it to be the accepted idea that the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order. Then, when fundamental principles of the cosmogony in Genesis are found to coincide with established facts and probable inferences, the coincidence has its value; and wherever the particulars are incongruous, the discrepancy does not distress us, I may add, does not concern us. I trust that the veneration rightly due to the Old Testament is not impaired by the ascertaining that the Mosaic is not an original but a compiled cosmogony. Its glory is, that while its materials were the earlier property of the race, they were in this record purged of polytheism and Nature-worship, and impregnated with ideas which we suppose the world will never outgrow. For its fundamental note is, the declaration of one God, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible, -a declaration which, if physical science is unable to establish, it is equally unable to overthrow. But, leaving aside for the present all questions of this sort, I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago. There will be no need to go much beyond the line of subjects which it has been my business to study, in order to bring before you, in a cursory review, not indeed all the disturbing topics of the time, but quite enough of them for our purpose. For the changes which we have to consider are all more or less connected I with the evolutionary theories which are now uppermost in the popular mind. In this presentation, it is best to set them forth in their in their simplest or most general form, divested of all theological or philosophical considerations, which have been or may be attached to them. I should rather say, to some of them. For the foundations, or at least the buttresses, of the now prevalent doctrine of the derivative origin of species mainly rest upon researches independently made, without speculative bias, being the general contributions to biological science in this century; the results of which have been accepted as far as made out without apprehension or other than scientific controversy. Upon no one of these particular points has there been a completer change of view than upon the distinctness of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them. It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend. It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized; and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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that increased powers of investigation- microscopical and chemical- might be expected to discover them. This expectation has not been fulfilled. It is true that the ambiguities of a hundred years ago are settled now. The zoophytes are all remanded to their proper places, though the animal kingdom at first claimed more than belonged to it. But other, more recondite and insurmountable, difficulties arose in their place. The best, I am disposed to say the settled, opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before. In short, the animal and vegetable lines, diverging widely above, join below in a loop. Naturalists may help classification, but do not alter these facts; when they sever this loop arbitrarily at what they deem the lowest point, or when they cut away the whole loop, and form of it a separate kingdom -the Protista of Haeckel. The only objection to the latter is (that the definition of this tertium quid from plant on the one hand and animal on the other is equally impracticable. One difficulty is removed only to have two in its place. The fact is, that a new article has recently been added to the scientific creed, -the essential oneness of the two kingdoms of organic nature. I crave your patience while I enter somewhat into particulars. Not many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three. The plant substance, named cellulose, because it formed the cell-walls, was supposed to constitute the whole vegetable fabric. It was known that all plants produced nitrogenous matter in the form of a compound of four elements; but this was thought to be merely a contained product, in a structureless condition, and to be not so much essential to the plant’s life as to that of the animals which the plants nourished. It was known to be structure-building material for animals: it was not known to be essential plant-structure also. But it was soon ascertained that this quaternary matter of the animal body was chemically the same in the plant, was elaborated there, and only appropriated by the animal. Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms. This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm. The statement that “protoplasm is the physical basis of life” must be accepted as true. As Professor Allman puts it, “wherever there is life, from its lowest to its highest manifestations, there is protoplasm; wherever there is protoplasm, there too is life,” or has been. The cellulose or solid material which composes the bulk of a tree or herb did not HDT WHAT? INDEX

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produce the protoplasm contained in its living parts, as was formerly supposed, but the protoplasm produced the cellulose: the semi- liquid and mobile matter within produced the cell- walls which enclose it. The walls or solid parts are to the protoplasm what the shell is to he oyster. The contents not only preceded he protective, investment, but can exist and prosper apart from it, as many a mollusk does, as many a simple plant does throughout the earlier and most active period of its life. Indeed this slimy matter lives before and apart from any thing which can be called a living being. A formless, apparently diffluent and structureless mass is seen to exhibit the essential phenomena of life, -to move, to feed, to grow, to multiply. We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite in form and fixed in phase, are individual beings, though we may not determine to which kingdom they belong. But there is life in simpler shape,

“If shape it might be called that shape has none, Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,”

there is vital activity in that which has not attained even the semblance of individuality. Little lumps of protoplasm are these, with out- line in a state of perpetual change, divisible into two or three or more, or two or three combining into one mass, either way without hindering or altering their manifestations. This living matter -of which Bathybius, if there be a Bathybius, or if it be any thing more than protoplasm of sponges, is one example -is said to have nothing more than molecular structure. It would be safer to say that the microscope has as yet revealed no organic structure. The natural history of protoplasm has recently been well expounded by Professor Allman, late President of the British Association, a most judicious naturalist, of conservative tendency; and his address, which you have read or should read, saves me from further de: tails, and enables me to proceed to other evidences of the substantial oneness of the two kingdoms of organic nature. Cellulose makes up the bulk of a vegetable, and was thought to be its true element. But it is now known to be not even peculiar to it: it enters largely into the fabric of certain animals, not of the very lowest grade. Starch was equally regarded as a purely and characteristically vegetable production; and its presence, in ambiguous cases, has been taken as a test. But it follows the example of cellulose. Being a prepared material from which cellulose in the plant is made by a molecular change, we are not now surprised to learn that starch-grains of animal origin have been found. We cannot conceive any thing more characteristic of a vegetable than chlorophyll, the green of herbage; for in it the special work of the plant is done, -namely, the transformation of mineral matter into organic, under the light of the sun, this being the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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prerogative of vegetation. Now, not only does chlorophyll abound in many ambiguous microscopical organisms of fresh and salt water, which except for this would be taken for animals, but it has recently been detected in hydras and sea-anemones and planarias, which are as certainly animals as are oysters and clams. Nor can it be thought that they possess something merely resembling chlorophyll; for it performs the characteristic work of that peculiar substance, which, as I have said, is the characteristic work of vegetation. For the index and essential accompaniment of this work (i.e., of the conversion of mineral into organic matter) is the evolution of oxygen gas from the decomposition of carbonic acid, water, &c., in which, if in any thing, vegetation consists. Now, the proof that what these animals possess is chlorophyll itself is demonstrated by their performance of the same function. They decompose carbonic acid and evolve oxygen gas, just as a green leaf does. Moreover, the chlorophyll has been extracted and identified by the spectroscopic test. Here, then, animals, undoubted animals, in addition to their own proper functions, take on the essential function of plants. There is no avoiding the conclusion that such animals are doing the duty of vegetables. Although I make little account of it, I should not overlook a more empirical distinction between the two kingdoms which has also failed. The characteristic features of an animal were mouth and stomach. This is the normal correlation of an animal with its conditions. Having to feed on vegetable matter, or what has been vegetable matter, in solid as well as liquid form, a mouth opening into an internal cavity of some sort was the natural pattern, to which all animals were supposed to conform. But Nature, with all her fondness for patterns, will not be arbitrarily held to them. Entozoa feed like rhizophytes; and turbellarias and their relatives have no alimentary canal, -the food taken by what answers to mouth passing as directly into the general tissue as does the material which a parasitic root imbibes from its host, or an ordinary root from the soil. While animals are thus overpassing the boundary in one direction, vegetables are making reprisals on the other. The rule is, that vegetables create organic matter, and animals consume it, producing none. But, while some animals produce some organic matter, some plants even among those of the highest grade feed wholly upon other plants, or even upon animals or their products. Like animals, some are herbivorous and some are carnivorous. That certain plants live parasitically upon other plants or upon animals, has long been too familiar to be remarkable. But that plants of the highest grade could capture or in some way take possession of small animals, extract and feed upon their juices, and appropriate these, as nourishment, is essentially a recent wonder and a recently ascertained fact. Yet some of the facts which point to this conclusion are old enough; and the conclusion would probably have been reached years ago, except for the preconception that plants and animals were too distinct for interchange of functions. Now that we know they are not, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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that the living structure in the two is fundamentally identical, what were formerly regarded as freaks of Nature are no longer mere wonderments, but parts of a system, and. capable of being correlated with the rest by investigation. And investigation soon ascertained that this carnivorous attachment to the vegetable organism in Diona’a and Drosera was an organ for digesting as well as capturing animal food. Juices are imbibed by it directly, as in animals from the stomach; and nourishing solid parts are rendered soluble and assimilate by imbuing them with peptones or digestive ferments, analogous in composition and in action to the gastric juice of the higher animals. Perhaps nothing in Nature can be more wonderful than all this; and nothing is more characteristic of the change which has come over scientific mind in our day than the manner in which such a discovery is received. The leading facts were well known a hundred years ago, and more. But, until recently, these phenomena were regarded as altogether anomalous; and such anomalies appear to have troubled no-body, except the framers of definitions. “Lusus natura” was a convenient phrase, and stood in the place of explanation, -as if the play of Nature was something apart from her work. No one seems to have had any difficulty in believing that a few particular plants were endowed with faculties of which no other plants were sharers. The thoughtful naturalist of our day is in a different frame of mind. He expects to find that the extraordinary is only an extreme case of the ordinary; and he looks for instances leading up from the one to the other. I cannot tarry to explain how this expectation has directed observation and stimulated research in this particular field, and reached the result that these wonderful plants are distinguished only by higher degrees and more prominent manifestations of a power which is in some sort common to many or to all their brethren. We learn, even, that the germinating embryo of a grain of corn feeds upon and digests the solid maternal nourishment which surrounds it, and the humblest mould appropriates the organic matter which it attacks, by the aid of a peptone or inversive ferment, not different in nature and -office from the gastric and other juices by aid of which we appropriate our daily meals. It does appear also that the lowest organisms, which live a kind of scavenger life, by using over again dead or effete organic matter running to decay -but to some of which living juices come not amiss -have also the power, certain salts being given, of creating organic matter, and building up a fabric without sun-light and without chlorophyll. Here, then, is the simplest organic life, -in which, germs being given, i.e. first individuals of the sort supplied and placed in favorable surroundings, they increase and multiply into more, each to multiply again, and so on, in geometrical progression. From such lowly basis the two kingdoms may be conceived to rise, diverging as they ascend in separate lines, -the one developing close relations with sunlight and becoming the food-producing vegetable realm; the other, the food-consuming animal realm, which, dispensed from the labor of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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assimilation, and from the fixity of position which generally attends it, may rise to higher and freer manifestations of life. Such, at least, appear to be the relations of the two kingdoms to each other and to their common base; and such is the conception through which we may attain to an explanation of how it may be that members of each line possess so many characteristics of the other. I have said, “germs being given,” the forms increase and multiply. If asked, Whence the germs, and were they everywhere and always prerequisite? the scientific answer must be yes, so far as we know. Thus far, spontaneous generation, or abiogenesis, -the incoming of life apart from that which is living, -is not supported by any unequivocal evidence, though not a little may be said in its favor. However it may be in the future, here scientific belief stands mainly where it did forty-five years ago, only on a better-tried and firmer footing. It remains to mention two supposed distinctions between vegetables and animals which were until recently prominent, but which are no longer criteria, even as between the higher forms of the two. The first is the faculty of automatic movement, or -to take up the question only on the highest plane -the faculty of making movements in reference to ends. This is affirmed of animals, and is an undoubted faculty of all of them, but was long denied to plants, perhaps from a notion that such movements argued consciousness. But consciousness, in any legitimate sense of the term, pertains only to the higher animals. To show the breaking down of the distinction, it would suffice to contrast the rooted fixity and vegetative growth of very many lower animals with the free loco-motion of most microscopic aquatic plants and of the genus of those not microscopic; but plants of the highest organization furnish obvious “examples better suited to our purpose.” Is there not an independent movement, in response to an external impression, and in reference to an end, when the two sides of the trap of Dionaea suddenly enclose an alighted fly, cross their fringe of marginal bristles over the only avenue of escape, remain quiescent in this position long enough to give a small fly full opportunity to crawl out, soon open if this hap- pens, but after due interval shut down firmly upon one of greater size which cannot get out, then pour out digestive juices, and in due time re-absorb the whole? So, when the free end of a twining stem, or the whole length of a tendril, outreaches horizontally and makes circular sweeps, and secures thereby a support, to which it clings by coiling; when a tendril, having fixed its tip to a distant support, shortens itself by coiling, so bringing the next tendril nearer the support; when a free revolving tendril avoids winding up itself uselessly around the stem it belongs to, and ill the only practicable way, namely, by changing from the horizontal to the vertical position until it passes by it, and then rapidly resumes its horizontal sweep, to result in reaching a distant support,-is it possible to think that these are not movements in reference to ends? You may say that all such movements are capable of explanation, or in time will be HDT WHAT? INDEX

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so; are the result of mechanism, and adjustments, and of common physical forces. No doubt; and this is equally true of every animal movement, not excepting. those instigated by volition. “Still it moves,” as the humbled Galileo said of the earth; and the idea that such movements are in reference to ends is not superseded by any yet devised explanation of the mechanism. A remaining distinction between plants and animals was based on the relations they respectively sustain to the air we breathe. This has already been stated, and the exceptions noted; but the topic is resumed in order to bring to view the substantially different relations of the two kingdoms to physical force. Plants give out oxygen gas, and thus purify the air or the respiration of animals. Animals, consuming this oxygen, breathe it back to the air in the form of carbonic acid. But the putting of this contrast is only another way of saying that plants produce organic matter and animals decompose it. The oxygen gas given out by sun-lit foliage is just what is left over when carbonic acid is decomposed and the carbon enters into the composition of the vegetable matter then produced. This elaborated matter, more complex and unstable than the materials of which it was made, is the food of animals, is first appropriated, then decomposed by them, and in the decomposition the carbon is given back to the air recombined with the oxygen they inhale, the carbon again taking the oxygen which was separated from it by the plant. So respiration means decomposition; and this decomposition in the animal economy means organic material used up, work done, energy degraded. It means that the clock-weight which was wound up by the sun in the plant has run down. It means that, very much as the sun, shining on the earth and ocean, converts water into vapor and lifts it into the upper air, so the same luminary, shining upon the plant, there raises mineral matter to a higher and unstable state, in what we call organic products, -in both cases endowing the affected matter with a certain energy. The exalted matter in the one case falls at length as rain, perhaps directly into the ocean from which it was lifted, perhaps upon a mountain summit, where as snow or glacier-ice it may long remain poised and comparatively stationary. But sooner or later it falls into the rivulet and the river, and in its fall and flow it expends its endowment of energy, and does work, -turns wheels and spins or forges, if man so directs, -and, when it has reached stable equilibrium at the level of the ocean, it will have expended just the energy which was imparted to it in the raising. So the energy with which the sun endowed vegetable matter when it was raised to the organic state may be given up as heat when this matter is restored to its original condition by burning, or falls slowly back to the same condition in the process of natural decay; or the heat, like the falling water, may do mechanical work. But also the organic material may be consumed in the plant itself. For the plant, like the animal, is a consumer. The only difference is that, whereas the animal is always and only a consumer and decomposer, the plant creates or HDT WHAT? INDEX

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composes likewise, and it produces vastly more than it consumes or decomposes. It decomposes only when it does mechanical work. But all its processes, all movements; all transformations, are work done at the expense of organized material and accumulated energy. Even the act of storing up solar force in the green herbage, or rather the changes connected with it, can only be done at a certain cost, though the cost is small in comparison with the gain. But every transference of material from one place or one state to another is done only by the decomposition and loss of some portion of it, -one part suffering that another may be changed and saved. When the germ feeds upon the maternal store in the seed, a considerable part is consumed in order to make the rest available; and the loss is made manifest, just in the breathing of an animal or in the combustion of fuel, by the evolution of carbonic acid and of heat. The same thing in its measure occurs in the upbuilding of the fabric, the carrying of material high into the air, -into a tree-top, for instance; and in all the processes of flowering, and in storing up in the seed the richest products as an outfit for a new generation. Where visible movements take place, the quicker action is at equivalent cost. The sensitive tendril, which will coil promptly after the first brushing with my finger, will coil again only after an interval of rest, and upon the third or fourth excitation, or after a certain number of spontaneous revolutions, it falls exhausted. But material endowed with energy in the plant is largely transferred as food to animals. It brings to them an energy which they may use, but did not originate. Not many years ago, it was taken for granted that living things moved and had their being, and did their work, by strength of their own; that the power by which I strike a blow, or write on my paper, or move my lips in articulate speech, was somehow an original contribution to, rather than a directed use of, the common forces of physical nature. To all who have familiarized themselves with the facts of the case, the contrary is now substantially certain. The sun is the source of all motion and force manifested in life on the earth, and plants are the medium in which energy is exalted to the most serviceable state. The work done by living beings is at the expense of, and is measured by, the passage of so much matter from an unstable to a relatively stable equilibrium, by the coming together of molecules in to closer and; firmer positions, and by the attendant fall of so much energy from an exalted to a relatively degraded condition. So plants, animals, men, in all their doings, add nothing to and take nothing from the sum of physical force. Their prerogative is, each in its measure, to direct the application of physical force, and to direct it to ends. The idea of ends involves that of individuality. The higher animals, and men among them, are complete individuals. We cannot make the idea of individuality any clearer than by adducing them as examples of it. In the lowest form of life, in those amorphous or indefinitely polymorphous “little lumps of protoplasm” which the biologists have made known to us, and even, perhaps, in a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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stratum or mass which takes the form of whatever bounds it, it is said that we may contemplate the phenomena of life in that which has no manifest individuality. What have we between these two extremes? The first and simplest individuality is that of cells. Cell-doctrine, or the cellular composition of plants and animals, belongs wholly to the biological science of the last half-century, although the name is older, and some knowledge of the structure in plants is as old as the micro-scope. The homologizing of animals with plants in this regard began about forty years ago; and the doctrine of the individual life of cells is recent. Unfortunately the rather inappropriate name cell came into use before the structure was rightly understood, and may be misleading. It was given, naturally enough, to the walls circumscribing cavities in ordinary plant-tissue, before it was understood that the walls were not made and then filled, -before it was known that the contents are the living thing, and the wall an encasement or shell. The substance of our recent knowledge is, -that a plant is an aggregate of organic units, mostly of very small size; that these are to the herb or tree what the bricks and stones of this chapel are to the edifice. Only they “are living stones, fitly framed together” in organic growth, and their walls answer to the cement. Animals do not differ materially, except that the mortar is mostly of the same nature as the bricks, and there is a greater or at length complete fusion or confluence of the cells. The component material, the protoplasm, is essentially the same, as has already been stated. But each aggregate, each ordinary plant or animal, begins as one cell, which is then the simple individual. This is growth and propagation divides itself into two, these two into four, these into sixteen, and so on, thus building up the structure, -a whole, of which the individual cells are component parts. The simplest plant begins in the same way with an initial cell, but this, instead of multiplying with cohesion into a structure, multiplies with separation into progeny. Other simple plants go on without separation to form a row of similar cells, which may casually fall apart into individuals or may remain connected; but in either case each has its own life, and does what the others do, so that the separation or the continued connection is a matter of indifference. But when, higher in the scale, structures are built up, what were individuals become parts or organs, or the thousandth or millionth part of an organ; then the life of the cells is their own no less, but their individuality blends in the common life of the aggregate. By increasing complexity of organization, with increasing subordination of parts and specialization of office, the highest plants and animals are composed. In them each unit or cell has its own life and its own nutrition, while also contributing to the common weal, -some by this function, some by that; but in the higher forms all are somehow controlled by a pervasive life and directed to common ends, -ends the more various, complex, and special, in proportion to the rank of the organism in the scale of being. So, too, the component cells become effete and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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die, while the aggregate life continues; and the continued structure, which is nothing but an aggregate, is somehow informed, animated, and operated by a common life of higher grade than that of any or all its components. In numerous lower plants and animals we cannot definitely determine what are organisms and what are organs; in the herb or tree, and in the coral polypidom, organ, individual, colony are inextricably blended; in the higher animals subordination of parts to a whole is completely attained. All along the ascent that which controls and subordinates parts aggrandizes its manifestations. The lowest animals add very little to merely vegetative life, except greater sensitiveness to external impressions and more free and varied response; a step higher brings in a greater range of unconscious feeling; the higher brute animals have attained unto specific desires, affections, imagination, and the elements of simple thought; the highest, gifted with reflective reason, may make their own thoughts the subject of thought. So, our conception of individuality is from ourselves, conscious beings: it is carried down unqualified to the brute animals with which we are associated; it becomes vague and shadowy in plants, but still, somehow, the idea inheres throughout all organisms. The beginning of organization is individuation or tendency to individualize. The completed self is man. Here let me interject a remark in correction of a common misapprehension as regards the nature of the simplicity of the lowest organisms. An animalcule and a unicellular plant, or the cellular components of common plants or animals, are simple indeed, comparatively. But the recent science which has brought out the close connection of the lower with the higher forms (and showed that through all “one increasing purpose runs”) is also showing, in all the latest microscopic work, that the plant-cell and the animal-cell are really very complex structures, and the processes through which one cell becomes two, instead of being a simple bisection, prove to be very elaborate and wonderful. The further the investigation is carried under the modern microscope, the more complex and recondite does their structure and behavior appear to be. They seemed to be simple because they are small; but much of the simplicity vanishes upon intimate acquaintance. Wherefore, in view of recent discoveries of this sort, it is premature to conclude that the “little lumps of protoplasm” described by Haeckel are really destitute of organic structure. It is an illusion to fancy that the mystery of life is less in an amoeba or a blood-corpuscle than in a man. From individuals in themselves, let us pass to questions relating to their succession and kinds. Plants and animals, each propagating their kind, produce lines of individuals, sustaining to each other the relation of parent and progeny. These lines are the species of the naturalist. Have the species come down from the beginning of life, unaltered or altered; or have there been successive creations? Taking first the vegetable and animal kingdoms as a whole, it has long been well understood that ages upon ages have passed since the earth HDT WHAT? INDEX

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was stocked with living beings of numerous sorts. Kind after kind has appeared, flourished, and disappeared; and, in the long succession, species of progressively higher rank have come into existence, the forms more and more approximating those which now exist. There is good reason to believe that at more than one epoch the earth has been as fully stocked with species as it is now, and in equal diversity, except as to the highest types. What relation have these beings of the earlier and of the succeeding times sustained to each other and to the present inhabitants of the earth? Half a century ago; when I began to read scientific books and journals, the commonly received doctrine was, that the earth had been completely depopulated and repopulated over and over, each time with a distinct population; and that the species which now, along with man, occupy the present surface of the earth, belong to an ultimate and independent creation, having an Ideal but no genealogical connection with those that preceded. This view, as a rounded whole and in all its essential elements, has very recently disappeared from science. It died a royal death with Agassiz, who maintained it with all his great ability, as long as it was tenable. I am not aware that it now has any scientific upholder. It is certain that there has been no absolute severance of the present from the nearer past; for while some species have taken the place of other species, not a few have survived unchanged, or almost unchanged. And, it is most probable that this holds throughout; for certain species appear to have bridged the intervals between successive epochs all along the line, surviving from one to another, and justifying the inference that species -however originated -have come in and gone out one by one, and that probably no universal catastrophe has ever blotted out life from the earth. Life seems to have gone on, through many and great vicissitudes, now with losses, now with renewals, and everywhere at length with change; but from first to last it has inhered in one system of nature, one vegetable and one animal kingdom, which themselves show indications of a common starting- point. As respects the vegetation, from which I should naturally draw illustrations, the nature and amount of the likeness between the existing flora and that of a preceding geological period has recently been summed up by Saporta in the statement that there is not a tree nor a shrub in Europe or North America which has not recognizable relatives in the fossil remains of the tertiary period. It is like visiting a country church-yard, where “The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,” and spelling out, one by one, from mossed and broken gravestones, the names of most of the living inhabitants of the parish, -names differing it may be in orthography from those on the village signs; but, as of the people, so of the trees, it is beyond reasonable doubt that the later are descendants of the earlier., The same holds true of animals; and the facts therefore point toward the conclusion that existing species in general are descended from tertiary ancestors. But if so they have mostly undergone change, and great change as we go farther HDT WHAT? INDEX

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back with the comparison. And there are many existing forms of which no fossil ancestor is known. What relation, if any, can these sustain to a by-gone flora or fauna? And, with what reason do we predicate change of species in former times if they are not change- able now? This brings up the question of the fixity or variability of species. Scientific opinion upon this point is not what it was thirty or forty years ago. Then it was generally, though not universally, believed that species are perfectly definite and stable; capable of variation, indeed, but only within circumscribed limits. Wherever it was difficult or impracticable to discriminate them, the difficulty was presumed to be, not in the things themselves, but in the imperfection of the naturalist’s knowledge or acumen. There was the evidence of a good number of cases to show that species had not perceptibly altered in four or five thousand years, and of some having lasted for a vastly longer time. Hence it was an article of scientific faith that species on the whole were fixed now, and that probably they have come down essentially unaltered from the beginning,- a beginning which was wholly beyond the ken and scope of science, which is concerned with questions about how things go on, and has nothing to say as to how they absolutely began. The naturalists of that day might suppose -certainly many of them did suppose -that existing species may have come into being by other than direct supernatural origination, and, indeed, the foremost of them were well aware that the “‘question’ of origin would have to be reargued at no distant day. But, so far, the various speculative attempts at explaining the mystery of the incoming of species had not been encouraging, and eminent naturalists deprecated all general theories of the sort, as at the best a waste of time. So the fixity and inscrutability of species -though silently doubted by some, and controverted by a few was still the postulate of natural history; and more than one laborious naturalist has been known to declare that, if this fixity was not complete, natural history was not worth pursuing as a science. There is now a different attitude toward this class of questions. First, the absoluteness of species is no longer taken for granted. That species have a stability, that every form reproduces after its kind, is obvious; but it is equally obvious that the similarity of its individuals is not complete. It had been assumed that the differences brought about by variation are always comparatively small, unessential, and limited. This is now partly doubted, and partly explained away. In the first place, much of the popular idea of the distinctness of all species rests on a fallacy, which is obvious enough when once pointed out. In systematic works, every plant and animal must be referred to some species, every species is described by such and such marks, and in the books one species is as good as another. The absoluteness of species, being the postulate of the science, was taken for granted to begin with; and so all the forms which have been named and admitted into the systematic works as species, are thereby assumed to be completely distinct. All the doubts and uncertainties which may HDT WHAT? INDEX

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have embarrassed the naturalist when he proposed or admitted a particular species, the nice balancing of the probabilities and the hesitating character of the judgment, either do not appear at all in the record or are overlooked by all but the critical student. Whether the form under consideration should be regarded as a new species, or should be combined with others into a more generalized and variable species, is a question which a naturalist has to decide for the time being, often upon insufficient and always upon incomplete knowledge; and increasing knowledge and wider observation generally raise full as many doubts as they settle. This may not be so decidedly the case in zoology as in botany; but I incline to the opinion that there is no wide difference in this respect. The patient and plodding botanist spends much of his time in the endeavor to draw specific lines between the parts of a series the extremes of which are patently different, while the means seem to fill the interval. When he is addressed by the triumphant popular argument, “if one form and one species has been derived from another, show us the intermediate forms which prove it,” he can only ejaculate his wish that this ideal vegetable kingdom was the one he had to deal with. Moreover when he shows the connecting links, he is told, “Then these are all varieties of one species; species are fixed, only with wider variation than was thought.” And when he points to the wide difference between the extremes, as being greater than that between undoubted species, he is met with the rejoinder, “Then here are two or three or more species which undoubtedly have true distinctions, if only you would find them out.” That is quite possible, but it is hardly possible that such fine differences are supernatural. Some one when asked if he believed in ghosts, replied, No, he had seen too many of them. So I have been at the making and unmaking of far too many species to retain any overweening confidence in their definiteness and stability. I believe in them, certainly. I do not exactly agree that they “are shadows, not ‘substantial things’,” but I believe that they have only a relative fixity and permanence. You will ask if lack of capacity to interbreed is not a criterion of species. I must answer, No. As a matter of course individuals of widely diverse species cannot interbreed; those of related species not uncommonly do; but it is said that when they do interbreed the hybrid progeny is sterile. Commonly it is so, sometimes not. The rule is not sufficiently true to serve as a test, either in the vegetable or in the animal kingdom. The only practical use of the test is for the discrimination of the higher grade of varieties from species. Now in fact some varieties of the same species will hardly interbreed at all; while some species interbreed most freely, and produce fully fertile offspring. So the supposed criterion fails in the only cases in which it could be of service. All that can be said is, that whereas known varieties tend to interbreed with unimpaired and sometimes with increased fertility, distinct species of near re- semblance tend not to interbreed at all; and between the two extremes there are HDT WHAT? INDEX

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all inter- mediate conditions. Here, as throughout organic nature, the extremes are far apart; the, interval is filled with gradations. What then is the substantial difference between varieties and species? Just here is the turning-point between the former view and the present. The former doctrine was that varieties come about in the course of nature, but species not; that varieties became what they are, but that species were originally made what they are. I suppose that, even before the day of Darwin- ism, most working naturalists were reaching the conviction that this distinction was untenable; that the same rule was applicable to both; and therefore that either varieties did not come in the course of nature, or that species did. Perfectly apprehending the alternative and its consequences, Agassiz took the ground that varieties as well as species were primordial, or rather that the more marked forms called varieties by most naturalists were species, and. therefore original creations. Rightly to understand his view, it must be taken along with his conception of species, as consisting from the very first of a multitude of individuals. Other naturalists were looking to the opposite alternative, and were coming to the conclusion that species as well as varieties were natural developments. In botany, this conclusion was reached more than sixty years ago, through it observation and experiment, by an English clergyman and naturalist, Herbert, afterward Dean of Manchester. He announced his conviction that “horticultural experiments have established, beyond the possibility of doubt, that botanical species are only a higher and more permanent class of varieties,” and, consequently, that the genus is the progenitor of the species belonging to it. Others have reached the same conclusion by more speculative routes, and have deduced the theoretical consequences. But no marked impression was made until the hypothesis of natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life was promulgated, and supplied a scientific reason for the diversification of varieties into species. The principle brought to view is too obvious to have been wholly overlooked. It is interesting to notice: that the earliest known anticipation of that principle which Darwin and Wallace developed almost simultaneously, was published sixty years ago, by Dr. Wells, the sagacious author of the theory of dew, who hit upon the idea of natural selection while resident in America. As abstracted by Mr. Darwin, who evidently takes delight in the discovery of these anticipations, the points which Dr. Wells made were substantially these: - “All animals vary more or less: agriculturists improve domesticated animals by selection.” What is thus done by art is done with equal efficacy, though more slowly, by Nature, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which they inhabit, and in this way: Negroes and mulattoes enjoy immunity from certain tropical diseases, and white men a comparative immunity from those of cold climates. Under the variation common to all animals, some of the darker would be HDT WHAT? INDEX

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better adapted than the rest to bear the diseases of a warm country, -say of tropical Africa. This race would consequently multiply, while the others would decrease, directly, because the prevalent diseases would be more fatal to them, and indirectly, by inability to contend with their more vigorous neighbors. Through the continued operation of the same causes, darker and darker races would prevail over the less dark, and in time would monopolize the region where they originated or into which they had advanced. Similarly would white races, to the exclusion of dark, be developed and prevail in cooler regions. Now, this simple principle, -extended from races to species; from the present to geological ages; from man and domesticated animals to all animals and plants; from struggle with disease to struggle for food, for room, and against the diverse hardships which at times beset all living things, and which are intensified by the Malthusian law of the pressure of population on subsistence, -population tending to multiply in geometrical progression, while food can increase only in a much lower ratio, and room may not be increasable at all, so that out of multitudinous progeny only the few fittest to the special circumstances in each generation can possibly survive and propagate, -this is Darwinism; that is, Darwinism pure and simple, free from all speculative accretions. Here, it may be remarked that natural selection by itself is not an hypothesis, nor even a theory. It is a truth, -a catena of facts and direct inferences from facts. As has been happily said, it is a truth of the same kind as that which we enunciate in saying that round stones will roll down a hill further than flat ones. There is no doubt that natural selection operates; the open question is, what do its operations amount to. The hypothesis based on this principle is, that the struggle for life and survival of only the fittest among individuals, all disposed to vary and no two exactly alike, will account for the diversification of the species and forms of vegetable and animal life, -will even account for the rise, in the course of countless ages, from simpler and lower to higher and more specialized living beings. We need not here enter into any further explanation of this now familiar but not always well-understood hypothesis; nor need I here pronounce any judgment of my own upon it. No doubt it may account for much which has not received other scientific explanation; and Mr. Darwin is not the man to claim that it will account for every thing. But before we can judge at all of its capabilities, we need clearly to understand what is contained in the hypothesis; for what can be got out of it, in the way of explanation, depends upon what has gone into it. So certain discriminations should here be attended to. Natural selection we understand to be a sort of personification or generalized expression for the processes and the results of the whole interplay of living things on the earth with their inorganic surroundings and with each other. The hypothesis asserts that these may account, not for the introduction of life, but for its diversification into the forms HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and kinds which we now behold. This, I suppose, is tantamount .to asserting that the differences between one species and another now existing, and between these and their predecessors, has come to pass in the course of Nature; that is, without miracle. In these days, all agree that a scientific inquiry whether this may be so -that is, whether there are probable grounds for believing it (no thoughtful person expects to prove it) -is perfectly legitimate; and, so far as it becomes probable, I imagine that you might safely accept it. For the hypothesis, in its normal and simplest form,- when kept close to the facts, and free from extraneous assumptions -is merely this:- Given the observed capacity for variation as an inexhaustible factor, assuming that what has varied is still prone to vary (and there are grounds for the assumption), and natural selection will- so to say-pick out for preservation the fittest forms for particular surroundings, lead on and diversify them, and, by continual elimination of the less fit, segregate the survivors into distinct species. This, you see, assumes, and does not account for, the impulse to variation, assumes that variation is an inherent and universal capacity, and is the efficient cause of all the diversity; while natural selection is the proximate cause of it. So it is the selection, not the creation of forms that is accounted for. Darwinism does not so much explain why we have the actual forms, as it does why we have only these and not all intermediate forms, -in short, why we have species. There is of course a cause for the variation. Nobody supposes that any thing changes without a cause; and there is no reason for thinking that proximate causes of variation may not come to be known; but we hardly know the conditions, still less the causes now. The point I wish to make here is that natural selection -however you expand its meaning -cannot be invoked as the cause of that upon which it operates, i. e., variation. Otherwise, if by natural selection is meant the totality of all the known and unknown causes of whatever comes to pass in organic nature, then the term is no longer an allowable personification, but a sheer abstraction, which meaning every thing, can explain nothing. It is like saying that whatever happens is the cause of whatever comes to pass. We may conclude, therefore, that natural selection, in the sense of the originator of the term, and in the only congruous sense, stands for the influence of inorganic nature upon living things, along with the influence of these upon each other; and that what it purports to ac-count for is the picking out, from the multitude of incipient variations, of the few which are to survive, and which thereby acquire distinctness. There is a further assumption in the hypo- thesis which must not be overlooked; namely, that the variation of plants and animals, out of which so much comes, is indefinite or all-directioned and accidental. This, I would insist, is no fundamental part of the hypothesis of the derivation of species, and is clearly no part of the principle of natural selection. But it is an assumption which Mr. Darwin judges to be war- ranted by the facts, and in some HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of its elements it is unavoidable. Evidently if the innate tendency to vary upon which physical circumstances operate is indefinite, then the variations which the circumstances elicit, and which could not otherwise amount to any thing, must be accidental in the same sense as are the circumstances themselves. Out of this would immediately rise the question as to what can be the foundation and beginning of this long and wonderful chapter of accidents which has produced and maintained, not only for this time but through all biological periods, an ever-varying yet ever well-adapted cosmos. But the facts, so far as I can judge, do not support the assumption of every-sided and in- different variation. Variation is somehow and somewhere introduced in the transit from parent to offspring. The actual variations displayed by the progeny of a particular plant or animal may differ much in grade, and tend in more than one direction, but in fact they do not appear to tend in many directions. It is generally agreed that the variation is from within, is an internal response to external impressions. All that we can possibly know of the nature of the inherent tendency to vary must be gathered from the facts of the response. And these, I judge, are not such as to require or support the assumption of a tendency to wholly vague and all- directioned variation. Let us here correct a common impression that Darwinian evolution predicates actual or necessary variation of all existing species, and counts that the variation must be in some de- finite ratio to the time. That is not the idea, nor the fact. “Evolution is not a course of hap-hazard and incessant change, but a continuing re-adjustment, which mayor may not, according to circumstances, involve considerable changes in a given time.” Every form is in a relatively stable equilibrium, else it would not exist. Forms adjusted to their surroundings ought by the hypothesis to remain unchanged until the circumstances change. Only those of their variations could come to any thing which happened to be equally well adapted to the unchanged circumstances; and this may be what we have when two or more nearly related species inhabit similar stations in the, same area. From this point of view you see how wide of the mark are those who imagine that Darwinian evolution supposes that the organic world was in early times, or at any time, out of joint or in ill relations to the surroundings. On the contrary, it is of the very nature of natural selection, that, while inducing changes eventually immense, it should preserve throughout all “time a condition of harmonious adaptation.” Catastrophes must destroy; but gradual modification, under the long and silent struggle which never hastes and never rests, preserves while it renovates and diversifies the races. I ought here to state that there are eminent naturalists (one of them of your own university) who accept the doctrine of evolution, but who think little of natural selection as a modus operandi in the diversification of species; and there are distinguished writers, not naturalists, who, from other points of view are ready to accept “the doctrine of the successive evolution from HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ancestral germs of higher and higher forms of life and mind,” while they profess to have buried the principle of natural selection and with it the Malthusian theory of population in one common grave. These are evolutionists, in their way, because the probability of evolutionary theories springs from the very various lines of facts, otherwise inexplicable, which they harmonize and explain: -in geology, the previous existence of forms more and more like those now existing, and at length coalescing in them; in geography, the actual distribution of species and genera over the earths surface; in systematic natural history, the reason why species and genera and orders are so variously related, are here connected by transitions and there separated by wide gaps; in morphology why the same functions may be assumed by different organs, or the same kind of organ may perform here one function and there another, or again exist as a vestige, of no service at all; in anatomy and biology, the transition from one element of structure to another, the gradual specialization of organs, and the remarkable coincidence between the order of the development in the individual animal and that of the rise from low to high in the scale of being, and that of the successive appearance of the grades in time; finally in psychology, the gradations between beings endowed with rudimentary sensation and beings endowed with mind. Here, where the “touch of Nature makes the whole world kin,” we reach the sensitive point. Man, while on the one side a wholly exceptional being, is on the other an object of natural history, -a part of the animal kingdom. If you agree with Quatrefages that man is a kingdom by himself, you must agree with him that this kingdom is solely intellectual; that he is as certainly and completely an animal as he is certainly something more. We are sharers not only of animal but of vegetable life, sharers with the higher brute animals in common instincts and feelings and affections. It seems to me that there is a sort of meanness in the wish to ignore the tie. I fancy that human beings may be more humane when they realize that, as their dependent associates live a life in which man has a share, so they have rights which man is bound to respect. Man, in short, is a partaker of the natural as well as of the spiritual. And the evolutionist may say with the apostle: “Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.” Man, “formed of the dust of the ground,” endowed with “the breath of life,” “became a living soul.” Is there any warrant for affirming that these processes were instantaneous? As has just been intimated, the characteristic of that particular theory of evolution which is now in the ascendant is that, by taking advantage of “every creature’s best” for bettering conditions, it has “made strife work for good, throughout” an immensely long line of adjustments and readjustments, in a series ascending as it advanced; that it supposes a process, not from discord to harmony, but from simpler to fuller and richer harmonies, conserving through- out the best adaptations to the then existing conditions. So while HDT WHAT? INDEX

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its advocates nowhere contemplate a state

“When Nature underneath a heap, Of jarring atoms lay, And could not heave her head,”

they may appropriate Dryden’s closing lines,-

“From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began, From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man.”

I have now indicated, at more than sufficient length for one discourse, some of the principal recent changes and present tendencies in scientific belief, especially in biology. Even the most advanced of the views here presented are held by very many scientific men, -some as established truths, some as probable opinions. There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs. It remains to consider what attitude thoughtful men and Christian believers should take respecting them, and how they stand related to beliefs of another order. That will be the topic of a following lecture. LECTURE II

THE RELATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC TO RELIGIOUS BELIEF.

IN a preceding discourse I brought to your (if notice a series of changes in view and opinion which have taken place among scientific men within my own remembrance. I restricted the survey to the biological sciences (with merely a reference to the principle of the conservation of energy in its application to the organic world), and in these to the supposed facts and immediate inferences, to what may be called their natural- historical interpretation. These new views are full of interest of a kind which you cannot expect a naturalist to under- value. For they have greatly exalted his calling. In the days of Linnaeus, who died only a hundred and two years ago, and throughout a long generation of his followers, species were looked upon as “simple curiosities of Nature,” to be inventoried and described; and striking phenomena in plants and animals, as something to be wondered at, but not to be explained. With the advent of Morphology, the precursor and parent of Evolution, Natural History developed from a curious pursuit, training the observing powers, to that of a true science, engaging the reason in the search for causes. According to one definition, “Science HDT WHAT? INDEX

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is the labor of mind applied to Nature.” In this sense, modern botany and zoology have certainly become scientific. They are at least attempting great labors. But in widely extending, as they now do, the operation of natural causes in the organic world, they make close connections between biology and physics, or what used to be called, and I think deserves to be called, natural philosophy. And the connection brings in, or brings up afresh, considerations which affect the ground of natural and revealed religion. Under this aspect, they properly excite your anxious attention. I used throughout the phrase “scientific belief,” as the one best suited to the occasion. The term is comprehensive and elastic, covering many degrees of conviction or assent, from moral certainty down to probable opinion. In this respect, scientific and theological beliefs are similar; as they also are in being mainly states of mind toward that which is incapable of demonstration, -either because, as in the case of ultimate beliefs (on which all science and knowledge are based) it is impossible to go beyond them, or else Because the subject-matter is not positively known, and certainty is unattainable from the nature or the present conditions of the case. The proofs upon which both biological and theological investigations have to rely are largely probabilities, some of a higher, some of a lower order, and much that is accepted for the time is taken on trial or on prima facie evidence. Much also is or should be held under suspense of judgment, a state of mind eminently favorable to accurate investigation. As to those who can forthwith assort the contents of their minds into two compartments, one for what they believe and the other for what they disbelieve, neither their belief nor their denial can be of much account. In all subjects of inquiry, those only are to be trusted who discriminate between inevitable beliefs, established convictions, probable opinions, and hypotheses on trial. Now, our general inquiry in this lecture is, What should be the attitude, I will not say of theological students, but of thoughtful men, in respect to scientific beliefs, tendencies, and anticipations, such as we have been considering? To a certain extent it may well be a waiting attitude. The strictly scientific matters must necessarily be left mainly to the experts, whose very various and independent investigations, pursued under every diversity of bias, must in time reach reasonably satisfactory conclusions. But the naturalists claim no monopoly in the consideration of the great problems which now interest us, in which indeed most of them de- cline to take any part. Perhaps theological students and divines might be asked to wait until views and hypotheses still ardently controverted among scientific investigators are I brought nearer to a settlement. But the disposition to discount expected results, either for or against supernatural religion, has always prevailed. The theologians at least have never waited, and cannot be expected to wait; and while some of their contributions to the subject have been inconsiderate, others have been most valuable. In any case, there is no call to wait HDT WHAT? INDEX

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on the ground that the disturbing views are only hypotheses. For, in the first place, we should have long to wait for demonstration one way or the other; and one crop of hypotheses is the fertile seed of another. Besides, hypothesis is the proper instrument for dealing with this class of questions; indeed, it is the essential precursor of every fruitful investigation in physical nature. You can seldom sound with the plummet while standing on the shore. To do this to any purpose, you must launch out on the sea, and brave some risks. Nearly all valuable results have been gained in this way. Newton’s theory of gravitation was a typical hypothesis, and one which happened to be capable of early and sufficient verification. The undulatory theory of light was another. The nebular hypothesis, or portions of it, and the, kinetic theory -of gases, less verifiable, are accepted willingly because of the success with which they explain the facts. Evolution is a more complex, loose and less provable hypothesis, or congeries of d hypotheses, which can at most have only a relative, though perhaps continually increasing probability from its power of explaining a great variety of facts. Its strength appears on comparing it with the rival hypothesis -for such it is- of immediate creation, which neither ex- plains nor pretends to explain any. How the more exact physical sciences are becoming more reconditely hypothetical, especially in the imagination of entities of which there can be no possible proof beyond their serviceability in explaining phenomena, we must not stop to consider. Only this may be said, that the adage, “Where faith begins science ends” is now well nigh inverted. For faith, in a just sense of the word, assumes as prominent a place in science as in religion. It is indispensable to both. Let it be noted, moreover, that the case we have to consider does not come before the tribunal of reason with antecedent presumptions all on one side, as theologians generally suppose. They say to the naturalists, not improperly, we will think about adopting your conclusions, contrary as they are to all our prepossessions, when they are thoroughly and irrevocably substantiated, and not till then. Your theory may prove true, but it seems vastly improbable. Here the naturalist is ready with a rejoinder: In this world of law you cannot expect us to adopt your assumption of specific creations by miraculous intervention with the course of Nature, not once for all at a beginning, but over and over in time. We will accept intervention only when and where you can convincingly establish it, and where we are unable: to explain it away, as in the case of absolute beginning. If the naturalist starts with the presumption against him when he broaches the theory of the descent of later from preceding forms in the course of Nature, so no less does the theologian when in a world governed by law he asserts a break in the continuity of natural cause and effect. But, indeed, you are not so much concerned to know whether evolutionary theories are actually well-founded or ill-founded, as you are to know whether if true, or if received as true, they would impair the foundations of religion. And, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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surely, if views of Nature which are incompatible with theism and with Christianity can be established, or can be made as tenable as the contrary, it is quite time that we knew it. If, on the other hand, all real facts and necessary inferences from them can be adjusted to our grounded religious convictions, as well as other ascertained facts have been adjusted, it may relieve many to be assured of it. The best contribution that I can offer towards the settlement of these mooted questions may be the statement and explanation of my own attitude in this regard, and of the reasons which determine it. I accept substantially, as facts, or as apparently well-grounded inferences, or as fairly probable opinions, -according to their nature and degree, -the principal series of changed views which I brought before you in the preceding lecture. I have no particular predilection for any of them; and I have no particular dread of any of the consequences which legitimately flow from them, beyond the general awe and sense of total insufficiency with which a mortal man contemplates the mysteries which shut him in on every side. I claim, moreover, not merely allowance, but the right to hold these opinions along with the doctrines of natural religion and the verities of the Christian faith. There are perplexities enough to bewilder our souls whenever and wherever we look for the causes and reasons of things; but I am unable to perceive that the idea of the evolution of one species from another, and of all from an initial form of life, adds any new perplexity to theism. In unfolding my thoughts upon the subject, I wish to keep as close “to the solid ground of Nature” as I possibly can, even where the discourse must rise from the ground of science into the finer air of philosophy. Specially I must heed the injunction: “If thou hast any tidings; prithee, deliver them like a man of this world,” and not trouble myself, nor you, with metaphysical refinements and distinctions which, however needful in their way and place, are unnecessary to our purpose. I take for granted, “like a man of this world,” the objective reality and substantiality of what we see and deal with, though I am told it cannot be proved; and I assume, -although demonstration is impossible, that what I and my fellow-men cannot help believing we ought to believe, or at least must rest content with. I suppose you will agree with me that it is not science, at least not natural science, which raises the most formidable difficulties to Christian theism, but philosophy, and that it is for philosophy to surmount them. The question which science asks of all it meets is, What is the system and course of things, and how is this or that a part of it in the fixed sequence of cause and effect? Philosophy asks whence the system itself, and what are causes and effects. Theology is partly historical science, and partly philosophy. Now I, as a scientific man, might rest in the probability of evolution as a general inference from the facts or a good hypothesis, and relegate the questions you would ask to the philosophers and theologians. But I am not one of those who think that scientific men should not HDT WHAT? INDEX

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concern themselves with such matters; and having gone so far as to say that the evolution which I accept does not seem to me to add any new perplexity to theism, and well knowing that others are of a contrary opinion, I am bound to further explanation and argument. But I have not the presumption to suppose that I can make any new contribution to this discussion; and what I may suggest must not be expected to cover the ground widely nor penetrate it deeply. I am sure that you will not look to me for the rehandling of insoluble problems and inevitable contradictions, into which the philosophical consideration of the relations of Nature and man to God ultimately lands us. Certainly they are not peculiar to evolution. So, in so far as we may fairly refer any of its perplexities to old antinomies, which can neither be reconciled nor evaded, the burden will be off our shoulders. It might suffice to show that evolution need raise no other nor greater religious or philosophical difficulties than the views which have already been accepted, and held to be not inimical to religion. But, indeed, our universal concession that Nature is, and that it is a system of fixed laws and uniformities, under which every thing we see and know in the inorganic universe, and very much in the organic world, have come to be as they are, in unbroken sequence, implicitly gives away the principle of all ordinary objection to the evolution of living as well as of life- less forms, of species as well as of individuals. It leaves the matter simply as one of fact and evidence. Indeed, mediate creation is just what the thoughtful and thorough observer of the ways of God in Nature would expect, and is what some of the most illustrious of the philosophic saints and fathers of the church have more or less believed in. In saying that the doctrine of the evolution of species has taken its place among scientific beliefs, I do not mean that it is accepted by all living naturalists; for there are some who wholly reject it. Nor that it is held with equal conviction and in the same way by all who receive it; for some teach it dogmatically, along with assumptions, both scientific and philosophical, which are to us both unwarranted and unwelcome; more accept it, with various confidence, and in a tentative way, for its purely scientific uses, and without any obvious reference to Its ultimate outcome; and some, looking to its probable prevalence, are adjusting their conditional belief in it to cherished beliefs of another order. One thing is clear, that the current is all running one way, and seems unlikely to run dry; and that evolutionary doctrines are profoundly affecting all natural science. Here you remark that your objection is not so much to the idea of mediate creation as to the form it has assumed; that the mediate production of species mall indeed be completely theistic. But that, whereas their immediate creation directly asserts Divine action, their incoming under Nature only implies it. To those who already believe in a Supreme Being the two views may religiously amount to the same thing. But, you continue, living beings were thought to afford a kind of demonstration of a supernatural creator. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Science, in taking this away, leaves us only the assurance that if we bring the idea of God to Nature we may find Nature wholly compatible with that idea. Well, what is lost in directness may perhaps be gained in breadth and depth. It is certain that the whole progress of physical science tends, in respect to Divine action, to consider that mediate, general, and in a sense indirect, which had been thought to be immediate and special. Youth is ever taught by instances, manhood by laws. You go on to say: The evolution of species now, so commended to us by science, not long ago seemed as improbable to scientific as to ordinary minds. What assurance can we unscientific people have that science will not reverse its present judgments? None, perhaps, except -that, while many particular judgments have been reversed or altered, the general course of e thought has run in one direction. And theologians, like naturalists, must be content with the best judgments they can form upon the present showing, and be ready to modify them upon better. Finally, and to reach the present point, you a pertinently commend to scientific men their own saying: “Science asks of every thing how it is a part of the system of Nature, of the chain of cause and effect.” An hypothesis must give the how and why, and from its own resources, before it is worth attending to. A credible hypothesis should assign real and known causes, and ascertain their actual operation somewhere before assuming their operation everywhere. A complete hypothesis should assign not only real but sufficient causes for all the effects; and when it assumes them in invisible and intangible forms, such as molecules and molecular movements, it is bound to show that all the observed consequences flow from the assumption. Now to declare that species come through evolution, without either proving it by facts or clearly conceiving the mode and manner how, is only supporting a thesis which was until lately deemed scientifically improbable by hypotheses of a kind which have always been regarded as invalid. Just here Darwinism comes in with a modus operandi, in which lies all its essential value. As the conception of the derivation of one form from another is the only distinctly-pointed alternative to specific supernatural creation, so the principle of natural selection, taken in its fullest sense, is the only one known to me which can be termed a real cause in the scientific sense of the term. Other modern hypotheses assign metaphysical, vague, or verbal causes, such as development, anticipation, laws of molecular constitution, without indicating what the special constitution is, -none of which have much advantage over the “nisus formativus” of earlier science. I have no time to recapitulate what I briefly said of natural selection in a former lecture; nor to analyze the applications of the principle by Darwin, Wallace, and others to critical instances; nor to specify its limitations and apparent failures. The discussion or even the presentation of these would fill the hour, and divert me from my particular task. Instead of this, I will merely give my impression of the present state of the case as respects the points now before us. You will HDT WHAT? INDEX

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remember the distinction which I pointed out between the principle of natural selection, which I take to be a true one, and the Darwinian hypothesis founded on it, which I take to be to a considerable extent probable. That is, I think that the influences and actions which the term “natural selection” stands for, give a sufficient scientific explanation of the way in which smaller differences among plants and animals may rise into greater, varieties into species. Given differences -and an internal tendency to differ more, i.e., given variation as an inexhaustible factor, and natural selection should suffice for the preservation and increase of the select few as a consequence of the destruction of the intermediate many. Surely there is nothing either improbable or irreligious in the idea that lines of individuals or races, once in existence, should be subject to the conditions of Nature, and that the fittest for particular conditions should thereby be preserved. As to variation, that really occurs as a fact, though we know not how; and, if we frame explanations of the mode and get conceptions of the causes of the variation of living things, still we probably shall never be able to carry our knowledge very much further back; for in each variation lies hidden the mystery of a beginning. We cannot tell why offspring should be like unto parent; how then should we know why it should sometimes be different? So then Darwinism has real causes at its foundation, viz., the fact of variation and the inevitable operation of natural selection, determining the survival only of the fittest forms for the time and place. It is therefore a good hypothesis, so far. But is it a sufficient and a complete hypothesis? Does it furnish scientific explanation of (i.e., assign natural causes for) the rise of living forms from low to high, from simple to complex, from protoplasm to simple plant and animal, from fish to flesh, from lower animal to higher animal, from brute to man? Does it scientifically account for the formation of any organ, show that under given conditions sensitive eye-spot, initial hand or brain, or even a different hue or texture, must then and there be developed as the consequence of assignable conditions? Does it explain how and why so much, or any, sensitiveness, faculty of response by movement, perception, consciousness, intellect, is correlated with such and such an organism? I answer, Not at all! The hypothesis does none of these things. For my own part I can hardly conceive that anyone should think that natural selection scientifically accounts for these phenomena. Let us here discriminate. To account scientifically for phenomena, or for complex series of phenomena, by assigning real and sufficient natural causes, is one thing. To believe that the phenomena have occurred in the course of nature, and have natural causal connection, is another. It is not natural selection which has led Mr. Darwin and many others to believe that life “was originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” and “that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world has been due to secondary causes;” but it is the observed fact of likenesses and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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that of gradation from form to form which suggested the idea of an actual evolution from form to form having somehow taken place. Variation and natural selection are now assigned as causes or reasons of the evolution. Variation originates all the differences. Natural selection, determining which forms shall survive, reduces their number and intensifies their character. But Darwin may likewise consistently speak of his favorite principle as a cause of the evolution, it being that in the absence of which the evolution could not take effect. A cause of variation it certainly is not, but it is a necessary occasion of it, or of its progress. Because without natural selection to pave the way, the wheels of variation would at once be clogged and all progress be arrested. Variation provides that upon which natural selection operates; the operation of natural selection makes room for further variation, gives opportunity for variability to change its fashions and display its novelties; and so the two go on, hand in hand. But, although thus conjoined, there is always this difference between the two, that natural selection works externally, with known natural agencies, and in the light of common day; variation works internally, in darkness, and its agencies and ways are recondite and past finding out. Or, when we find out something, -as we may hope to do, -we only resolve a before unexplained phenomenon into two factors, one of them a now ascertained natural process, the other a something which still eludes our search. But we suppose it to be natural, although as yet unknown. Surely we are not to suppose that natural agencies cease just where we fail to make them out. To Proceed: what Darwinism maintains is that variation, which is the origination of small differences, and species-production, which represents somewhat larger differences, and genus- production, which represents still greater differences, are parts of a series and differ only in degree, and therefore have common natural causes whatever these may be; and that natural selection gives a clear conception of a way in which continually or occasionally arising small differences may be added up into large sums in the course of time. This is a legitimate and on the whole a good working hypothesis. The questionable point is whether the sum of the differences can be obtained from the individually small variations by simple addition. I very much doubt it. I doubt especially if simple addition is capable of congruously adding up such different denominations. That is, while I see how variations of a given organ or structure can be led on to great modification, I cannot conceive how non-existent organs come thus to be, how wholly new parts are initiated, how any thing can be led on which is not there to be taken hold of. Nor am I at all helped in this respect by being shown that the new organs are developed little by little. The doubt is not whether the organs and forms were actually evolved in the course of Nature. I agree with Darwin that they probably were, and if so then doubtless under natural selection. And I cannot help thinking that Darwin would agree with me that the principle of natural HDT WHAT? INDEX

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selection does not account for it. That is, we both account for it all, only by assuming as an inexplicable fact that variation does occur to the whole extent of the extreme differences. All appears to have come to pass in the course of Nature, and therefore under second causes; but what these are, or how connected and interfused with first cause, we know not now, perhaps shall never know. Now views like these, when formulated by religious instead of scientific thought, make more of Divine providence and fore-ordination than of Divine intervention; but perhaps they are not the less theistical on that account. Nor are they incompatible with “special creative act,” unless natural process generally is incompatible with it, -which no theist can allow. No Christian theist can eliminate the idea of Divine intervention any more than he can that of Divine ordination; neither, on the other hand, can he agree that what science removes from the supernatural to the natural is lost to theism. But, the business of science is with the course of Nature, not with interruptions of it, which must rest on their own special evidence. Still more, it is the business of science to question searchingly all seeming interruptions of it, and its privilege, to refer events and phenomena not at the first but in the last resort to Divine will. Moreover, “special creative act” is not excluded by evolutionists on scientific ground, is not excluded at all on principle, except by those who adopt a philosophy which antecedently rules out all possibility of it. Darwin postulates one creative act and a probability of more, and so in principle is at one with Wallace and with Dana, who insist on more. But it has been said, and indeed is said over and over, even by thoughtful men, that, although Darwinism is not necessarily atheistic, yet, when once started it dispenses with further need of God. “Given [it is said] the laws which we find, then there is no more use for God, and all things have come out as we find them with none of his supervision. There may have been -we do not know -a God once; but law and not God, is the great Creator.” A few words should dispose of this. First, by what right is it assumed that the Darwinian differs from the orthodox conception of law? In the next place, this line of argument applies equally to a series of creative acts separated by intervals, during which it could with the same reason (or unreason) be said that there is no use for God, that there may have been a God at times! So it cuts away the ground from under the Christian evolution which the writer quoted from allows, as well as from that which he deprecates. And it equally dispenses with use for God in Nature for the several thousand years which have passed since creation under the biblical view was finished, and “the Creator rested from all the work which he had made.” There is no more validity in the argument in the one case than in the others. A word or two upon the subject of creative acts occurring in time may not be out of place. These, when spoken of in the present connection, do not usually refer to the making of a new form of plant or animal instanter out of the dust of the ground. However it might have I been when there was only one HDT WHAT? INDEX

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act of creation to think of, the enormous crudeness of such a conception when applied to a long succession of animals would now be seriously felt by every one. It is a phrase most used by those who accept the idea of the evolution of one species from another, but who feel the utter incompetence of known natural causes to account for it. In the absence of such causes, they, being theists, naturally (and I cannot say unphilosophically) assign the simpler and seemingly easier part of evolution to recondite natural causes which they are unable to specify, the more difficult or inscrutable to a diviner and more direct or supernatural act, which they liken to creation. I suppose they do not feel the necessity, as they have not the ability, to draw any definite line between what they think mere Nature may accomplish, and what they believe she cannot. Probably what they have in mind is mediate creation and not miracle. Perhaps they are convinced that if they could behold the birth of a species, they would see nothing more miraculous than in the birth of an individual. They mean that the springs of Nature are somehow touched by a new form or instance of force directed to some new end. Yet so they must be in a degree in the origination of a new race or variety. This whole conception of mediate creation is logically carried out to its extreme by my philosophical colleague, Professor Bowen, when he concludes that “not only every new species but that each individual living organism, originated in a special act of creation.” So the difference between pure Darwinism and a more theistically expressed evolution is not so great as it seemed. Both agree in the opinion that species are evolved from species, and that evolution somehow occurs in the course of Nature. Darwinism opines that the whole is a natural result of general causes such as we know of and in a degree understand, such as we recognize under the concrete terms of variability, heredity, and the like, -terms which we can estimate and limit only by reference to what we see coming to pass, -along with complex physical interactions which are more measurable and predictable. The very much that it has not accounted for by these causes and processes, it assumes may be in time accounted for by them, or by as yet unrecognized general causes like them. The specially theistic evolution referred to judges that these general causes cannot account for the whole work, and that the unknown causes are of a more special character and higher order. I think it does not declare that these are not secondary causes, and whether they would be ranked as natural causes would depend upon the sense in which the term Nature was at the moment used. Probably such evolutionists, if they had to give form to their conceptions, would vary in all degrees between the direct interposition of a supernatural hand at certain stages or crises, and that extreme extension of the Supernatural into and through the Natural which Professor Bowen reaches the assertion that each individual living organism, as well as every new species, originated in a special act of creation. This, the complete assimilation of specific to individual origination, is simply Darwinism, expressed in less HDT WHAT? INDEX

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appropriate language. What the one calls “special act” the other, along with the rest of mankind, calls general process. The common principle of the Divine ordination of Nature, which the philosopher here asserts in a paradoxical way, the Darwinian implies, or even postulates, on appropriate occasions. The Darwinian Naturalist, I mean, not the monistic and agnostic philosopher, -from whom, so far, we have kept as clear as has Mr. Darwin in every volume and every line. Suppose now that we are shut up to Nature for the evolution of the forms of living things. As theists, we are not debarred from the sup- position of supernatural origination, mediate or immediate. But suppose the facts suggest and inferentially warrant the conclusion that the course of natural history has been along an unbroken line; that -account for it or not- the origination of the kinds of plants and animals comes to stand on the same footing as the rest of Nature. As this is the complete outcome of Darwinian evolution, it has to be met and considered. The inquiry, what attitude should we,- Christian theists, present to this form of scientific belief, should not be a difficult one to answer in my opinion, we should not denounce it as atheistical, or as practical atheism, or as absurd. Although, from the nature of the case, this conception can never be demonstrated, it can be believed, and is coming to be largely believed; and it falls in very well with doctrine said to have been taught by philosophers and saints, by Leibnitz and, Malebranche, Thomas Aquinas, and Augustine. So it may possibly even share in the commendation bestowed by the Pope, in a recent sensible if not infallible allocution, upon the teaching of “the Angelic Doctor,” and make a part of that genuine philosophy which the Pope declares to stand in no real opposition to religious truth. Seriously it would be rash and wrong for us to declare that this conception is opposed to theism. Our idea of Nature is that of an ordered and fixed system of forms and means working to ultimate ends. If this is our idea of inorganic nature, shall we abandon or depreciate it when we pass from mere things to organisms, to creatures which are themselves both means and ends? Surely it would be suicidal to do so. We may, and indeed we do, question gravely whether all this work is committed to Nature; but we all agree that much is so done, far more than was formerly thought possible; we cannot pretend to draw the line between what may- be and what may not be so done, or what is and what is not so done; and so it is not for us to object to the further extension of the principle on sufficient evidence. I trust it is not necessary to press this consideration, though it is needful to present it, in order to warn Christian theists from the folly of playing into their adversary’s hand, as is too often done. But I am aware that we have not yet reached the root of the difficulty. We are convinced theists. We bring our theism to the interpretation of Nature, and Nature responds like an echo to our thought. Not always unequivocally: broken, confused, and even contradictory sounds are sometimes given back to us; yet as we listen to and ponder them, they mainly harmonize with our HDT WHAT? INDEX

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inner idea, and give us reasonable assurance that the God of our religion is the author of Nature. But what of those- you will say -who are not already convinced of His existence? We thought that we had an independent demonstration of His existence, Ii and that we could go out into the highways of unbelief and “compel them to come in;” that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world were clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,” “so that they are without excuse.” We could shut them up to the strict alternative of Divinity or Chance, with the odds incalculably against Chance. But now Darwinism has given them an excuse and placed us on the defensive. Now we have as much as we can do, and some think more, to reshape the argument in such wise as “to harmonize our ineradicable belief in design with the fundamental scientific belief of continuity in nature, now extended to organic as well as inorganic forms, to living beings as well as inanimate things.” The field which we took to be thickly sown with design seems, under the light of Darwinism, to yield only a crop of accidents. Where we thought to reap the golden grain, we find only tares. The outlook is certainly serious, yet not altogether disheartening. Perhaps we cannot now safely separate the wheat from the tares, but must let them grow together unto the harvest. Nobody expects in this world to ascertain the limits between design and contingency. Nobody expects to demonstrate any design, except his own to himself by consciousness; he cannot really prove his own to his bosom friend; though his assertion may give his friend, and his actions may give his enemy, convincing reasons for inferring it. But we are sure that every intellectual being has designs, that the reach and pervasiveness of design must be in proportion to the wisdom; and that the designs of the Author of Nature, if any there be, must be all- pervading and fathomless. Yet if they be wrought into a system of adaptations, some of the adaptations themselves may be such as irresistibly to suggest their reason to our minds. At least they suggest reason, even if we fail to apprehend, or wrongly apprehend, the reason. The sense that there is reason why is as innate in man, as that there is cause whereby. Now, to adopt the apt words of Francis Newman, “after stripping off all that goes beyond the mark of sober and cautious thought, there remain in this world fitnesses innumerable on I the largest and the smallest scale, in which alike common sense and uncommon sense see I design, and the only mode of evading this belief is by carrying out the cumbrous Epicurean argument to a length of which Epicurus could not dream. We cannot prove, we are told, that the eye was intended to see, or the hand to grasp, or the fingers to work delicately. Of course we cannot. But what is the alternative? To believe that it came about by blind chance. No science has any calculus or apparatus to decide between the two theories. Common sense, not science, has to decide, and the most accomplished physical student has in the decision no a vantage whatever over a simple thoughtful man.” Arrangements innumerable, extending through all nature, subserving all ends, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of course involve innumerable contingencies. The theist is not expected to have any definite idea of the respective limits of these. He can. only guess at the limits of intention and contingency in the actions of his nearest neighbor. The non- theist gains nothing by eliminating instances, unless he can eliminate all design from the system. Until he does this, he gains nothing by showing that particular fitnesses come to pass little by little, and under natural causes. He cannot point to a time where there were no fitnesses, apparent or latent, and if he argues that all fitnesses were germinal in the nebulous matter of our solar system, he does not harm our case. The throwing of design ever so far back in time does not harm it, nor deprive it of its ever-present and ever-efficient character. For, as has been acutely said, “If design has once operated in rerum natura (as in the production of a first life-germ), how can it stop operating and undesigned formation succeed it? It can-not, and intention in Nature having once existed, the test of the amount of that intention is not the commencement but the end, not the first low organism, but the climax and consummation of the whole.” I am not going to re-argue an old thesis of my own that Darwinism does not weaken the substantial ground of the argument, as between theism and non-theism, for design in Nature. I think it brought in no new difficulty, though it brought old ones into prominence. It must be reasonably clear to all who have taken pains to understand the matter that the true issue as regards design is not between Darwinism and direct Creationism, but between design and fortuity, between any intention or intellectual cause and no intention nor predicable first cause. It is really narrowed down to this, and on this line all maintainers of the affirmative may present an unbroken front. The holding of this line secures all; the weakening of it in the attempted defence of unessential and now untenable outposts endangers all. I have only to add a few observations and exhortations addressed to Christian theists. If intention must pervade every theistic system of Nature, if we give credit to Mr. Darwin when in this regard he likens his divergence from the orthodox view to the difference between general and particular Providence, is it safe to declare that his theory, and his denial that particular forms were specially created, are practically atheistical? I might complain of this as unfair: it is more to my purpose to complain of it as suicidal. It is in effect holding a theistic conception of Nature for our private use, but acting on the opposite when we would discredit an unwelcome theory. Or else it is trusting so little to our own belief that we abandon it as soon as any weight is laid upon it. As soon as you do this, by conceding that the evolution of forms under natural laws militates against design in Nature, you are at the mercy of those reasoners, who, looking at the probabilities of the case from their own point of view, coolly remark that:- “On the whole, therefore, we seem entitled to conclude that, during such time as we have evidence of, no intelligence or volition has been concerned in events happening HDT WHAT? INDEX

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within the range of the solar system, except that of animals living on the planets.” You may say that implicit belief of intention in Nature affords an insufficient foundation for theism. But you are not asked to ground your theism upon it, nor upon the whole world of external phenomena. You may reiterate that you cannot believe that all these events have occurred under natural laws. Nothing hinders your assuming what you need from the supernatural; but allow that the need of other minds may not be identical with yours. As I have said before, what you want is, not a system which may be adjusted to theism, nor even one which finds its most reasonable interpretation in theism, but one which theism only can account for. That, it seems to me, you have. An excellent judge, a gifted adept in physical science and exact reasoning, the late Clerk-Maxwell, is reported to have said, not long before he left the world, that he had scrutinized all the agnostic hypotheses he knew of, and found that they one and all needed a God to make them workable. When you ask for more than this, namely, for that which will compel belief in a personal Divine Being, you ask for that which He has not been pleased to provide. Experience proves that the opposite hypothesis is possible. Some rest in it, but few I think on scientific grounds. The affirmative hypothesis gives us a workable conception of how “the world of forms and means” is related to “the world of worths and ends.” The negative hypothesis gives no mental or ethical satisfaction whatever. Like the theory of the immediate creation of forms, it explains nothing. You inquire, whither are we to look for independent evidence of mind and will “concerned in natural events happening within the range; of the solar system.” Certainly not to the court of pure physical science. For that has ruled this case out of its jurisdiction by assuming a fixed dependence of consequent upon antecedent throughout its domain. There are plenty of phenomena to which it cannot assign known causal antecedents; but it supplies their place at once, either by assuming that there is a physical antecedent still unguessed, or by inventing one in an hypothesis. It deals in effects and causes, and knows nothing of ends. It has no verdict to render against our case, for it does not entertain it, and has no jurisdiction under which to try it. But its wiser judges do not insist that theirs is the only court in the realm. We have not to go beyond Nature for a jurisdiction, which may be likened to that of Equity, since it enforces specific performance, and which adds to causes and effects the consideration of ends. Biology takes cognizance of the former, like physics, of which it is on one side a part, but also of ends; and here ends (which mean intention) become a legitimate scientific study. The natural history of ends becomes consistent and reasonably intelligible under the light of evolution. As the forms and kinds rise gradually out of that which was well-nigh formless into a consummate form, so do biological ends rise and assert themselves in increasing distinctness, variety, and dignity. Vegetables and animals have paved the earth with intentions. The study and the estimate of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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these is quite the same, under whatever view of the mode in which the structures and beings that exemplify them came to be. The highest of these exemplars is himself conscious of ends. He pronounces that critical monosyllable I. I am, I will, I accomplish ends. I modify the outcome of Nature. Here, at length, is something “on the planets” it which “has been concerned in events;” and in my opinion it is just now a good and useful theistic view which connects this something with all the lower psychological phenomena that preceded and accompany it. Our wills, in their limited degree, modify the course of Nature, subservient though that be to fixed laws. By our will we make these laws sub serve our ends. We momently violate the uniformity of Nature. But we do not violate the law of the uniformity of Nature. Is it not legitimate, is it not inevitable, that a being who knows that he is a will, and a power, and a successful contriver, should explain what he sees around and above him by the hypothesis of a higher and supreme will? A will which has disposed things in view of ends in establishing Nature, and which may, it Deed be, dispose to particular and timed ends, either with or without perceptible suspension of the law of the uniformity of Nature, The question I ask has “been adversely answered, substantially as follows: It may be that in the first instance men can hardly avoid predicating a being who has done and is doing all this. Nevertheless a trained mind soon reaches the incongruity of it, at least “as concerns any events which have happened within the range of the solar system.” For the belief that a supernatural power has so acted contradicts that very belief in the uniformity of Nature upon which all scientific reasoning and practical judgments rest. To this it is well rejoined, that the ultimate scientific belief on which our reason reposes “is that belief in the uniformity of Nature which is equivalent to a belief in the law of universal causation; which again is equivalent to a belief that similar antecedents are always followed by similar consequents. But this belief is in no way inconsistent with a belief in supernatural interference. If the principle of the uniformity of Nature asserted that every natural effect is, and has ever been, preceded by natural causes, then it would be in terms inconsistent with supernatural interference and with supernatural origination of the system. But science does not give us nor find any such principle. All scientific beliefs are in themselves as true and as fully proved if supernatural interference be possible as they are if such interference be impossible. A law does no more than state that under certain circumstances (positive and negative) certain phenomena will occur. If on some occasions these circumstances, owing to supernatural interference, do not occur, the fact that the phenomena do not follow proves nothing as to the truth or falsehood of the law.” If such interference violates the law of the uniformity of Nature, the human will, and all wills, and all direction of material forces to ends, are every day violating it. It is also urged that giving particular direction in a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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special act would be an addition to the plenum of force in the universe, and therefore a contradiction to the recently acquired scientific principle of the conservation of energy. The answer may be this. It is not at all certain that all direction given to force expends force; it is certain that, under collocations, a minute use of force (as pulling a hair-trigger or jostling a valve) may bring about immense results; and, finally, increments of force by Divine action in time, of the kind in question, if such there be, could never in the least be known to science. The only remaining supposition that I now think of is the crude one that thought and will are functions of the body, secretions as it were of the organ through which they are manifested, “psychical modes of motion.” Then, as has well been said, they must be correlated with physical modes of motion, at least in conception; but it is conceded by all sensible I thinkers that thought cannot be translated into extension, nor extension into thought. Now, since the only conceivable source of physical force is supernatural power, still more must this be the only conceivable source of thought. There is an old objection which threatens to undermine the ground on which we infer Divine will from the analogy of human; namely, that our wills, being a part of the course of Nature and amenable to its laws, their movements, though seemingly free, are as fixed as physical sequences upon this insoluble problem we have nothing practical to say, except to admit that so much of choice is determined by antecedent conditions and the surroundings, by hereditary bias, by what has been made for the individual and inwrought into his nature, that, granting the will has an element of freedom, it may be in effect a small factor. I can only urge that it is not an insignificant factor. As to this, a pertinent although homely suggestion came to me in the remark of a humble but shrewd neighbor, to the effect that he found the difference between people and people he dealt with was really very little, but that what there is was very important. So facts and reasonings may shut us up to the conclusion that the will, sovereign as it seems to the user, is practically a small factor in the determination of events. But what there is makes all the difference in the world in man! And now, as to man himself in relation to evolution. I have no time left for the discussion of questions which naturally interest you more than any other, but which, even with time at disposal, are not easy to treat. I will not undertake I to consider what your attitude should be upon a matter which connects itself with grave ulterior considerations; but I will very briefly and frankly intimate what views I think a scientific man, religiously disposed, is likely to entertain. To pursue the illustration just ventured upon: The anatomical and physiological difference between man and the higher brutes is not great from a natural-history point of view, compared with the difference between these and lower grades of animals; but we may justly say that what corporeal difference there is extremely important. The series of considerations which suggest evolution up to man, suggest man’s evolution also. We may, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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indeed, fall back upon Mr. Darwin’s declaration, in a case germane to this, that “analogy may be a deceitful guide.” Yet here it is the only guide we have. If the alternative be the immediate origination out of nothing, or out of the soil, of the human form with all its actual marks, there can be no doubt which side a scientific man will take. Mediate creation, derivative origination will at once be accepted; and the mooted question comes to be narrowed down to this: Can the corporeal differences between man and the rest of the animal kingdom be accounted for by known natural causes, or must they be attributed to unknown causes? And shall we assume these unknown causes to be natural or supernatural? As to the first question, you are aware, from my whole line of thought and argument, that I know no natural process for the transformation of a brute mammal into a man. But I am equally at a loss as respects the processes through which any one species, anyone variety, gives birth to another. Yet I do not presume to limit Nature by my small knowledge of its laws and powers. I know that a part of these still occult processes are in the every-day course of Nature; I am persuaded that it is so through the animal kingdom generally; I cannot deny it as respects the “highest members” of that kingdom. I allow, however, that the superlative importance of comparatively small corporeal differences in this consummate case may justify anyone in regarding it as exceptional. In most respects, man is an exceptional creature. If, however, I decline to regard man’s origin as exceptional in the sense of directly supernatural, you will understand that it is because, under my thoroughly theistic conception of Nature, and my belief in mediate creation, I am at a loss to know what I should mean by the exception. I do not allow myself to believe that immediate creation would make man’s origin more divine. And I do not approve either the divinity or the science of those who are prompt to invoke the supernatural to cover our ignorance of natural causes, and equally so to discard its aid whenever natural causes are found sufficient. It is probable that the idea of mediate creation would be more readily received, except for a prevalent misconception upon a point or genealogy. When the naturalist is asked, what and whence the origin of man, he can only answer in the words of Quatrefages and Virchow, “We do not know at all.” We have traces of his existence up to and even anterior to the latest marked climatic change in our temperate zone: but he was then perfected man; and no vestige of an earlier form is known. The believer in direct or special creation is entitled to the advantage which this negative evidence gives. A totally unknown ancestry has the characteristics of nobility. The evolutionist can give one satisfactory assurance. As the wolf in the fable was captious in his complaint that the lamb below had muddied the brook he was drinking from, so those are mistaken who suppose that the simian race can have defiled the stream along which evolution traces human descent. Sober evolutionists do not suppose that man has descended from monkeys. The stream must have branched too early for that. The resemblances, which are the same in fact HDT WHAT? INDEX

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under any theory, are supposed to denote collateral relationship. The psychological differences between man and the higher brute animals you do not expect me now to discuss. Here, too, we may say that, although gradations abridge the wide interval, the transcendent character of the superadded must count for more than a host of lower similarities and identities; for, surely, what difference there is between the man arid the animal in this respect is supremely important. If we cannot reasonably solve the problems even of inorganic nature without assuming initial causation, and if we assume for that supreme intelligence, shall we not more freely assume it, and with all the directness the case may require, in the field where intelligence at length develops intelligences? But while, on the one hand, we rise in thought into the supernatural, on the other we need not forget that one of the three old orthodox opinions,- the one held to be tenable if not directly favored by Augustine, and most accordant to his theology, as it is to observation, - is that souls as well as lives are propagated in the order of Nature. Here we may note, in passing, that since the “theologians are as much puzzled to form a satisfactory conception of the origin of each individual- soul as naturalists are to conceive of the origin of species,” and since the Darwinian and the theologian (at least the Traducian) take similar courses to find a way out of their difficulties, they might have a little more sympathy for each other. The high Calvinist and the Darwinian have a goodly number of points in common. View these high matters as you will, the out-come, as concerns us, of the vast and partly comprehensible system, which under one aspect we call Nature, and under another Providence, and in part under another: Creation, is seen in the emergence of a free and self-determining personality, which, being capable of conceiving it, may hope for immortality. “May hope for immortality.” You ask for the reasons of this hope upon these lines of thought. I suppose that they are the same as your own, so far as natural reasons go. A being who has the faculty - however bestowed -of reflective, abstract thought superadded to all lower psychical faculties, is thereby per saltum immeasurably exalted. This, and only this, brings with it language and all that comes from that wonderful instrument; it carries the germs of all invention and all improvement, all that man does and may do in his rule over Nature and his power of ideally soaring above it. So we may well deem this a special gift, the gift beyond recall, in which all hope is enshrined. None of us have any scientific or philosophical explanation to offer as to how it carried to be added to what we share with the brutes that perish; but it puts man into another world than theirs, both here, and -with the aid of some evolutionary ideas, we may add-here- after. Let us consider. It must be that the Eternal can alone impart the gift of eternal life. But He alone originates life. Now what of that life which reaches so near to ours, yet misses it so completely? The perplexity this question raises was as great as it is now before evolution has ever heard HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of; it has been turned into something much more trying than perplexity by the assurance with which monistic evolutionists press their answer to the question; but a better line of evolutionary doctrine may do something toward disposing of it. It will not do to say that thought carries the implication of immortality. For our humble companions have the elements of that, or of simple ratiocination, and the power of reproducing conceptions in memory, and -what is even more to the present purpose -in dreams. Once admit this to imply immortality and you will be obliged to make soul coextensive with life, as some have done, thereby well-nigh crushing the whole doctrine of immortality with the load laid upon it. At least this is poising the ponderous pyramid on its apex, and the apex on a logical fallacy. For the entire conception that the highest brute animals may be endowed with an immortal principle is a reflection from the conception of such a principle in ourselves; and so the farther down you carry it, the wider and more egregious the circle you are reasoning in. Still, with all life goes duality. There is the matter, and there is the life, and we cannot get one out of the other, unless you define matter as something which works to ends. As all agree that reflective thought cannot be translated into terms of extension (matter and motion), nor the converse, so as truly it cannot be translated into terms of sensation and perception, of desire and affection, of even the feeblest vital response to external impressions, of simplest life. The duality runs through the whole. You cannot reasonably give over any part of the field to the monist, and retain the rest. Now see how evolution may help you; -in its conception that, while all the lower serves its purpose for the time being, and is a stage toward better and higher, the lower sooner or later perish, the higher, the consummate, survive. The soul in its bodily tenement is the final outcome of Nature. May it not well be that the perfected soul alone survives the final struggle of life, and indeed “then chiefly lives,” -because in it all worths and ends inhere; because it only is worth immortality, because it alone carries in itself the promise and potentiality of eternal life! Certainly in it only is the potentiality of religion, or that which aspires to immortality. Here I should close; but, in justice to myself and to you, a word must still be added. You rightly will say that, although theism is at the foundation of religion, the foundation is of small practical value without the, superstructure. Your supreme interest is Christianity; and you ask me if I maintain that the doc- trine of evolution is compatible with this. I am bound to do so. Yet I have left myself no time in which to vindicate my claim; which I should wish to do most earnestly, yet very deferentially, considering where and to whom I speak. Here we reverse positions: you are the professional experts; I am the unskilled Inquirer. I accept Christianity on its own evidence, which I am not here to specify or to justify; and I am yet to learn how physical or any other science conflicts with it any more than it conflicts with simple theism. I take it that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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religion is based on the idea of a Divine Mind revealing himself to intelligent creatures for moral ends. We shall perhaps agree that the revelation on which our religion is based is an example of evolution; that it has been developed by degrees and in stages, much of it in connection with second causes and human actions; and that the current of revelation has been mingled with the course of events. I suppose that the Old Testament carried the earlier revelation and the germs of Christianity, as the apostles carried the treasures of the gospel, in earthen vessels. I trust it is reverent, I am confident it is safe and wise, to consider that revelation in its essence concerns things moral and spiritual; and that the knowledge of God’s character and will which has descended from the fountain- head in the earlier ages has come down to us, through annalists and prophets and psalmists, in a mingled stream, more or less tinged or rendered turbid by the earthly channels through which it has worn its way. The stream brings down precious gold, and so may be called a golden stream; but the water -the vehicle of transportation -is not gold. Moreover the analogy of our inquiry into design in Nature may teach us that we may be unable always accurately to sift out the gold from the earthy sediment. But, however we may differ in regard to the earlier stages of religious development, we shall agree in this, that revelation culminated, and for us most essentially consists, in the advent of a Divine Person, who, being made man, manifested the Divine Nature in union with the human; and that this manifestation constitutes Christianity. Having accepted the doctrine of the incarnation, itself the crowning miracle, attendant miracles are not obstacles to belief. Their primary use must have been for those who witnessed them; and we may allow that the record of a miracle cannot have the convincing force of the miracle itself. But the very reasons on which scientific men reject miracles for the carrying on of Nature may operate in favor of miracles to attest an incoming of the super- natural for moral ends. At least they have nothing to declare against them. If now you ask me, What are the essential contents of that Christianity which is in my view a compatible with my evolutionary conceptions as with former scientific beliefs, it may suffice to answer that they are briefly summed up in the early creeds of the Christian Church, reasonably interpreted. The creeds to be taken into account are only two,- one commonly called the Apostles’, the other the Nicene. The latter and larger is remarkable for its complete avoidance of conflict with physical science. The language in which its users “look for the resurrection of the dead” bears -and doubtless at its adoption had in the minds of at least some of the council- a worthier interpretation than that naturally suggested by the short western creed, namely, the crude notion of the revivification of the human body, against which St. Paul earnestly protested. Moreover, as brethren uniting in a common worship, we may honorably, edifyingly, and wisely use that which we should not have formulated, but may on due occasion qualify,- statements, for instance, dogmatically HDT WHAT? INDEX

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pronouncing upon the essential nature of the Supreme Being (of which nothing can be known and nothing is revealed), instead of the Divine manifestation. We may add more to our confession: we all of us draw more from the exhaustless revelation of Christ in the gospels; but this should suffice for the profession of Christianity. If you ask, must we require that, I reply that I am merely stating what I accept. Whoever else will accept Him who is himself the substance of Christianity, let him do it in his own way. In conclusion, we students of natural science and of theology have very similar tasks. Nature is a complex, of which the human race through investigation is learning more and more the meaning and the uses. The Scriptures are complex, an accumulation of a long series of records, which are to be well understood only by investigation. It cannot be that in all these years we have learned nothing new of their meaning and uses to us, and have nothing still to learn. Nor can it be that we are not free to use what we learn in one line of study to limit, correct, or remodel the ideas which we obtain from another. Gentlemen of the Theological School, about to become ministers of the gospel, receive this discourse with full allowance for the different point of view from which we survey the field. If I, in my solicitude to attract scientific men to religion, be thought to have minimized the divergence of certain scientific from religious beliefs, I pray that you on the other hand will never needlessly exaggerate them; for that may be more harmful. I am persuaded that you, in your day, will enjoy the comfort of a much better understanding between the scientific and the religious mind than has prevailed. Yet without doubt a full share of intellectual and traditional difficulties will fall to your lot. Discreetly to deal with them, as well for your- selves as for those who may look to you for guidance, rightly to present sensible and sound doctrine both to the learned and the ignorant, the lowly and the lofty-minded, the simple believer and the astute speculatist, you will need all the knowledge and judgment you can acquire from science and philosophy, and all the superior wisdom your supplications may draw from the Infinite Source of knowledge, wisdom, and grace. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1882

Karl Alfred von Zittel described an exceptionally well-preserved pterosaur wing, showing flight membranes in detail.

Walther Flemming’s accurate depictions, in Zellsubstanz, Kern, und Zelltheilung, of cell division (mitosis). THE SCIENCE OF 1882

Charles Darwin’s final letter to Nature, on the dispersal of freshwater bivalves (his obituary appeared the same month).

Workers digging sandstone blocks in the Nevada State Prison yard found giant footprints left by a “pre- Adamaite man.” E.D. Cope confirmed this interpretation but O.C. Marsh argued that the tracks pertained to a giant ground sloth. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 23, Thursday: Pierre Jean Édouard Desor died while spending the winter, on his physician’s advice, at Nice, France. A mountain and a city street would be named after him — as well as any number of fossil echinoderms, and sharks’ teeth such as Isurus desori. PALEONTOLOGY

The Mississippi River at Memphis began another rise that would culminate in a crest of 35.15 feet on March 9th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1883

James Hall named Cryptozoon, on the basis of cabbagelike rocks up to meter across — for such gullibility he would come under heavy criticism, although he was right. PALEONTOLOGY

Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyramus de Candolle was elected to the US’s National Academy of Sciences. He published his ORIGINE DES PLANTES CULTIVÉES. THE SCIENCE OF 1883 BOTANIZING

Benjamin Gilbert Ferris’s A NEW THEORY OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (New York: Fowler & Wells) attempted to render the mechanism of evolution subordinate to a Whiggish teleology of the gradual evolution of improvement along a path of minimum pain and disruption (this, it would seem, was a work not of biological research, but rather one of inventive armchair theologizing; had Thoreau lived, it would have been interesting to discover what he might have had to say about it). NEW THEORY OF ORIGIN

Excerpts follow: It is difficult to see how the belief in the existence of a personal Deity could have obtained a lodgment in the mind except upon the basis of its truth. The belief may now be regarded as universal, save with those men of science who have reasoned themselves into disbelief. Man, the last creation, having physically the highest and most complete organization, according to this theory, could only be formed through the medium of the highest animal structure next below him –the ape– and his ape birth furnishes the strongest proof of the truth of the theory. The difference between the mind of man and that of the most intelligent animal is so great, that the idea of his propagation by the sexual connection of apes is utterly absurd. Nothing short of direct divine Influx into the ape ovum could have produced the wonderful result. The world –the Christian world, at least– has witnessed, historically, the exhibition of that which is called the “miraculous conception” in the production of a Human so infinitely above common humanity as to be capable of complete one-ness with Divinity. Even in that grandest display of divine benevolence, involving the salvation of mankind, God has seen fit not to depart from His established laws of creation. And thus has been completed the mighty cycle of being, which begins and ends in Himself. Darwin. with that candor for which he is most remarkable, says: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“There can be no doubt that the difference between the mind of the lowest man and that of the highest animal is immense. An anthropomorphous ape, if he could take a dispassionate view of his own case, would admit, that though he could form an artful plan to plunder a garden — though he could use stones for fighting or for breaking open nuts, yet that the thought of fashioning a stone into a tool was quite beyond his scope. Still less, as he would admit, could he follow out a train of metaphysical reasoning, or solve a mathematical problem, or reflect on God, or admire a grand natural scene.” Nevertheless he insists, that the difference is one of degree only and not of kind and refers to “the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, &c., of which man boasts,” as being, “found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well developed condition, in the lower animals” (The Descent of Man, Volume I, page 100). But it seems to me, that in my theory of creation, there is a more rational and satisfactory explanation of these phenomena. There is a manifest preparation in the animal kingdom for the production of man in reference to his mind as well as body. Suppose him born of the ape as to body-if the ape mother had no higher psychological qualities than an oyster, there would have been no basis for human mentality, and he might just as well have been created from a lump of earth. But he has a dual existence-he is both animal and man; and in this double character, he dominates the entire animal kingdom. The lower part of his mind is, primarily, inherited from the ape, and forms a basis for the higher or human part; and the necessity of this explains why the incipient “emotions and faculties,” referred to are found in certain of the higher animals. In one sense the theory here presented may be said to be one of special creation; but proceeding upon a plan of creative evolution, it is just as free from any feature of the miraculous as the germination and growth of a plant was in ordinary generation. At first creation proceeded by short transitions, as is evident from a study of the lower organisms; but as it advanced the forms became more complicated, the gaps wider and wider, until the appearance of man, and whatever may be claimed as to structural resemblances, the mental differences between him and the ape are immense. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 9, Friday: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway addressed the Royal Institution in London on “Emerson and his Views of Nature.” He attempted to advise this competent audience that on April 27, 1854 , Waldo Emerson had delivered a talk on poetry in a public room at the Harvard Theological School, at Conway’s request, in which Emerson had spoken of arrested and progressive development in a manner which quite anticipated the 1859 theory of Mr. Charles Darwin’s ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Darwin, it seems, wasn’t simply mistaken, as Professor Louis Agassiz had been waxing apoplectic at the time and as he died still insisting, but simply hadn’t been original — it had been Agassiz’s buddy Emerson who had been the original, he had known it all along, while the good professor of biology simply hadn’t noticed this wonderful thing about his buddy!

“What does this prove...?” “This is truly monstrous!”

What Emerson had said about the primary theoretical framework of the science of biology, Conway reported, was “The electric word pronounced by [Doctor] John Hunter [1728-1793] a hundred years ago, — arrested and progressive development — indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organism, — gave the poetic key to natural science, — of which the theories of [Isidore] Geoffroy St. Hilaire [1805-1861], of Lorenz Oken [1779-1851], of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832], of [Professor] Louis Agassiz [1807-1873], and [Sir] Richard Owen [1804-1892] and [Doctor] Erasmus Darwin [1731-1802] in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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zoölogy and botany, are the fruits, — a hint whose power is not exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics.” –Which of course was not Darwinism, but far from it and in opposition to it. It was in fact the obsolete mental universe of hierarchy and superiority, of Naturphilosophie, the great ladder of being which Mr. Charles Darwin had been struggling to supersede. THE SCIENCE OF 1883

Evidently Waldo had been referring to Saint-Hilaire’s 1832-1837 HISTOIRE GENERALE ET PARTICULIERE DES ANOMALIES DE L’ORGANISATION CHEZ L’HOMME ET LES ANIMAUX … OU TRAITE DE TERATOLOGIE …, or perhaps to the English version of Volume I of this by Palmer which had appeared in 1835. Evidently, also, the assembled Brits were so tolerant toward this venturesome American minister, that he was able to mistake their politeness. At any rate, in his relentlessly self-promotional autobiography of 1904 he would proclaim that his audience had been “much startled.”

In LOUIS AGASSIZ: A LIFE IN SCIENCE (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, Edward Lurie would report in regard to this sort of total misunderstanding, on his pages 282-290, that: Moses Ashley Curtis told his botanist friend, “I am always suspicious of Agassiz. He has an enormous amount of facts —he is incomparable in the discovery of facts— but I am becoming continually more dissatisfied with him as a generalizer....” One reason why the academicians and laymen of Boston were so well informed on major aspects of the new biology was that Agassiz had spent so much time and effort contradicting these ideas. Before 1859, Agassiz had argued with almost every major assumption of the forthcoming Darwinian analysis. As [Asa] Gray knew and Agassiz indicated by his protestations, the world was prepared for a revival of the “development” theory. But this would be in a form that, as Gray predicted, would obviate many of the older arguments against it. In Agassiz’s view, every old argument was just as valid as ever; Darwin’s work supplied no new mechanism or interpretation but was simply a rehash of Lamarck, [Lorenz] Oken, and the VESTIGES It was hardly worth the bother, it seemed, for the director of the Harvard museum to refute the arguments again, but bother he must, because his colleagues would not let the matter rest. Agassiz’s cosmic philosophy shaped his entire reaction to the evolution idea. His definition of the relation of natural history to transcendental conceptions was that such conceptions were basic to understanding and were supported by evidence. Thus he could assert: There is a system in nature... to which the different [classification] systems of authors are successive approximations.... This growing coincidence between our systems and that of nature shows... the identity of the operations of the human and the Divine intellect; especially when it is remembered to what an extraordinary degree many a priori conceptions, relating to nature, have in the end proved to agree with reality, in spite of every objection at first offered HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to them by empiric observers. An attitude such as this made Agassiz appear to his critics an exponent of a traditional idealism whose German education in the spirit of Naturphilosophie prevented him from admitting the validity of an objective interpretation of nature based on observable, secondary phenomena. This was an understandable reaction to Agassiz. There was an unbroken thread connecting his mental outlook with a view of nature stretching back to Plato, a view intellectually close to a concept of being in which the immaterial world was considered the essence of reality. Exemplifying this intellectual tradition, Agassiz saw natural history as the earthly representation of spirit, and thought of the Creative Power as having engineered a timeless, all- encompassing plan for the universe. This scheme of creation was rational, because nature past and present illustrated the creative intention. All facts could be subsumed under this master plan that had been fashioned in the beginning, and all apparent change explained as indicative of a predictable, fixed order in the universe. Species, the individual units of identity in nature, were types of thought reflecting an ideal, immaterial inspiration. The same was true of the larger taxonomic categories — genera, families, orders, branches, and kingdoms. All such categories had no real existence in nature. Reality could be discovered only in the character of the individual animals and plants that had inhabited and were now inhabiting the material world. The individual fossil or living form represented on earth the categories of divine thought ranging from species to kingdom and ultimately symbolized a complete identity with the highest concept of being, God. For Agassiz there was only one method by which an insight could be gained into this creative process, and that was the method of the natural scientist. The naturalist had an understanding vastly superior to the theologian; it was his expert knowledge of the data of the material world that could provide continual and ever more impressive verification of the power and grandeur implicit in the plan of creation. The fact that Agassiz thought of himself as possessing this ability provided him with the intellectual drive to achieve superior knowledge. It was this life role, moreover, that prevented a simple espousal of traditional idealism. Without constant empirical study, Agassiz would have been deprived of a basis for offering the world new demonstrations of the work of the Creative Power, such as the Ice Age. In drawing a spiritual lesson from his study, Agassiz had to create “species” that did not exist, because he could not admit variation and had to interpret the glacial epoch as another event in a long chain of divinely inspired catastrophes. It was this intellectual quality that made Agassiz such a formidable and perplexing opponent for men like Darwin and Gray. He was quite capable of making the most admirable scientific discoveries reflecting complete devotion to scientific method, but he would then interpret the data through the medium of what HDT WHAT? INDEX

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seemed to be the most absurd metaphysics. Faced with this kind of mentality, Darwin and his defenders understandably labeled Agassiz the advocate of an outworn idealism. The tragedy of Agassiz’s relationship to Darwin’s ideas was that in a crucial decade of transformation in natural history interpretation, he had given too little thought to justifying his own viewpoint. When Agassiz finally published an integrated statement of his philosophy in 1857, the “Essay on Classification” represented ideas that had little value for his times. This publication demonstrated, however, that Agassiz was by this time entirely certain that the teachings of Naturphilosophie were incompatible with special creationism. He therefore equated this concept with the false notion that “all animals formed but one simple, continuous series,” an idea that could readily “become the foundation of a system of the philosophy of nature which suggests all animals as [being] the different degrees of development of a few primitive types.” It was but a short step from such a view to one that interpreted animal forms as sharing a unity of origin and genetic derivation, illustrating the transformation of one form into another through modification from “physical” causes. Unable to tolerate this idea, Agassiz found it necessary to abjure what he felt were these larger tendencies of Naturphilosophie, all the while retaining the mental attitude once derived from its idealism, the ability to interpret the data of experience as significant of a meaning above and beyond experience. Naturphilosophie seemed a threat to Agassiz’s special creationism primarily because it assumed a continuity in organic creation. Agassiz and his honored master Cuvier, on the other hand, deeply believed that the creative plan was so ordered as to illustrate discontinuity and the independence of natural categories. Thus catastrophes had operated to break the thread of natural history on many occasions. Moreover, since species and the larger units of identity were symbolic of divine intelligence, they were immutable and could never be said to illustrate material connection with each other. Individuals representing the divine plan were created independently and separately. This discontinuous view of creation gave the Deity much more power than believers in “development” were ever able to allow. Multiple and new creations were symbolic of the discontinuity ordained by the creator. Agassiz did believe, however, in one particular concept of continuity and development. Indebted to his German education from Dollinger, he affirmed that change was to be discerned in the life-history of the individual form, namely, the ontogenetic transformations revealed by embryology. The development of the individual from egg to adult signified, to Agassiz, a progressive, unfolding evolution along a path predetermined by the potentiality of the original egg and ending in a fixed form HDT WHAT? INDEX

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that was the permanent character of the individual. Change and development were in this view transitory stages in the achievement of permanence. Schelling employed this concept to demonstrate the existence of a supreme being who could ordain the potentiality of highest perfection from the beginning. Agassiz drew similar comfort from embryology, synthesizing empiricism and idealism by insisting that the naturalist had to observe the development of the egg under the microscope to experience demonstrations of absolute power. Understandably, Agassiz insisted that embryology provided “the most trustworthy standard to determine relative rank among animals.” This science was the necessary basis for all classification, since study of individual development revealed how the animal conformed to the essence of its type. Individual growth reflected an unfolding of the higher categories of identity, and by studying a single fish Agassiz could see the entire scale of being from species to branch in the animal kingdom. Embryology thus illustrated the entire history of life. Agassiz, therefore, could never understand why the evolution concept of Darwin required such a great amount of time to accomplish change in species or types when he could observe change and evolution that occurred rapidly in the individual. If such change was so sudden in the history of life from egg to adult, it was incomprehensible why great periods were required to effect changes in classes, orders, or types. To Agassiz change was dynamic and catastrophic in embryology, just as it was in geology. In each instance, sudden change resulted in preordained, final purpose. Agassiz could not understand the evolutionary process because he confused two different kinds of evolution. He made the common error of his time of equating the history of the individual — ontogeny— with the history of the type or race—phylogeny. Agassiz believed that the various phases of embryological development or ontogeny were in fact determined by the inherent race history that each individual form contained within its germ as a kind of preview of things to come. Thus the embryology of the animal revealed in successive stages the predetermined scale of categories to which it belonged—species, genus, family, and so on. Agassiz was consequently very impressed with the “biogenetic law,” that ontogeny or individual development is a recapitulation of phylogeny or racial history, the history of the type being the cause of the history of the individual. His student Joseph Le Conte claimed that Agassiz had discovered this “law.” This was an unfounded assertion, because the concept had been known since the late eighteenth century, and Agassiz had learned it from his teacher Tiedemann. Agassiz’s specific contribution to the recapitulation concept was empirical. In his own words, “I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of growth in their egg, that is all.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Analysts such as Le Conte and others claimed that Agassiz’s association with the recapitulation idea made him a notable forerunner of Darwin. Nothing could be further from the truth. Agassiz’s interpretation of the facts of embryology was a cosmic one: The leading thought which runs through the succession of all organized beings in past ages is manifested again in new combinations in the phases of development of the living representatives of these different types. It exhibits everywhere the working of the same creative Mind, through all times, and upon the surface of the whole globe. Moreover, Agassiz emphatically contradicted the wider uses of the recapitulation concept by men of his generation, an interpretation that viewed the separate examples of ontogeny as proof of a long history of causally connected phylogenetic transformations in an ascending scale of development from lower to higher forms beginning with the earliest ancestor and ending with contemporary creation. Agassiz insisted, therefore, that embryology showed a recapitulation of phylogeny only in the repetition of the natural history of the particular and separate type-plan to which the individual belonged. In so doing he reflected his disapproval of the assumptions of Naturphilosophie, that there was an ascending and unbroken scale of development from lower to higher forms. He was explicit on this point: It has been maintained... that the higher animals pass during their development through all the phases characteristic of the inferior classes. Put in this form, no statement can be further from the truth; and yet there are decided relations, within certain limits, between the embryonic stages of growth of higher animals and the permanent characters of others of an inferior grade.... As eggs, in their primitive condition, animals do not differ one from the other; but as soon as the embryo has begun to show any characteristic features, it presents such peculiarities as distinguish its branch. It cannot, therefore, be said that any animal passes through the phases of development which are not included within the limits of its own branch. No Vertebrate is, or resembles at any time, an Articulate; no Articulate a Mollusk.... Whatever correlations between the young of higher animals and the perfect condition of inferior ones may be traced, they are always limited to representatives of the same branch.... No higher animal passes through phases of development recalling all the lower types of the animal kingdom. Agassiz’s interpretation of the recapitulation idea had consequences for the concept of evolution. From the first, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Agassiz was much more radical in regard to recapitulation than the embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer. Agassiz believed that ontogeny was a recapitulation of adult ancestral forms, while Von Baer would grant only that recapitulation was limited to a repetition of young or intermediate forms in the life-history of ancestors and that the individual deviated from these resemblances in a progressive fashion during its growth. In 1859 Darwin cited Agassiz’s concept of adult recapitulation and Agassiz’s belief that this process of repetition in the individual signified the history of the race. For Darwin, this concept “accords well with the theory of natural selection,” and he hoped it would be proved in the future. Subsequently, Darwin accepted the Agassiz view without qualification. Agassiz’s view of recapitulation as a direct repetition of final adult forms was erroneous. Darwin’s acceptance of it had unfortunate results for the later history of the evolution doctrine. Von Baer’s view, on the other hand, laid the groundwork for the modern science of embryology by stressing the fact of individual development from egg to adult, and the very limited recapitulation of younger forms in such development. Had Darwin followed Von Baer and not Agassiz, modern embryology would not have had to rescue Von Baer’s interpretations from the obscurity in which they were placed by the triumph of Darwinism and by the ideas of such subsequent advocates of the Agassiz position as Ernst Haeckel. Von Baer, of course, opposed evolution from idealistic presuppositions, and vacillated a good deal in his own relationship to Darwinism. Nevertheless, when modern embryologists who were intellectually equipped to separate Von Baer the idealist from Von Baer the embryologist perceived the value of his view of recapitulation, they could employ it as a means of understanding phylogeny as the result of individual ontogeny in particular periods of natural history. To call Agassiz a precursor of Darwin on the basis of Darwin’s ill-considered use of an erroneous Agassiz conception is a vast mistake. In fact, when Von Baer criticized Darwin for his use of the recapitulation concept, he was in effect criticizing Agassiz. Agassiz was wrong on recapitulation, and Darwin made the same error. Darwin made other errors too, but despite gaps in his knowledge, despite ignorance of the mechanism of heredity, and despite Agassiz, Darwin was right. He was right because the evolution idea did not require the recapitulation theory for its general validity. Darwin, after all, understood phylogeny, and Agassiz did not. Regardless of the erroneous Agassiz belief that individual development was determined by previous ancestral history, it is most nearly accurate to say that the history of types and races is the result of separate, modified, individual transformations. Ontogeny “causes” phylogeny in the large sense, rather than the reverse of this process, as Agassiz believed. Phylogeny, moreover, is best understood through knowledge of the history of life. Organic development occurs through the introduction and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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preservation of new and useful variations and the consequent influence of such transformations on the character of subsequent populations. In Von Baer’s criticisms, Darwin paid a heavy price for his use or Agassiz’s interpretation of recapitulation. To make matters worse, Darwin did not realize that Agassiz had expressed strong reservations about the very recapitulation idea he advocated and Darwin used. Agassiz criticized recapitulation, moreover, before 1859, and his criticism was both empirical and idealistic. Agassiz did so because of a growing realization that the concept was useful to advocates of the development hypothesis. Recapitulation, sometimes put forward as proof of a long, continuous sweep of natural history with types and races transformed into more advanced types, was a view of phylogeny Agassiz could never accept. Consequently, he cast doubt upon such continuity, taking issue with the logical extension of an idea he had advocated by citing evidence that demonstrated that ontogeny did not always recapitulate phylogeny in direct repetition, since many characters appeared in the individual in a sequence different from that in which they had appeared in the history of the type. Agassiz joined Von Baer both before and after 1859 in opposing concepts of development with the weapons of idealism. For Agassiz, the reality of the plan of creation was threatened by a historical view of the evolution of types and races; permanence of type was also threatened by a concept of transmutation made possible through the agency of physical processes. Hence recapitulation, to Agassiz, had to prove thought and premeditation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1886

Dr. Samuel Kneeland, Jr. began to edit THE ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY.

THE SCIENCE OF 1886 John Bell Hatcher’s “ant hill method of collecting minute fossils” was to examine materials brought to the surface and deposited in piles by colonies of ants. He was thus able to recover hundreds of tiny fossil teeth and jaws. He even carried shovelfuls of ants and sediment to other fossil localities that he desired to have investigated by these industrious arthropods.

A. Ficatier reported an Ordovician trilobite that had been perforated with two holes, at a Magdalenian-age site HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in France, perhaps as a personal ornament. The fossil would lend to the site its name, La Grotte du Trilobite. PALEONTOLOGY

Charles Gould’s MYTHICAL MONSTERS surveyed the various weird creatures reported in several cultures and proposed that some of these myths may have been inspired by discoveries of fossil remains of extinct forms of life. (Was he aware that he was merely echoing Henry Thoreau?)

“WALKING”: The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent, — others merely sensible, as the phrase is — others prophetic. Some forms of disease even may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.” The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.

ROBERT HUNT HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1887

Benjamin Apthorp Gould was designated as the initial recipient of a new reward, the James Craig Watson Medal for Valuable Labors in Promoting the Progress of Astronomical Science.

ASTRONOMY THE SCIENCE OF 1887

Harry Govier Seeley theorized that dinosaurs consisted of two varieties: “lizard-hipped” (saurischian) versus “bird-hipped” (ornithischian).

Theodore Boveri described cell division to produce gametes (meiosis).

Worthington George Smith excavated a Bronze Age grave of a mother and child on Dunstable Downs, surrounded by at least 200 fossil sea urchins (he nicknamed the mother Maud, I don’t know why). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1889

Alfred Russel Wallace was awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University. He had described what we now term the “Wallace effect,” the process of selection for reproductive isolation. He had emphasized the significance of symmetrical color patterns in animals. He had presented a criticism of the popular field of eugenics. He had developed a model of “human selection” that emphasized our crying need to improve the economic status of adult human females. He attempted to publicize important work being done by others in the investigation of glaciation episodes in the Southern Hemisphere. THE SCIENCE OF 1889 PALEONTOLOGY

Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach died in Leipzig, Germany, leaving his orchid herbarium to the Vienna museum with instructions that it should remain closed for 25 years. Because the British had expected his collection to go to either Kew or the British Museum, this action, clearly designed as it was to thwart upcoming British orchid taxonomists, stirred up a tempest in a teapot.

The Pajaro Valley Evaporation Company of Watsonville, California began small-scale production of dehydrated onions. (In 1950 tins of their product, deemed still enjoyable, would be discovered in a storeroom in Skagway, Alaska.)

Amorphophallus titanum, a gigantic aroid from Sumatra, flowered for the first time in cultivation at Kew. PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1890

Georgia II Code, Section 2422: “The marriage relation between white persons and persons of African descent is forever prohibited, and such marriage shall be null and void.”

During this year, in the CONSTITUTION OF MISSISSIPPI, Article 14, Section 263: “The marriage of a white 1 person with a negro or mulatto, or person who shall have /8th or more of negro blood, shall be unlawful and void.”

During this year, also, the Federal District Court of Southern Georgia determined in State v. Tatty, 41 Federal 753, that Georgia laws forever prohibiting marriage between whites and persons of African descent were not to be circumvented merely by contracting said marriage in some other state where such a marriage was legal.

Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. took up appointments at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History. THE SCIENCE OF 1890

The “Bone Wars” between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh over dinosaur fossils became widely known when Cope provided incriminating letters to the New-York Herald.

Edward Drinker Cope, author of THE ORIGIN OF THE FITTEST: ESSAYS ON EVOLUTIONS, belatedly espousing the long-standing project of the American Colonization Society of “returning the African to Africa,” warned us in his “Two Perils of the Indo-European” that the evidence was against the supposition that race mixture could produce a race superior to either of its progenitors:45 With a few distinguished exceptions, the hybrid is not as good a race as the white, and in some respects it often falls below the black especially in the sturdy qualities that accompany vigorous physique. The highest race of man cannot afford to lose or even to compromise the advantages it has acquired by hundreds of centuries of toil and hardship, by mingling its blood with the lowest. It would be a shameful sacrifice, fraught with evil to the entire human species. It is an unpardonable sale of a noble birthright for a mess of pottage…. The greatest danger which flows from the presence of the negro in this country, is the certainty of the contamination of the race.

RACISM

45. Published in The Open Court 3: 2052-4, 2070-1. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1891

Ethnologist Frank Cushing learned of a Zuni legend about life forms turning to stone while the earth was young (the natives of the American southwest were of course attempting to explain the fossils they kept coming across). PALEONTOLOGY

Ravenstein added up the carrying capacity of the planet Earth at some 5,994,000,000 people (capable of surviving on its 73,200,000 square kilometers of fertile lands at perhaps some 80 persons per square kilometer, and its 36,000,000 square kilometers of grasslands at perhaps some 3.9 people per square kilometer, and its 10,900,000 square kilometers of desert at perhaps some 0.4 people per square kilometer). THE SCIENCE OF 1891

Carnegie Hall opened in New York.

The Forest Reserves Act was passed by Congress; it authorized withdrawal of public lands for a national forest reserve as lumber king Frederick Weyerhaeuser expanded his holdings. This began a policy that will set aside more than 185,000,000 acres of national forests in 40 states during the following 80 years.

Kohler began a placer operation at North Wash Bar. This undermined Cass Hite’s efforts to obtain mining investors, so Hite killed him. Convicted of 2d-degree murder, Hite would be pardoned by the state Governor.

Bromide Basin mines were in full operation. There were about 100 men and a 5-stamp mill, that in a couple of years would produce about $15,000 (in 1891 dollars) in gold.

The Denver Rio Grande Western Railroad made a preliminary survey of a route from Green River to Eagle City.

The Bartram Botanical Garden which had been purchased and preserved by Andrew M. Eastwick in 1850 at this point became part of Philadelphia’s park system. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1893

After much reluctance, Alfred Russel Wallace allowed himself to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

In this year he advanced the notion that the Australian aborigines were a Caucasian people. He made contributions to the theory of ice movement in glaciers. He all but proved Sir Andrew Ramsay’s glacial origin theory of alpine lake basins. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION

E.B. Poulton studied caterpillars of the species Gastropacha quercifolia, noting how siblings looked quite different depending on where they lived and what they ate (this discovery would come to be referred to as “phenotypic plasticity”). THE SCIENCE OF 1893 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1894

William Bateson’s MATERIALS FOR THE STUDY OF VARIATION (a saltationist attack on Charles Darwin’s gradualist genetics).

Eugène Dubois’s monograph on Pithecanthropus erectus, Java Man, a missing link between humans and apes.

Charles Brongniart described a Carboniferous dragonfly having a 2-foot wingspan — because of the manner in which insects of this sort absorb oxygen from the air, such a form of life simply could not have come into existence unless the earth’s ancient atmosphere contained a greater proportion of oxygen than now. THE SCIENCE OF 1894 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1895

A team of paleontologists, including Samuel Williston, Elmer Riggs, and Barnum Brown, successfully excavated a Triceratops fossil in Wyoming.

The philosophical problem that had come to our attention in the 2d Law of Thermodynamics, and in the concept of entropy, has to do with our tendency toward future-worship. It has to do with the consequentialist attitude in ethics. The “heat death of the universe” thingie which had begun in 1824 and proceeded to 1865 was entirely incompatible with our moral consequentialism, our future-worship, because it pointed up the fact that eventually, inevitably, there won’t be any sort of livable future anymore, and nothing will be morally legitimate or illegitimate, and everything will be as if no human being had ever lived and struggled and hoped and dreamed and thought. In this year the problem was brought before the popular mind when a 29-year-old, H.G. Wells, published his first successful fiction, the science-fiction fantasy THE TIME MACHINE. The book was suffused with the sadness of knowing that eventually our sun would be exploding, and then fading away, and that eventually, the entire universe would be reduced to a big dull blah. (The only “inconvenient truth” that Al Gore is now adding is an awareness that since human civilization is inevitably subject to the “Law of the Most Limiting Condition,” our demise is bound to come a whole lot sooner than folks had, during the 19th Century, been imagining.) THE SCIENCE OF 1895 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1896

J. de Morgan described nine pierced fossil urchins found in a Chalcolithic tomb at Toukh.

Daniel Cunningham concluded that Neanderthals represented an intermediate step between Pithecanthropus erectus and modern humans. PALEONTOLOGY

A gelatinous blob that had washed ashore at St. Augustine, Florida was inspected by cephalopod expert Addison Verrill, who at first suspected it to be the remains of a giant octopus but, after examining a tissue sample, found it to have been from a decomposing whale. THE SCIENCE OF 1896

Charles W. Morse cornered New-York’s ice market, incorporating as the American Ice Company.

The New-York Botanical Garden was established, in accordance with legislation that had been drafted way back in 1891.

Hirase and Ikeno published their discovery of motile sperm in Ginkgo and Cycas. PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1899

Charles Doolittle Walcott identified Chuaria, millimeter-sized black fossil disks, as the compressed shells of marine invertebrates. He was correct that these disks had come from a form of living thing — although actually they had been unusually large planktonic alga. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1899

Daniel Chester French did two busts of Sherman Hoar (who had just died in Concord of typhoid fever), after having sculpted Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar in 1886. He would sculpt George Frisbie Hoar, for the Senator Hoar Memorial, in 1908.

A letter from John Witt Randall sent to Francis Ellingwood Abbott on January 9, 1857 about Henry Thoreau was included in POEMS OF NATURE AND LIFE (Boston: George H. Ellis, page 109): I hope you will find Mr. Thoreau a pleasant companion. I have met him at Mr. Hoar’s, and was pleased with the accuracy of his botanical observations. He seemed to know what he knew — by no means, I think, the most common of characteristics. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1901

Gregor Mendel’s paper on inheritance in peas was republished in the RHS journal.

Harry Govier Seeley’s DRAGONS OF THE AIR, the initial popular book on pterosaurs, argued that they were warm-blooded and should be classified parallel to birds in between reptiles and mammals (this was in direct opposition to Richard Owen’s determination that pterosaurs had been cold-blooded, and therefore poor flyers). THE SCIENCE OF 1901 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1902

In France, a public health law mandated formation of municipal health departments in the large cities.

M.P. Ravenel isolated the bovine microorganism M. bovis from a child with tuberculosis meningitis.

At an International Conference in Berlin, the Cross of Lorraine, symbol of eternal life, was adopted for a world crusade against tuberculosis.46

46. Of course, nowadays we find this double-barred Cross of Lorraine featured on an alternative kind of communion wafer: HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History discovered Tyrannosaurus rex, or vice versa.

Walter Sutton deduced that chromosomes separated for reproduction. This would become the basis for the chromosome theory of inheritance, to become in two years the official doctrine of the science. THE SCIENCE OF 1902 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1903

Wilson, collecting for Veitch, successfully reintroduced the blue poppy Meconopsis to Europe, though his greatest triumph was the successful introduction of the regal lily Lilium regale.

Henry E. Huntington purchased San Marino Ranch, where he began to create his estate, complete with museum collections and botanical gardens.

Ernest Rutherford pointed out at the British Association that because radioactivity could power the sun and maintain its heat, the estimate that Lord Kelvin had made of the age of the solar system would likely be found to be too conservative. THE SCIENCE OF 1903

Human bones from Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, England, sometimes referred to as “Cheddar Man” the earliest Englishman, turned out to be only some 15,000 years old. PALEONTOLOGY

L. de Vesly described 1st-Century to 3d-Century remains at Gallo Roman temples and wells near Rouen, France. Finds there included a cache of Neolithic axes and fossil sea urchins — evidence of association of axes and urchins over thousands of years.

From this year into 1906, Ernesto Schiaparelli would be excavating at Heliopolis, Egypt. One of his finds would be of a fossil sea urchin that had been engraved with hieroglyphs. The inscription would eventually be translated as “Found in the south of the quarry of Sopdu by the god’s-father Tja-nefer” — archaeologists would surmise that the fossil might have been found by a New Kingdom miner or scribe, perhaps near Sinai. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1905

K.S. Merezhkovsky suggested that chloroplasts had originated as a cyanobacterium swallowed by a protozoan, i.e., that the cells of algae and plants have resulted from a combination of two independent organisms, that became symbionts by one learning to survive inside the cell wall of the other (this bold idea would be largely forgotten until in the 1960s it would be suggested again). THE SCIENCE OF 1905

Frederic Clemens created the first ecology text of influence authored in the United States of America, RESEARCH METHODS IN ECOLOGY. His “climax theory of vegetation” would dominate plant ecology during the first decades of the century.

Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, an improved milk chocolate product, was introduced.

Employees elected members for a Men’s Committee, and then for Women’s Committee. The committees would meet weekly and their work would influence government actions.

Friend Joseph Burtt spent 6 months on Sao Thome and Principe at the suggestion of Friend William Cadbury of Cadbury Chocolates and observed that at one of the cocoa plantations nearly half of the workers died within one year of their arrival.

The Gothenburg system was made obligatory in Swedish cities, but soon there would arise criticism of the system’s loopholes and of its failure to create temperance. Many local authorities would become financially dependent on the system’s profits and therefore begin to encourage sales of alcohol. THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1907

Alfred Russel Wallace debunked Percival Lowell’s conceit that Mars was inhabited by living beings who irrigated their crops by means of canals, by pointing out among other things that the polar caps of Mars probably consisted of frozen CO2 rather than of H2O. ASTRONOMY

P. Raymond described a Neolithic deposit in Saône-et-Loire in France, containing an axe and three fossil sea urchins. PALEONTOLOGY

The Mauer jaw was discovered in Germany. This would become the type specimen for Homo heidelbergensis (archaic Homo sapiens precursor to neanderthalensis).

By measuring the ratio of isotopes of uranium and lead in a mineral from Connecticut, Bertram Boltwood established that the mineral had formed 410,000,000 years ago (the estimate would later change to 265,000,000 years, but this experiment had laid the groundwork for our radiometric dating techniques). THE SCIENCE OF 1907 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1908

Charles and George Sternberg discovered a dinosaur “mummy” — a duckbill fossil that still possessed skin, tendons, and bits of flesh. PALEONTOLOGY

From this year into 1911, Oliver P. Hay would be contending that the posture of dinosaurs had been crocodilian (that is, that they should not be displayed with upright legs). THE SCIENCE OF 1908

When Otto Hauser uncovered the body of a Neanderthal youth at Le Moustier, he persisted in burying and “rediscovering” the Neanderthal as important visitors arrived. In a pit at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, Amadee Bouyssonie and Jean Bouyssonie discovered the skeleton of a Neanderthal (their find would encourage the hypotheses of intentional Neanderthal burial of the dead, although some opposition would arise among anthropologists).

Avocados were planted at San Marino Ranch (today, the Henry E. Huntington Botanical Gardens in Pasadena), constituting what was apparently the first commercial avocado grove in California (however, the Haas avocado would not arrive until later). PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1909

Guyot Hall at Princeton University was completed. Its gargoyle-like ornaments of various species had been fashioned in the studio of Gutzon Borglum, the Mount Rushmore sculptor. The ground floor was assigned to the Natural History Museum, which had previously been housed in Nassau Hall in what is now the Faculty Room; it would now be able to expand rapidly. GEOLOGY

Charles Doolittle Walcott discovered the fossils of soft-bodied animals in the Burgess Shale formation of the Canadian Rockies. He proceeded to publish several papers in which he described these strange animals, that lived more than 500,000,000 years ago, as primitive ancestors of our modern groups. THE SCIENCE OF 1909

Abbé Breuil discovered Neanderthal skeletons in France that had been carefully buried (between this year and 1921, excavations at La Ferrassie in France would be yielding the remains of several Neanderthals in what archaeologists would consider as graves).

Arthur Smith Woodward pointed out to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the dinosaurs had been victims of “excess growth,” not to mention tooth loss, offering such matters as evidence in favor of his hobby horse — a supposed “racial senility” pushing the dinosaurs toward extinction. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1910

Alfred Russel Wallace became one of the first to suspect that the megafaunal extinctions that marked the end of the Pleistocene period might have been caused by unrestrained hunting by humans. PALEONTOLOGY

While digging a foundation, laborers came upon the remains of an Iron Age cremation, including a Neolithic axe and a fossil echinoid. THE SCIENCE OF 1910 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1911

A chance discovery turned up the astonishingly well preserved Clacton Spear. Made of yew and over 400,000 years old, this happens to be one of the world’s oldest recovered wooden artifacts. A hand axe, possibly 200,000 years old and of Neanderthal design, was found in Norfolk, England. The stone of this axe has been fashioned in such manner as to give prominence to a fossil bivalve. THE SCIENCE OF 1911

However, during this year, also, Charles Dawson “discovered” the Piltdown skull in southern England (excavations of such faked fossils would continue for years).

Between this point and 1914, in Egypt, Ernst Stromer and Richard Markgraf would turn up fossils of 3 species of carnivorous dinosaur (the fossils would be formally described during the 1930s, then obliterated by a 1944 WWII bombing). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1912

Professor William James’s MEMORIES AND STUDIES dismissed Herbert Spencer as “the philosopher whom those who have no other philosopher can appreciate.”

Alfred Lothar Wegener again proposed the theory of continental drift (Kontinentalverschiebung) originally suggested by Abraham Ortelius. This would be almost completely ignored until 1968 because nobody could imagine a source of energy that might be driving such crustal movements. THE SCIENCE OF 1912

Frederick Hopkins showed that there were chemical substances (additional to fats, carbohydrates, and minerals) obtained from food that are essential to human growth and maintenance, and Casimir Funk coined a term for such substances: “vitamines.”

The discovery of luminous paint, and radium as a treatment for cancer, created a demand for uranium. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1913

H.G. Wells’s LITTLE WARS was the initial book to describe hobby war gaming done with miniatures. In such war games, Wells noticed, firearms tended to dominate the battlefield and tended to induce the players to focus on eliminating their opponent’s forces. To curtail these tendencies and render the gaming more sophisticated, Wells developed new rulebooks. Meanwhile, he was scribbling away at THE WORLD SET FREE, a novel in which he described aerial bombs made from isotopes of uranium (in 1934 a German-language translation of Wells’s THE WORLD SET FREE would induce Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard to patent the idea of nuclear chain reactions).

Frederick Soddy announced discoveries concerning isotopes of radioactive elements (for this he would receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921, and have a crater named in his honor on the far side of the moon).47

In this year Neils Henrik David Bohr of Denmark was arriving at a concept of the atom in which its electrons were presumed to occupy stable quantized orbits with well-defined quantized energy. According to his new model, absorption and emission of light by an atom was occurring as a result of an electron vanishing from its given quantum orbit as it absorbed or emitted a photon and appearing, simultaneously, in another orbit involving a different quantum of energy. For the 1st time we had an explanation of our observation that atoms absorb and emit light at particular frequencies that are characteristic of that atom.

HISTORY OF OPTICS

We did not yet have any inkling that we would be able to shoot these atomic particles at each other. However, on a macro scale we were continuing to be inventive of new ways to kill people. For instance, in this year Isaac Newton Lewis, a retired Coast Defense artillery officer, began to manufacture a light machine-gun in Belgium. This would come to be known as the Lewis gun and would be probably the most effective such weapon in the World War I timeframe.

Arthur Holmes reasoned that the rate of breakdown of radioactive isotopes in igneous rocks might be used to determine when these rocks had originally solidified (an ability to determine the absolute ages of rocks would enable paleontologists to more accurately date their fossil finds). THE SCIENCE OF 1913

47. H.G. Wells would access Soddy’s isotope work for his 1914 THE WORLD SET FREE, also titled THE LAST WAR, a wish-fulfilment fantasy in which A-bombs dropped from airplanes make inevitable a world of peace (in WEALTH, VIRTUAL WEALTH AND DEBT Soddy would return the favor, praising this sci-fi scenario created by Wells). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1914

Charles Doolittle Walcott identified fossil bacteria in Cryptozoon-like structures (stromatolites).

Peyrony discovered the remains of a Neanderthal baby in southwestern France. Because no one appreciated that the bones were Neanderthal, they would not be examined closely and would later be believed lost (they were to be rediscovered and described nearly 90 years later).

A note on the humble beginnings of modern aerial warfare: in this year Japanese aviators flying off the decks of converted merchant ships fired their pistols at a lone German aviator circling above Tsingtao. (Practical night-fighting dates to the installation of radar sets on twin-seat Beaufort fighters in 1940. Practical night bombing dates to 1942, when the British started using radio signals to guide Lancasters and Stirlings to the Ruhr. While bombing was certainly possible without such assistance, it was grossly inefficient. One 1946 study conducted by Group Captain F. C. Richardson discovered that just 5% of the bombs dropped by unassisted night bombers were falling within five miles of their intended targets.)

During his World War I internment in Budapest as a prisoner of war, Milutin Milanković was able through connections to study undisturbed in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Science and the Central Meteorological Institute. With ample free time and no distractions, he prepared a mathematical explanation of this planet’s long-term climate cycles in terms of changes in the position of the Earth in comparison to the Sun, now known as “Milankovitch cycles.” The Earth’s orbit about Sol is an ellipse, rather than a circle, because this isn’t the only planet. The gravitational fields of monsters such as Jupiter and Saturn have an influence, with the net effect being that every 413,000 years we are farther from Sol and receive less warmth. This provided our first real explanation for the Ice Ages that have occurred in the geological past of the Earth, and offers a forecast of climate changes that are to be expected in the future. THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1916

British concern over prostitutes who were providing cocaine to their soldier customers contributed to the passage of a “Defense of the Realm Act.”

Although this Act was primarily intended to curb military and domestic use of cocaine, it in addition enacted controls over opium.

The German secret agents who in the previous year had begun operations in Romania and in the USA, waging a campaign of biowarfare against the enemy livestock, began to stage their attacks also in Argentina, in Spain, and in Norway. The dates and details of this operation are now obscure, as in fact they obtained no significant results from their attempts to pour bacteria cultures on animal feed and to administer needle injections to the domestic livestock. All we know for sure is that various attempts, over the following three-year period, would HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

be prosecuted with great determination. BIOTERRORISM

Two duckbill dinosaur fossils possessing extremely rare skin impressions were sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, when a German warship fired upon the vessel carrying them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1917

University of Washington anatomist Victor Emmel developed an “in vitro” test for the sickle cell trait. MALARIA

In “The Structure and Development of the Plant Association,” Henry Gleason abandoned the ecological effort to describing vegetation in terms of associations and instead offered an understanding according to which the phenomena of vegetation depend upon each species considered severally.

D’Arcy Thompson suggested that shapes of different animals might result from changes to a common underlying body plan.

Stone tools discovered at Bir el Ater in eastern Algeria included triangular objects that might have been arrowheads or spear points. The tools would be dubbed Aterian but their age would be underestimated for decades. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1921

William Diller Matthew suggested that the dinosaurs might have been driven to extinction by mountain building, continental uplift, and replacement by mammals. PALEONTOLOGY

Miners at Broken Hill in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, Africa, found leg bones and a skull that would later be classified as Homo heidelbergensis. THE SCIENCE OF 1921

Henry Russell established, on the base of uranium/lead dating, that Benoit de Mallet had been underestimating rather than overestimating, when in 1748 he had alleged in his TELLIAMID that the earth was already at least 2,000,000,000 years old. The planet was at least some 3,000,000,000 years old, and John Lightfoot (1647) and James Usher (1650), in assigning much shorter chronologies to Earth’s existence, had been very very mistaken. (We now have unmetamorphized rocks from northern Canada, as inclusions in a later formation, that are around 3,960,000,000 years old, and believe that there must be remelted and reprocessed rocks in the earth’s crust which, could they be identified, would date back to about 4,600,000,000 BCE.) GEOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1922

W.J. Robbins initiated plant tissue culture studies.

Knudson published his asymbiotic method of seed germination; “Nonsymbiotic Germination of Orchid Seeds” in Botanical Gazette. This would revolutionize the propagation of orchids, both sexually and vegetatively, and lead to techniques of mericloning and meristemming that are used widely today for production of many crop species.

Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History began a series of excavations in central Mongolia, hoping to find human fossils (they found, instead, dinosaur fossils). PALEONTOLOGY

From this point into 1924, Guy Brunton and Flinders Petrie would be discovering caches of fossil bones, in shrines and tombs dating to the 13th Century BCE at Qau and Matmar, devoted to the Egyptian deity Set. THE SCIENCE OF 1922 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1923

When Jesuit priests Émile Lincent and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin viewed ancient stone tools found at Shuidonggou, China, they noticed that the artifacts resembled those made during the Middle Paleolithic in Europe. PALEONTOLOGY

Verne Mason and John Huck “proved” that sickle cell disease was being caused by a dominant gene and could be passed on by any person with the trait. Actually this wasn’t much good as science — but it was most excellent as racism. MALARIA

THE SCIENCE OF 1923 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1924

Winifred Goldring described a fossil forest dating to the Devonian Period, discovered during excavations for the Gilboa Dam. The locale would be regarded as the oldest such fossil forest as yet uncovered. PALEONTOLOGY

During this year and the following one J.B.S. Haldane would publish 10 mathematical papers arguing that natural selection of genetic variations as described by Mendel could enable populations to adapt to change. THE SCIENCE OF 1924

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers Campephilus principalis were being considered to be gone for good, extinct, when ornithologist Arthur A. Allen and Elsa Allen, a breeding pair from Cornell University, came upon a nesting pair of the birds near the Taylor River in Florida: “I have just enjoyed one of the greatest experiences of my life, for I have found that which they said could not be found — the ivory-billed woodpecker. Once a fairly common bird in many parts of Florida, it is supposed to have followed the Carolina Parakeet into extinction. Those who know most about Florida birds held out little hope of my ever seeing one alive, but after a month’s search I have found a pair of them and they are very much alive.”48

48. A couple of local taxidermists, hearing of this, of course located the valuable birds, and stuffed them (of course there wasn’t any law against collecting such trophies). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1925

Annales of Eugenics. EUGENICS

Raymond Dart’s description of Australopithecus africanus (the “Taung child,” a hominid child’s skull from Africa) challenged Osborn’s theory of the Asian origin of man. He considered it to be the missing link between humans and apes. PALEONTOLOGY

John Thomas Scopes was the defendant in the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” for teaching children about evolution in the public school. Two-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan led the prosecution. Labor lawyer Clarence Darrow, who led the defense, goaded Bryan into declaring that in his humble opinion humans weren’t mammals (the Scopes conviction would be overturned on a technicality but the anti-evolution law would remain on the books for decades). THE SCIENCE OF 1925 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1926

Professor William Morris Davis’s “The Value of Outrageous Geological Hypotheses” warned against quick dismissal of novel ideas (the paper would become famous).

A stone spearhead embedded in the rib of an Ice Age bison near Folsom, New Mexico was the initial of many such evidences of the presence of humans in the New World as of 8,000 BCE. PALEONTOLOGY

Scientists were beginning to formulate genetic explanations for some plant conundrums of long standing. For instance, in this year East and Manglesdorf resolved the issue of self-sterility in Nicotiana tabacum, while Filzer and Lehmann conducted similar studies of Veronica.

Vito Volterra applied mathematics to ecology in “Fluctuations in the abundance of a species considered mathematically” in Nature (118: 558-60).

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky’s BIOSFERA (THE BIOSPHERE) explained our “biosphere” as the integrative combination all this planet’s various ecosystems. THE SCIENCE OF 1926 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1927

Discovery and description of “Peking man” by Davidson Black.

Excavations in Kent’s Cavern in southern England turned up a fragment of a human upper jaw roughly 43,000 years old (Arthur Keith provisionally identified this as having been from as anatomically modern human and his identification would be confirmed in 2011). PALEONTOLOGY

John S. Lawrence viewed the sickling trait in healthy people of different races and tried to refute the belief that sickle cell trait was a “deeply rooted racial characteristic.” MALARIA

Charles Sutherland Elton’s ANIMAL ECOLOGY suggested that studies of food chains, the size of food items, the ecological niche, and the concept of a pyramid of numbers could be best understood as methods of representing the ecosystem as a pattern of feeding relationships.

Raymond Pearl’s “Why Lazy People Live the Longest” presented a rate-of-living hypothesis, that a faster rate of biochemical reactions leads to a shorter lifespan. THE SCIENCE OF 1927 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1928

Following up on success with Drosophila, Stadler used X-rays to produce mutations in corn (Zea mays). PLANTS

In a letter to Science, Louise Sudbury revealed that a fossil of a plant, Cycadeoidea Etrusca, had been collected by Etruscans over 4,000 years ago. PALEONTOLOGY

John Henry Pull found fossil urchins at two separate Neolithic burial sites (he did not, however, possess the connections necessary to get his find published). THE SCIENCE OF 1928 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1929

Davidson Black announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis, Peking Man, at Zhoukoudian, China. Over the next several years five nearly complete skulls would be recovered from the same site (the specimens would disappear, however, during World War II).

Alexander Audova rejected racial senility as an explanation for dinosaur extinction, preferring environmental change. PALEONTOLOGY

From this year into 1934 Gunnar Save-Soderbergh would lead research expeditions in Greenland that would find remains of a transitional animal between fish and amphibians (the species would be named Ichthyostega soderberghi). THE SCIENCE OF 1928 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1930

Themistocles Zammit’s PREHISTORIC MALTA: THE TARXIEN TEMPLES displayed fossil sea urchins found in Bronze Age temples. PALEONTOLOGY

Burrhus Frederic Skinner began research into reflexes. (Reflexes aren’t just for pigeons anymore.)

During this year and the following one, he would be the recipient of a Harvard Fellowship. THE SCIENCE OF 1930 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1931

When Sir Albert Charles Seward rejected the biologic interpretation of Cryptozoon fossils (stromatolites), his repudiation would be considered by other paleontologists as “Seward’s folly.” PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1932

John von Neumann offered a precise formulation and proof of the “ergodic hypothesis” of statistical mathematics. (His book on quantum mechanics, THE MATHEMATICAL FOUNDATIONS OF QUANTUM MECHANICS, published during this year, remains a standard treatment of the subject.)

A Harvard expedition to Australia collected Kronosaurus queenslandicus, a 135,000,000-year-old marine reptile fossil with a 9-foot skull and banana-sized teeth (researchers were aided in excavating the fossil from a limestone quarry by an explosives expert nicknamed “The Maniac”). THE SCIENCE OF 1932

Fossil diggers in Australia also recovered a 25,000,000-year-old toothed dwarf whale that would be assigned the name Mammalodon. It would be described as having been a “bottom-feeding mud-sucker.” PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1935

M. Baudouin described more than 80 fossil sea urchins drilled for use as jewelry — some of them turned into personal adornments as long as 35,000 years ago. PALEONTOLOGY

Professor Arthur George Tansley coined the term “ecosystem” to characterize the interactivity that exists between the “biocoenosis” or group of living creatures and their “biotope” or environment in which they live. By virtue of this new understanding, ecology would come to be understood as the science of ecosystems. THE SCIENCE OF 1935

With division of the Department of Biology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, Professor Hugo Leander Blomquist became Chair of the new department of Botany (a post he would hold until 1953). Professor Blomquist’s researches included studies of every major group of plants except the fungi, and for many years in addition he would offer classes in bacteriology. In addition to bryological studies, he published on freshwater and marine algae. He would become the author of a book on the grasses of North Carolina, illustrated with his own drawings. Other books would include a GUIDE TO THE SPRING AND EARLY SUMMER FLORA OF THE PIEDMONT OF NORTH CAROLINA, written in 1948 with Associate Professor Henry John Oosting (a well known flora that would appear in six editions) and FLOWERS OF THE SOUTH, NATIVE AND EXOTIC, HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

a popular work that he would undertake in 1953 in collaboration with the artist Wilhelmina F. Greene.

The Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People was organized by C.C. Spaulding and Dr. James E. Shepard. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1936

The world’s first prefab structure, termed “the Crystal Palace,”49 assembled in 1851 in the Hyde Park district of London by Joseph Paxton and the home of the “Great Exhibition of Art and Industry,” reassembled in 1853 in Sydenham Park to the south of London, finally burned down. We see that it has turned out that Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, had been mistaken, or had been paranoid or something — for the common people of England had not utilized this as a pretext for descending upon London and staging a revolution. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had constructed full-scale concrete restorations of the prehistoric reptiles known to that time, for the relocated exhibit. —For the very biggest and newest, what but the very biggest and oldest? His reconstruction required, as he put it, 640 bushels of artificial stone. Here is his drawing showing all his dinosaur restorations, including the marine reptiles, in their park settings. To the left he depicts his two Iguanodon, at the center his Hylaeosaurus, and to the right his Megalosaurus:50

Near Johannesburg, Robert Broom found the 1st skull of an adult australopithecine.

Vitamin D3 was chemically characterized when it was shown to result from the ultraviolet irradiation of 7- dehydrocholesterol. In the same year, the elusive antirachitic component of cod liver oil was shown to be identical to this newly characterized vitamin D3. This established that the antirachitic substance “vitamin” D was chemically a seco-steroid. VITAMIN-D RICKETS

49. An accurate descriptor would have been “Prefabricated Palace,” but that didn’t have enough of a Magic Kingdom ring to it. 50. The Iron Duke was not himself cast in concrete. (He’s in Westminster Abby even if you don’t visit.) The saurian wannabees are still standing around to the south of London. (They’re there even if you don’t visit.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1937

THE FORT UNION OF THE CRAZY MOUNTAIN FIELD, MONTANA, AND ITS MAMMALIAN FAUNAS (George Gaylord Simpson’s tour de force of biostratigraphy, paleoecology, and taxonomy). PALEONTOLOGY

Ales Hrdlicka asserted that the aboriginal peoples of the Americas had always resembled modern Native Americans (this view would predominate for decades). THE SCIENCE OF 1937

Blomquist, H.L. “Hepaticae collected in the vicinity of Mountain Lake Biological Station, Va., 1934.” Claytonia 4: 6-9. Also, “Mosses of North Carolina I. Sphagnales.” The Bryologist 40 (4): 67-71. Also, “The North Carolina Academy of Science.” Science, New Series 85 (2217): 607. BOTANIZING HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1938

Burrhus Frederic Skinner’s THE BEHAVIOR OF ORGANISMS. (In a few years, he would be training pigeon volunteers to sit in the pilot seat of smart bombs — which, you’ll have to admit, is a whole lot more humane, not to mention cost-effective, than the Japanese approach, or the Palestinian approach, to suicide bombing.)51

THE SCIENCE OF 1938

When fishermen brought in a coelacanth, a fish long believed to be extinct, caught off the coast of South Africa, Margaret Courtney-Latimer, a curator at the East London Museum in South Africa, managed to keep the specimen preserved long enough for its identity to be confirmed by ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith. PALEONTOLOGY

51. There is an urban legend that our Navy, when it found out that pigeons can’t fly underwater, adapted Skinner’s conditioning techniques to marine mammals with bomb backpacks, strapping detonators to the tips of their noses. Our federal government assures us, however, that although the US Air Force might at one time have been willing to train suicide pigeons, now the US Navy would never consent to train suicide dolphins. Not going to happen. We do have a US Navy Marine Mammal Program but it is a member of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums and meets or exceeds this alliance’s standards of excellence for marine mammal care, husbandry, conservation and education. Put your mind at rest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1939

Switzerland began to use DDT to control the Colorado Potato Beetle.

About 200 worked ivory fragments, roughly 32,000 years old, were found in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany (three decades later the pieces would be reassembled as statue of a lion-headed man). THE SCIENCE OF 1938 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1940

Frank Morton Carpenter collected a 2.5-foot wing from a dragonfly-like giant insect that had lived in Oklahoma during the Permian Period. PALEONTOLOGY

Discovery of the Lascaux caves.

From this year into 1944, 17 dinosaur fossils, including several type specimens (fossils used as examples of named species) would be lost because the European museums housing them were damaged or destroyed in various WWII battles. THE SCIENCE OF 1940 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1941

Pope Pius XII declared Albertus Magnus the patron of all those who devote themselves to the natural sciences.

E.T. Hall, excavating the ruins of a dwelling in New Mexico occupied between 700 and 900 CE, uncovered two fossil jawbones of Eocene mammals that had been collected by Paleo-Indians. PALEONTOLOGY

H. Kirchner suggested that dinosaur tracks in the Rhine Valley might have inspired the legend of Siegfried slaying the dragon Fafnir. THE SCIENCE OF 1941 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1942

Edward Osborne Wilson discovered, near the port of Mobile, Alabama, the first US colony of fire ants Solenopsis invicta.

Ernst Mayr’s SYSTEMATICS AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and Julian Huxley’s EVOLUTION: THE MODERN SYNTHESIS made significant contributions to the neo-darwinian synthesis, combining elements of natural selection, genetics, mutation, population biology, and paleontology. THE SCIENCE OF 1942 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1946

Near the Ediacara Hills in Australia, Reg Sprigg discovered the oldest complex fossils yet discovered, of multicellular organisms that predated the Cambrian Period (at least some of these would be generally assumed to be related to modern cnidarians such as jellyfish and corals). THE SCIENCE OF 1946 PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1947

Thor Heyerdahl sailed a raft made of balsa logs, the Kon Tiki, from South America far into the Pacific Ocean, to support his contention that prehistoric people could have made such journeys. Heyerdahl would use the presence in the Easter Islands of a plant called totara (Scirpus) that is native to coastal South America as proof of ancient travel. A closely related plant, also called totara, is used extensively by inhabitants of the area around Lake Titicaca — for thatching, for construction of mats, even for building boats. THE SCIENCE OF 1947

Rudolph Zallinger completed his “The Age of Reptiles” mural in the Yale Peabody Museum — a depiction of dinosaurs as slow-moving that would prevail until the 1960s. However, American Museum of Natural History curator Edwin Colbert discovered a quarry loaded with Triassic-era Coelophysis dinosaurs in New Mexico and inferred that these beasts had been swift runners with bird-like posture. Colbert would conclude that they had been consuming their own young (however, their stomach contents would later be identified as crocodilian). PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1948

Mary Leakey discovered the skull of the ape Proconsul, that had lived about 16,000,000 years ago — despite being a most significant find, this would do little to augment Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey’s meager research funding. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1948

According to Robert Sattelmeyer’s and Richard A. Hocks’s “Thoreau and Coleridge’s THEORY OF LIFE” in Joel Myerson’s STUDIES IN THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: 1985 (Charlottesville VA: UP of Virginia, pages 269-84), having “read and copied extracts from [Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s THEORY OF LIFE] shortly after its posthumous publication in 1848” Henry Thoreau was almost immediately deeply under the influence of this book: “His reading of the THEORY OF LIFE … came just at the beginning of a subtle but profound shift in Thoreau’s stance toward nature, a shift that amounted to adopting the study of natural history, along with writing, as the principle occupation of his life. In this context, Coleridge’s treatise offered him a philosophical underpinning for his work, and more importantly provided him with a bridge between the transcendental idealism of his youth and the detailed and scientific study of nature that occupied his maturity.” This in spite of the entire lack of corroborative citations in Thoreau’s journal. Robert Milder’s reaction to this hypothesis by Sattelmeyer and Hocks has been that Thoreau “seems not to have digested [Coleridge’s THEORY OF LIFE] fully or given it prominence in his thought for some time, probably not before 1853. The reason for this, I think, is that his concern, through 1852 at least, was primarily with his own spiritual development and only “very” subordinately with the vast, impersonal reaches of time and purpose suggested by cosmology. Thus an analogist like Wilkinson who seemed to promise a moral knowledge of the immediate was more pertinent to Thoreau’s interests of 1851-1852 than was Coleridge. It was only when Thoreau, frustrated in his hopes for personal metamorphosis, began to look beyond the life of the individual for consolation and meaning that Coleridge assumed the kind of significance Sattelmeyer and Hocks ascribe to him.” My own take on this controversy would be that Coleridge’s THEORY OF LIFE meant to Thoreau, when he read it, approximately what it meant to me when I read it: nothing. It is a confused piece of sophomoronic trash, imitative of the Germans and leading one precisely nowhere, and my sense of the situation is that the memory of this pretentious Coleridgean effort would gradually have evaporated from Thoreau’s consciousness over the years more or less as it has evaporated from mine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1949

André Leroi-Gourhan discovered “Cave of the Reindeer” near the village of Arcy-sur-Cure, where he would be conducting a 15-year excavation. These discoveries would suggest, to some, that Neanderthals had possessed an artistic sense, to the extent of making collections of fossil mollusk shells and fossil coral. The matter remains open to debate. PALEONTOLOGY

Radiocarbon dating techniques were being pioneered by Willard Libby et al at the University of Chicago.

Freeman Dyson calculated that the various formulations of quantum electrodynamics then prevalent were merely different mathematical ways of saying the same thing.

Foot fluroscopes had been in every shoestore in America for some two decades at least (many, many times I had dashed into a shoe store to inspect the wiggling of the bones of my toes). In this year the New England Journal of Medicine published two papers about such devices. One, by a Dr. Williams, reported that per the measurements he had done on fluoroscopes in about a dozen stores, the individual radiation dose amounted to approximately 200 rad, and the other, by Louis Hempelmann, suggested that for safety reasons the use of such fluroscopes ought to be restricted. THE SCIENCE OF 1949 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1951

At the Bull Brook site in Ipswich, carbon dating of artifacts indicated that the region had had Paleo-Indian inhabitants at about 7,000 BCE. Other collections discovered at Great Neck and along river banks would date to the later Archaic (6,000-3,000 BCE) and Woodland (0 CE) periods. PALEONTOLOGY

Barbara McClintock described “jumping genes,” that could move around within an organism’s genome. THE SCIENCE OF 1951 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1952

Boris Sokolov pioneered a term “Vendian” (based on fossils found near the Ediacara Hills in the Soviet Union, this was to designate a period immediately preceding the Cambrian). PALEONTOLOGY

During this year and the following one, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey were combining gases generally believed to have been in the earth’s early atmosphere (methane, ammonia, and water vapor) and charging them with electricity. Their experiments would produce several amino acids, building blocks of life. THE SCIENCE OF 1952

March: Kenneth Walter Cameron’s “Emerson, Thoreau, and the Society of Natural History” (American Literature, Volume 24, Number 1, pages 21-30). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1953

Piltdown Man was determined to have been a hoax, consisting of the jaw of an ape mounted upon a human skull.

James Watson and Francis Crick’s paper in Nature on the molecular structure of DNA, with Rosalind Franklin’s on her essential X-ray photographs of DNA.

Working separately in the USA, Charles Hard Townes, and in the USSR, Nikolai Basov and Aleksander Prochorov, created “masers” that amplified microwave radiation. The next step would be to create “lasers” that would amplify visible and near-visible electromagnetic waves possessing identical frequency, phase, and direction of motion.

Fiesel Houtermans and Claire Patterson offered independent estimates of the age of the earth done by radiometric dating of meteorites. Both estimates were over 4,500,000,000 years.

From this year until 1968, Theodor Verhoeven would be attempting to persuade paleontologists that stone tools found on the island of Flores had been made by Homo erectus around 750,000 years ago — this was an uphill slog. THE SCIENCE OF 1953 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1954

C.H. Townes, J.P. Gordon, and H.J. Zieger described an ammonia maser they had built at Columbia University, which was able to produce coherent microwave radiation.

HISTORY OF OPTICS

Elso Barghoorn and Stanley Tyler reported the discovery in Canadian rock formations of bacterial cells that were nearly 2 billion years old. PALEONTOLOGY

Living stromatolites were discovered in Shark Bay, Australia. The find was somewhat surprising as such stromatolites have no defenses against organisms possessing mouths and have probably become since the Cambrian Period relatively rare. THE SCIENCE OF 1954 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1956

Vernon Ingram of Cambridge University precisely identified the amino-acid substitution in the human gene resulting from the sickle cell mutation.

Gilbert Plass’s “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change.”

M.W. de Laubenfels suggested that the dinosaurs had been driven to extinction by a meteorite impact. Deus ex machina! PALEONTOLOGY

Keith Runcorn described polar wandering based on paleomagnetic studies of Europe and North America. His suggestion as to a cause for the observed wandering was not a deus ex machina but continental drift.

At the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire, a DIDO heavy water enriched uranium nuclear reactor began operation.

The existence of antineutrinos was experimentally confirmed by Clyde L. Cowan and Frederick Reines, and also by Bruce Cork.

RAND Corporation began to study detonating atomic bombs on the moon. What could go wrong? THE SCIENCE OF 1956 ASTRONOMY

“If anything bad can happen, it probably will.”

— Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss in the Chicago Daily Tribune, February 12, 1955) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1959

July 17, Friday: Mary Leakey found Zinjanthropus in Olduvai Gorge. This would be dated at 1,750,000 years and rewrite human prehistory. PALEONTOLOGY

Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro resigned saying he had “moral differences” with President Manuel Urrutia Lleo. Later in the day the president resigned and he and his family sought refuge.

Billie Holiday died in New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1960

November 4, Friday: After two years in Britain, Peter Sculthorpe boarded a plane at Heathrow Airport and flew back to Australia.

In the Olduvai Gorge of Tanzania, Jonathan Leakey came upon a lower jaw and showed it to his mother Mary Leakey. This new species would be designated by his father Louis Leakey as Homo habilis. The specimen would prove to be 1,750,000 years old.

In a nationwide broadcast, President de Gaulle of France pledged himself to respect the outcome of a referendum in Algeria — even if the vote were to turn out to be for independence. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1961

Melvin Calvin was awarded the Nobel Prize. In association with Andrew Benson, James Bassham, and other scientists he had described the light-independent reactions (often called the dark reactions, or the Calvin cycle) of the photosynthetic system. Beginning with carbon dioxide, these reactions synthesize organic compounds (3-carbon phosphate sugars) that become glucose and other sugars.

Henry Morris’s and J.C. Whitcomb’s THE GENESIS FLOOD attracted new supporters to their previously insignificant Biblical Literalist movement.

Martin Glaessner determined fossils in the Ediacara Hills of South Australia (the Ediacaran fauna) to be Precambrian in age (approximately 600,000,000 years old) — the oldest-known multicelled organisms. PALEONTOLOGY

Gene Shoemaker and E.C.T. Chao determined the Ries Basin in Bavaria to have been shaped by a meteorite impact (this would help pave the way for the deus ex machina explanation that extrinsic chance events, asteroid and comet impacts, had been what had produced the various mass extinctions). THE SCIENCE OF 1961 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1962

Observation of stimulated emission from homojunction gallium arsenide semiconductor diodes.

HISTORY OF OPTICS

James Neel’s “thrifty genotype” hypothesis, that human ancestors endured feast/famine cycles that resulted in the human body becoming very effective in storing fat for lean times. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1962 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1963

September 7, day: A march by Saigon high school students to an anti-government rally was stopped by special forces units, who surrounded the schools and arrested 800 students.

In Lucerne, Little Music for strings op.16 by Alexander Goehr was performed for the initial time.

Fred Vine and Drum Matthews of the University of Cambridge’s “Magnetic Anomalies Over Oceanic Ridges” appeared in Nature — hard evidence supporting Wegener’s theory of continental drift. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1964

Vincent Dethier’s “Microscopic Brains,” a Science article on insect behavior, called for a more empathetic (perhaps “Thoreauvian”) approach to animal subjects, even tiny invertebrates. THE SCIENCE OF 1964

Two deciduous molars roughly 44,000 years old were collected at Grotta del Cavallo in southeastern Italy and were presumed at first to be those of a Neanderthal (in 2011 these would be assigned to modern humans).

W. Brian Harland and Martin J.S. Rudwick theorized that the earth experienced a great Ice Age in the Neoproterozoic (late Precambrian), and Rudwick suggested that the climate’s return to moderate conditions paved the way for the evolution of multicelluar life. PALEONTOLOGY

William B. Bridges of Hughes Research Laboratories produced an ion laser.

Jerome V.V. Kasper and George C. Pimentel of the University of California–Berkeley created a new type of laser in which photodissociation of CF3I or of CH3I produced a population inversion in atomic iodine. The lased output of this new chemistry turned out to be at a wavelength of 1.315 um in the near infrared spectrum.

April 4, day: President Makarios of Cyprus announced he was withdrawing from the Turkey-Greece-Cyprus Treaty of Alliance, alleging that under this treaty Turkey has misused troops stationed in Cyprus.

João Belchior Marques Goulart, deposed president of Brazil, crossed the border into Uruguay.

An article in Nature by Louis S.B. Leakey, John Napier, and Philip Tobias reported the discovery in Olduvai Gorge of the new hominid species Homo habilis. This monicker, meaning “handy,” would not be (shall we say) well received by the scientific community. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1965

Fossil remain of the early primate Aegyptopithecus zeuxis were discovered by Dr. Grant E. Mayer and Dr. Elwyn L. Simons of Yale’s Peabody Museum in the Fayum Depression of Egypt, about 60 miles south of Cairo, a currently semi-arid region which in 33,000,000 BCE had had seasonal rainfall and had had abundant subtropical vegetation. THE SCIENCE OF 1965

N.H. Field’s “Fossil sea-echinoids from a Romano-British site” described the centuries-long occupation of a Romano-British settlement in Dorset. Newer buildings had been built upon older ones, with fossil urchins in each. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1966

Harry Whittington began to re-examine the fossils found in Burgess Shale, originally identified by Charles Walcott starting in 1909. Over the following two decades Whittington (with the assistance of his graduate students Simon Conway Morris and Derek Briggs) would overturn some of Walcott’s theories and propose that most of these creatures had left no living relatives. PALEONTOLOGY

Willi Hennig worked up a new approach to assessing evolutionary relationships, to be known as “cladistics.” Although this technique would be hotly debated, it would eventually become standard practice in paleontology, botany, and zoology. THE SCIENCE OF 1966

During this year and the following one a joint American, British, and South African expedition would uncover Triassic dinosaur fossils in the Transkei (Herschel) District of South Africa. After decades in Harvard’s collections, the fossils would be reexamined and identified by Paul Sereno as Pegomastax africanus, a cat- sized plant eater with fangs, a parrot-like beak, and porcupine-like quills.

A Texas birdwatcher, Olga Hooks Lloyd, reported sighting an Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis in the Neches River swamp in the Big Thicket area of east Texas. John V. Dennis then reported a female ivory-bill along a nearby bayou (neither sighting could be corroborated by photograph or sound recording). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1967

E.O. Wilson, with Robert Helmer MacArthur, THE THEORY OF ISLAND BIOGEOGRAPHY (Princeton UP). ECOLOGY

Lynn Sagan (later, Lynn Margulis) hypothesized that chloroplasts had originated as cyanobacteria, and that mitochondria had originated as bacteria, by having learned to live within the cell walls of other species as symbionts.

Richard Leakey found two fossil skulls, Omo I and Omo II, in Ethiopia. Though initially dated at 130,000 years, the fossils would turn out when dated by argon decay to be at 195,000 years — the oldest examples of Homo sapiens. PALEONTOLOGY

P.S. Martin suggested that fast-moving bands of human hunters had caused the extinctions of Pleistocene big- game species.

At Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, S.B. Misra discovered a well-preserved sea floor with numerous fossils dating from the late Precambrian (later to be dubbed the Ediacaran Period).

Daniel Janzen argued that because they were accustomed to “easy” conditions, it wouldn’t be likely that tropical plants would survive a wide range of temperature, light, or hydrologic conditions. THE SCIENCE OF 1967 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1968

The term “Green Revolution” was coined by W. Gaud, the head of the US Foreign Aid Program.

A.G. Cairns-Smith suggested that life on earth most likely had begun at the surface of some fine-grained clay crystal, because this was such a common material in the earth’s crust and because such surfaces were optimal for the agglomeration of various organic molecules. He would publish on this topic repeatedly until his death but experimental evidence would remain scant, in part because lab technology wasn’t yet at the place needed to test such an hypothesis.

Tadashi Suzuki found a plesiosaur fossil in his hometown of Iwaki City, Japan (his find was of an entirely new species although it wouldn’t be identified as such for nearly four decades). PALEONTOLOGY

Richard Fox described a Paleocene mammal Prothryptacodon albertensis retrieved from a well dug in Alberta, Canada. This find eerily resembles that of another Paleocene mammal recovered from a Louisiana oil well and described in 1932 by George Gaylord Simpson. THE SCIENCE OF 1968 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1969

Stewart Brand’s THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin were the initial humans to stand on the moon (they having been specifically chosen for, among other characteristics, a lack of anything interesting to say).

John Ostrom’s description of Deinonychus with an illustration by Bob Bakker suggested that the dinosaur had been alert, agile, and intelligent. PALEONTOLOGY

R.H. Whittaker suggested that the living beings that have evolved on this particular planet and are still in existence ought now to be divisible into five kingdoms: Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, and Monera. THE SCIENCE OF 1969 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1971

John M.J. Madey outlined the principles of the free electron laser.

A.G. Sharov described a pterosaur with fossil “hair” impressions as Sordes pilosus (hairy devil).

Polish and Mongolian paleontologists discovered entwined skeletons of a Protoceratops and a juvenile Velociraptor in the Gobi Desert — most likely locked in mortal combat.

Douglas Lawson discovered in Texas the humerus of a giant pterosaur. Over the following four years he would continue collecting, and finally would publish a description of Quetzalcoatlus northropi, the largest flying animal ever found with an estimated wingspan of 39 feet.

Five pairs of adult wall lizards were moved to another island in Croatia, one that had lacked such wall lizards. Over the following few decades the lizards in their new habitat would evolve noticeably larger heads, stronger bites, and a greater tolerance for an herbivorous diet than the lizard population on the original island.

From this year into 1974, Crystal Bennett would be collecting Iron Age archaeological specimens at Busayra in southern Jordan. The excavations would uncover large numbers of fossils showing signs of human modification, including 70 fossil sea urchins. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1971 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1972

The National Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act was passed by Congress. Concerns over the results of screening gained high profile. A urea-based treatment, briefly hailed as a cure for sickle cell disease, was found toxic and had to be abandoned.

DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) usage was banned in the US (but we could continue to make the stuff, and vend it overseas).

Malaria was so epidemic in Cambodia during the 1st year of the Pol Pot terror that the Khmer Rouge actually broke its golden rule of self-sufficiency and asked for help from an American charity. The one and only Western item accepted into Cambodia during this regime would be — our DDT.

Stephen Jay Gould’s and Niles Eldredge’s theory of Punctuated Equilibrium — that evolution occurs sometimes in short bursts separated by long periods of stability. THE SCIENCE OF 1972

Bob Bakker’s “Anatomical and Ecological Evidence of Endothermy in Dinosaurs” in Nature argued that dinosaurs had been warm-blooded. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1973

Lieth calculated the annual net primary production for land vegetation on Earth, at an upper limit, to be 100,000,000,000 tons of dry matter, having a caloric content of 426,000,000,000,000,000 kilocalories.52

Peter Grant and Rosemary Grant began a long-term study of the finches of the Galapagos Islands. In succeeding years, as they watched finches adapt to alternating wet and dry conditions, the Grants would discover that evolution can proceed with greater rapidly than imagined by Charles Darwin.

Heinz Tobien collected a primate tooth fragment from limestone rocks in southern Germany. Studies published in 2001 and 2011 would suggest that his fossil was 17,000,000 years old, and that a hominoid migration into Eurasia had occurred 3,000,000 years earlier than previously supposed. PALEONTOLOGY

Half in jest, Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel observed that ancient aliens might have seeded the early earth with DNA and all life on this planet arisen from that seeding.

Taking a line from THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, Leigh Van Valen established a “Red Queen” hypothesis of coevolution between predator and prey: “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Dorothy Retallack’s THE SOUND OF MUSIC AND PLANTS argued that plants have musical tastes that somehow happen to resemble those of some humans. Plants exposed to Bach, easy listening, and Muzak thrived while plants subjected to Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin withered. Her assertions would claim a New Age audience.53 THE SCIENCE OF 1973

52. The corresponding lower limit would be zero, of course, were something to happen to exterminate such land vegetation on Earth. 53. Similarly, some folks associated with Dr. Rhine’s lab at Duke University would pray for alternate rows of seedlings and proclaim that the plants in the rows they prayed for had thrived disproportionately (their experiment would not, however, produce the same result when repeated under controlled conditions by experimenters lacking the necessary affirmative attitude). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1974

Richard Eaton’s FLORA OF CONCORD. It is to be noted that of the 540 named plant species recorded by Dr. Edward Jarvis, Eaton has not listed 39 locally — could changes in scientific nomenclature over the years account for this discrepancy? THE SCIENCE OF 1974 BOTANIZING

Donald Johanson and his team discovered a female fossil hominid (to be named Australopithecus afarensis) and called her “Lucy.” This specimen established that hominids did walk upright before developing large brains, which overturned some long-held presumptions about hominid evolution. Lucy’s status as a direct ancestor of modern humans would, however, remain conjectural. PALEONTOLOGY

John Ostrom’s “Archaeopteryx and the Origin of Flight” revived a theory advanced by Thomas Henry Huxley during the 1860s.

While leveling ground for a building, Porky Hansen turned up a mammoth tusk. The site would reveal many more mammoths and would become, for Hot Springs, South Dakota, a valuable tourist attraction. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1975

E.O. Wilson, SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW SYNTHESIS (Harvard UP).

“No good ever came of obeying a law which you had discovered.” — Henry Thoreau, JOURNAL, March 19, 1851 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

Mary-Claire King and Allan Wilson calculated that human and chimpanzee DNA sequences differed by roughly 1%, meaning humans have more in common with chimps than chimps do with gorillas. King and Wilson suggested that humans and chimps differ largely in the DNA that switches genes on and off. THE SCIENCE OF 1975

Equipped with an old geological map, Joan Wiffin found, in the Maungahouanga Valley New Zealand’s 1st recognized dinosaur fossil, a theropod tail vertebra. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1976

John M.J. Madey and a group at Stanford University demonstrated the 1st free-electron laser.

Paleontologists looking for cave bear remains explored Sima de los Huesos (“Pit of the Bones”) at Atapuerca, Spain. For many years afterward this would remain the densest accumulation of fossil human bones so far found, including the remains of more than 30 Homo heidelbergensis individuals. PALEONTOLOGY

Overturning the classifications proposed by R.H. Whittaker 7 years earlier, Carl Woese proposed that we instead divide all living beings on this particular planet at this present moment into three categories: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya. THE SCIENCE OF 1976 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1977

Fred Sanger and collaborators provided the initial complete DNA sequence of an organism (a bacteriophage, or virus infecting bacteria). THE SCIENCE OF 1977

US Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirmed that, between 1949 and 1969, the United States military had contaminated 239 populated areas with biological agents. These areas included, among other locations, Key West, Florida, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Panama City, Panama, St. Louis, Missouri, San Francisco, California, and the District of Columbia.

GERM WARFARE When the submersible Alvin photographed deep sea vents on the ocean floor, discovering that they give rise to an ecosystem owing nothing whatever to photosynthesis, we were prompted to ask whether life on earth might not have arisen first in deep-sea, rather than in shallow-water, ecosystems. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1978

The initial test tube baby was born, in England.

Janet Parker, a worker on the floor above a lab where the remaining samples of the small pox virus were being stored in Birmingham, England, contracted smallpox and died. The virus had apparently gotten through an air duct between the two floors. She infected her mother, who survived, but in the meanwhile her father was so alarmed that he had a fatal heart attack. The lab director then committed suicide. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

There was an unexpected criticality at the Fukushima Daiichi facility of Tokyo Electric Power Company (they would be attempting to conceal this for years and years).54 TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

WALDEN: If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, –we never need read of another. One is enough.

54. There have been in the nuclear industry, to date, some 70 such criticality excursions and some 21 resultant fatalities, but –so far at least– there hasn’t been a single atomic blast! Cross your fingers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

J.W. Kitching discovered a clutch of prosauropod eggs in South Africa, the oldest dinosaur embryos yet found. They would indicate that sauropods had walked on all fours as small animals, but the significance of this find would be overlooked for nearly three decades. PALEONTOLOGY

F. Metzger-Krahé described a 9th-Century Viking settlement in southern Jutland –perhaps the initial city-like settlement in Northern Europe– at which were found 185 fossils, most of them fossil sea urchins.

Mary Leakey announced the discovery at Laetoli of fossil footprints demonstrating that hominids had walked upright 3,600,000 years ago. THE SCIENCE OF 1978 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1979

By this point in time the Concord municipal disposal facility hard by Walden Pond was being referred to politely as “the town’s landfill.” Nevertheless, as a Concord family got its trash ready for their Saturday jaunt to this, ahem, landfill, their children were likely to be singing a ditty “To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump” to that catchy dum, dah dah dum, dah dah dum dum dum from the William Tell Overture (that had, for Rossini, signalled the approach of the mighty Swiss army).

(We may wonder what treasures will be excavated from this landfill, after the extermination of the humanoids and the rise of the cockroachoids!)

Fresh out of law school and short on ready cash, Robert Heggestad purchased on the installment plan at a Virginia antique shop a cabinet that turned out to contain some 1,700 plant and invertebrate specimens from the personal collection of Alfred Russel Wallace. Oh, wow! THE SCIENCE OF 1979

Crystal Bennett found in the Amman Citadel a human-altered sea urchin fossil in Islamic (Fatimid) deposits dating from the 10th to 12th centuries. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1980

France exploded a neutron bomb.

Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington erupted. VOLCANISM

Louis W. Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen V. Michel presented their asteroid impact theory of an extrinsic cause for dinosaur extinction (they appeared to be entirely unaware that there was a distinction to be made between an extrinsic event which would in itself produce a mass extinction, versus an extrinsic event which would serve as a mere trigger influencing the timing of an intrinsically caused mass extinction, just as they appeared to be entirely unaware that the time-spread from the initial portion of this mass extinction to the last dinosaur species to become extinct during this event amounted to some tens of thousands of years — and we wonder what reasons there might have been for such appalling obtuseness). PALEONTOLOGY

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus describe genetic mutations affecting the body plan of the fruit fly Drosophila, and identify genes controlling the basic body plans of all animals. These genes will eventually be known as Hox genes. THE SCIENCE OF 1980 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1982

When pro boxer Earnie Shavers auditioned for a role in ROCKY II, he was pulling his punches and Sylvester Stallone told him they should make it look real. Pretty soon Sly needed to go to the bathroom and “When he came back he tol’ me he was sorry, but they couldn’t use me.... Only thing, people come up to me now, they know who I am, and they say, ‘Hey Earnie, think you could beat Rocky?’”

“Grizzly” Adams was played by the actor Dan Haggerty in the TV movie The Capture of Grizzly Adams.

Iran got the upper hand in its war with Iraq. We needed to leap to the assistance of our friend Saddam Hussein. President Ronald Reagan removed Iraq from our list of known terrorist countries so we would be able to do “whatever was necessary and legal” to assist him in his nation’s struggle for survival (soon we would be sending him air shipments of our anthrax and weapons-grade botulin toxin).

During this year or the following one, Bill Walker unearthed a dinosaur claw at a Surrey clay pit. A previously unknown theropod, the animal would be formally named Baryonix walkeri and nicknamed “Claws.” Claws’s fishy fossilized gut contents raise suspicions that it might have been semi-aquatic, a hypothesis supported by oxygen isotopes later found in its tooth enamel. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1982 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1983

E.O. Wilson’s PROMETHEAN FIRE: REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGIN OF MIND (Harvard UP). Big thoughts from a lightweight.

Adolf Seilacher noticed how very unrelated most of the Ediacaran fossils discovered in the 1940s were to any modern forms. Calling them vendobionts, he suggested that such forms would have been driven to extinction with the emergence of large predators. PALEONTOLOGY

Private collecters found an exceptionally well-preserved primate fossil at Messel, Germany. Over the next 26 years, the fossil would be split into two pieces (one of which would get prettied up), reunited, and described amid media hoopla as “the missing link” and a potential human ancestor. THE SCIENCE OF 1983 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1984

In this year and the following one the tomb of Pharaoh Rameses VII (Usermaatresetepenre) (1,133 BCE-1,125 BCE) in the Valley of the Kings (#1) was being re-excavated by Edwin Brock, currently co-director of the Amenmesse Tomb Project that in 2006 announced the discovery of the most recent tomb Valley of the Kings tomb, #63. DIGGING UP THE DEAD

Richard Leakey and his team discovered Turkana Boy, the most complete Homo erectus fossil yet recovered.

David Raup and Jack Sepkoski pointed out that mass extinctions have been happening quite regularly, roughly every 26,000,000 years. Such a claim is provocative since it points in the direction of our needing to come up with an explanation for these mass extinctions that is intrinsic to the life sciences, rather than one that would be extrinsic to those sciences — such as the cockamamie doctrine of all those fortuitous deus ex machina asteroid and comet strikes. THE SCIENCE OF 1984

The forgotten site at which the famous Hadrosaurus foulkii skeleton named by Professor Joseph Leidy had been dug up in the summer of 1858 was rediscovered by a Boy Scout, Chris Brees, at the end of Maple Street in Haddonfield, New Jersey. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1985

According to the journal Science (227:173-177), the virus HTLV and a fatal sheep virus, VISNA, have been found to be very similar, indicating a close taxonomic and evolutionary relationship.

Paleoanthropologists excavated an artifact-rich portion of Cueva de los Aviones in Iberia. 50,000-year-old perforated and pigment-stained shells from the cave would prompt researchers to suspect, a quarter of a century later, that some Neanderthals had had the good sense to wear, if not clothing, at least both makeup and jewelry. PALEONTOLOGY

Kenneth Okaley’s DECORATIVE AND SYMBOLIC USES OF FOSSILS describing, among other things, a hand axe crafted by Homo heidelbergensis featuring a fossil sea urchin, and a fossil urchin set within a bronze locket from a Gallo-Roman temple. THE SCIENCE OF 1985 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1986

Michael J. Crowe’s THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE DEBATE 1750-1900: THE IDEA OF A PLURALITY OF WORLDS FROM KANT TO LOWELL (Cambridge MA: Cambridge UP, especially page 237).

When Norman H. Sleep attempted to calculate the probability of life forms surviving an extraterrestrial impact in the Hadean Period (the initial 700,000,000 years of earth’s existence), his submission was rejected because no life could have developed on earth prior to the presence of a planetary crust. THE SCIENCE OF 1986 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1987

Cuban scientists reported a female Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis in the mountains of Cuba.

Jenny Clack discovered Acanthostega, the most complete Devonian tetrapod specimen as yet identified. Since it had functional gills as well as legs, it would appear that land animals may already have had legs as they emerged from the water. PALEONTOLOGY

Allan Wilson and Rebecca Cann discovered that all humans share a common ancestor, who lived in Africa as recently as 150,000 years ago. Because the discovery was based on examination of mitochondrial DNA, the ancestral entity would be awarded the popular (and somewhat misleading) name of “Mitochondrial Eve” (the finding, although controversial, would be supported by another such discovery in 2000).

Dhananjay Mohabey discovered what looks like a simple clutch of dinosaur eggs in India. Eventually he, Jeffrey Wilson, and colleagues would report that the fossil find had included not merely the eggs of a sauropod, but also a predatory Cretaceous snake that was apparently snapping up hapless hatchlings.

Charles Bonner collected a plesiosaur mother-and-fetus fossil. Nearly a quarter century later, O’Keefe and Chiappe would describe this as evidence that plesiosaurs gave live birth, and might well have been attentive mothers. THE SCIENCE OF 1987 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1989

Philip Gingerich discovered in Egypt a fossil whale, Basilosaurus. The specimen had tiny legs, just inches long, retaining all five toes. Five years later Gingerich would discover in Pakistan an even more primitive whale ancestor, Rodhocetus, with even larger hind legs. Eighteen years later Hans Thewissen would discover in Kashmir another missing link in cetacean evolution: the fox-like Indohyus. PALEONTOLOGY

Ned Colbert finally completed his definitive species description of Coelophysis dinosaurs he found in 1947.

Rob Gargett argued that sites interpreted as Neanderthal graves at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, La Ferrassie, Shanidar, and several other localities might all be explained by natural processes, and that evidence for deliberate burial was lacking.

Based solely on fossil footprints, the creationist Carl Baugh declared a new species, Homo bauanthropus (the “footprints” in question had already been identified as dinosaur tracks and invertebrate burrow casts, but never mind). THE SCIENCE OF 1989 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

1990

E.O. Wilson’s SUCCESS AND DOMINANCE IN ECOSYSTEMS: THE CASE OF THE SOCIAL INSECTS (Inter- Research).

Bert Hölldobler’s and E.O. Wilson’s THE ANTS (Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP).

The Human Genome Project was launched with the goal of sequencing all 3 billion base pairs of human DNA by 2005. THE SCIENCE OF 1990

Mongolia invited the American Museum of Natural History to reinstate excavations in the Gobi desert. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1991

Piero Cannata took a hammer and knocked one of the toes off the left foot of Michelangelo’s “David.”

The Chicxulub crater was discovered in the Yucatán Peninsula, supporting an asteroid impact theory first suggested in 1980. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1991

June: At the request of the students of Strawbridge Elementary School near the site at which the famous dinosaur skeleton had been dug up in the summer of 1858, the one denominated Hadrosaurus foulkii by Dr. Joseph Leidy, the state Assembly declared that species to be the Official Dinosaur of the State of New Jersey.

Kurt Vonnegut and Jill Krementz filed for divorce. The petition would later be withdrawn (that dinosaur, however, is still official). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1992

Russia allowed a US team to visit the site of the 1979 anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk, Siberia. The team turned up telltale evidence, in the lungs of victims, that many had died from inhalation anthrax, likely caused by the accidental release of aerosolized anthrax spores from the secret military base. Given the hundreds of tons of anthrax the Sverdlovsk facility could produce, it was indeed fortunate that the accidental release had been of only a small amount of spores.

GERM WARFARE Ian Campbell and collaborators published a paper pointing to the Siberian Traps, an area of massive volcanic activity, as the cause of the Permo-Triassic mass extinction 251 million years ago. PALEONTOLOGY

Paleontologists led by Jim Kirkland discovered Utahraptor, a super-sized velociraptor that conveniently suggests the super-sized velociraptors that would appear on the screen in “Jurassic Park” a year later (except, of course, that this Utahraptor had not been in existence during the Jurassic).

Joe Kirschvink’s “Late Proterozoic Low-latitude Glaciation: The Snowball Earth,” a short book section in a specialized monograph — this snowball hypothesis would attract little attention until expanded by Paul Hoffman and his collaborators several years later.

A team led by Tim White discovered the initial traces of a hominid fossil that would later be named Ardipithecus ramidus. Seventeen years later, the team would publish a detailed description of a 4,400,000- year-old, 120-centimeter-tall, nearly complete adult female, along with fossils from 35 other individuals. The team would argue that “Ardi” should supplant “Lucy” at the base of the hominid tree. THE SCIENCE OF 1992 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1993

J. William Schopf inferred that although the microfossils of the Apex Basalt in Australia are 3,500,000,000 years old, they could photosynthesize and produce oxygen (Martin Brasier and others would problematize this by inferring that 3,400,000,000-year-old microbes from a nearby outcrop had fed off sulfur).

An expedition from the American Museum of Natural History discovered in the Gobi desert the skeleton of an Oviraptor dinosaur crouching over a nest of eggs, to all appearances incubating them in the manner of modern birds. PALEONTOLOGY

Roland Anderson and Jennifer Mather’s “Personalities of Octopuses” in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

During this year and the following one Roger Pedersen found the shin bone of someone who had apparently been a strapping specimen of Homo heidelbergensis, likely weighing in at a muscular 200 pounds. Named for his discoverer, “Roger” was about 500,000 years old. THE SCIENCE OF 1993 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1994

A Cincinnati Enquirer investigation identified 32 of the University of Cincinnati patients who had been used as guinea pigs in military research into the effects of plutonium. The newspaper’s researchers were able to do this primarily by matching initials and other details found in the research reports with the names provided by relatives who were contacting the newspaper’s radiation hotline. Several families hired lawyers to sue the University of Cincinnati, the researchers, and the city of Cincinnati, which at the time owned General Hospital. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Elaine Morgan supported the “aquatic ape” hypothesis that modern humans evolved from semiaquatic apes, as suggested by our hairless bodies and subcutaneous layers of fat. PALEONTOLOGY

In what will later be named Chauvet cave, French cavers discovered 32,000-year-old paintings showing 400 animal images.

Ron Clark noticed some previously overlooked foot bones, showing both ape and human qualities, from Sterkfontein. Future finds would associate these bones with a skeleton nicknamed “Little Foot.” THE SCIENCE OF 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1995

Lee Berger and Ron Clarke’s article in the Journal of Human Evolution argued that the Taung child, discovered in 1924, might have been killed by a bird of prey. PALEONTOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF 1995

A bumper sticker was seen in Miami, Florida, statistically the most violent city in North America, outdistancing even Los Angeles:

THANK YOU FOR NOT SHOOTING HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1996

E.O. Wilson (with Laura Simonds Southworth), IN SEARCH OF NATURE (Shearwater Books).

Alan Walker and Pat Shipman described advanced vitamin A poisoning in a 1,700,000-year-old Homo erectus specimen, asserting it as evidence both of meat eating (presumably consuming the liver of a large carnivore) and sufficient sociability in Homo erectus to care for an individual who had become ill and incapacitated. PALEONTOLOGY

When a 9,500-year-old “Kennewick Man” skeleton was recovered in the northwestern United States, it bore little resemblance to modern Native Americans. This suggests a more complicated early population of the Americas than was being presumed.

Using “molecular clock” estimates of mutation rates, Greg Wray and collaborators hypothesized that metazoan phyla diverged from each other 1,000,000,000 years ago, or perhaps even earlier. They argued, in other words, that metazoans may have existed hundreds of millions of years before the earliest metazoan fossils (about 600,000,000 years old) as yet noticed.

Tim White’s team discovered horse, antelope, and other mammal bones with cut marks from stone tools — evidence of tool use 2,500,000 years ago.

At the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting Chen Pei Ji unveiled Sinosauropteryx prima from Liaoning, China, the 1st feathered dinosaur as yet discovered. Fourteen years later, a team of Chinese and British paleontologists would argue, based on pigment-rich microscopic spheres in the fossilized feathers, that this specimen had had a striped tail, a reddish color alternating with white. THE SCIENCE OF 1996 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1997

Karen Chin evaluated a 17-inch coprolite excavated in Saskatchewan, full of crunched bone estimated at 65,000,000 years — this had likely been the calling card of a T. rex.

Excavations near Koblenz in northern Germany turned up a Neanderthal skullcap, estimated at 170,000 years, that apparently had been used as a bowl. PALEONTOLOGY

Paul Sereno discovered the delicate Darth Vader-like skull of a dinosaur he would name Nigersaurus taqueti and nickname “the Mesozoic Cow.”

Two 5-foot Humboldt squid in the Sea of Cortez “mugged” a diver working on a PBS documentary, making off with his gold chain — exhibiting bad manners but good taste. THE SCIENCE OF 1997

James C. Garman and others attempted in “‘This Great Wild Tract’: Henry David Thoreau, Native Americans, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and the Archaeology of Estabrook Woods” in Historical Archaeology 31(4): 59-80 to characterize Henry Thoreau’s powers of observation, his attitude towards Native Americans, and the archaeology and history of Estabrook Woods. Thoreau’s journal reference to the puzzling prominence of the corn hills indicated how dubious he was of the ready local explanation. Engaged by Middlesex School as required by the federal Historic Preservation Act, this group discussed Thoreau’s journal description of the supposed “Indian corn hill” in Estabrook Woods and reexamined the terrain:

They confirmed Thoreau’s suspicion that the ground disturbance was of colonial origin and ascribed it to the mid-1700s. Very clearly, Thoreau had been trying to puzzle out what physical characteristics would indicate a native origin of a hilled field, versus what an intrusive origin. He had examined alignment, soil conditions, and size, and had speculated about tools used in their construction:

After Sunday, May 12, 1850: I walk over the old corn-fields, it is true, where the grassy corn-hills still appear in the woods — but there are no traces of them there.

January 10, 1851: like the exhausted Indian corn lands.

September 12, Friday: Woods where you feel the old corn hills under your feet–for these not being disturbed or levelled in getting the crop like potatoe hills last an indefinite while–& by some they are called Indian corn fields–though I think erroniously not only from their position in rocky soil frequently–but because the squaws probably with their clam shells or thin stones or wooden hoes did not hill their corn more than many HDT WHAT? INDEX

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now recommend.

December 4, 1856: a succession of little hills and hollows, as if the whole earth had been a potato or corn field.

August 24, Monday, 1857: I was confident that if Indian corn hill, they could not be very old, perhaps not more than a century or so, for such could never have been made with the ancient Indian hoes. Compare the above with the essay Walking: He had not better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer is armed with plow and spade.

November 13, Friday, 1857, relating event of November 7, 1857 in regard to some very prominent Indian corn-hills, like the burial-ground of some creatures: I observed on the 7th [on a walk with Waldo Emerson], between the site of Paul Adams’s and Bateman’s Pond, in quite open land, some very prominent Indian corn-hills. I should say that they were higher above the intermediate surface than when they were first made. It was a pasture, and they were thickly covered with grass and lichens. Perhaps the grass had grown better on the hillocks, and so they had grown while the intermediate spaces had been more trodden by the cows. These very regular round grassy hillocks, extending in straight rows over the swells and valleys, has a singular effect, like the burial-ground of some creatures.

October 20, 1860: “In several of these new woods — pitch pine and birches — can see the old corn- hills still.” The “new woods” that were probably within Easterbrooks Country include the following: Mason’s pasture (?), white pine; Henry Shattuck’s, pitch pine; and north of Henry Shattuck’s, pitch pine. Compare this with Thoreau’s FAITH IN A SEED (Washington: Island Press, 1993, page 156): I see the old corn hills still very distinctly in their rows, and in some instances these were the work of our predecessors, the Indians.

For more about the native American corn hills of Massachusetts: MASS. CORN-HILLS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1998

Associate Professor of History Christopher Klemek’s “Feathered Friends: History and Representation in a Quaker Fable” reported the absence of any historical basis for the nice Quaker story “Fierce Feathers” that had sprung up around the events preceding the Battle of Saratoga during September 1777. “FIERCE FEATHERS” PROFESSOR KLEMEK

Paul Hoffman, Alan Kaufman, Galen Halverson, and Daniel Schrag offered a Neoproterozoic snowball earth theory, that during the late Precambrian this planet had undergone global glaciations followed by extreme greenhouse conditions, that had spurred the evolution of multicellular life forms.

Xiao, Zhang, and Knoll described in Nature some fossilized animal embryos, while Li, Chen, and Hua simultaneously described some in Science. The specimens were from the Doushantuo phosphorites in southern China estimated to be about 570,000,000 years old — the oldest fossil embryos so far discovered. Nine years later, however, Bailey and collaborators would challenge this interpretation, arguing that such “fossil embryos” might just as easily have been large bacteria. That challenge would be answered, however, by an announcement of the discovery of such fossil embryos inside egg cysts. PALEONTOLOGY

Andrew Parker suggested that Wiwaxia, Canadia, and Marella had developed flickering displays of iridescent color at about the same point at which Cambrian animals were evolving eyes.

Aterian artifacts at sites in Libya (named for stone tools discovered in Algeria in 1917) were estimated at 70,000 years. Over the next dozen years the age of artifacts found at various sites in northern Africa would be pushed back to at least 110,000 years. THE SCIENCE OF 1998 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1999

Chinese paleontologists discovered an exceptionally well-preserved feathered dinosaur, probably a juvenile dromaeosaur. Citing the confusion caused by language barriers and jet lag, the paleontologists’ American collaborators nicknamed the fossil “Dave the fuzzy raptor” after a character alluded to in a Cheech and Chong routine. This fossil would be assigned to the genus Sinornithosaurus. (The next fuzzy discovery would be nicknamed “Chong.”)

Pierre-Jean Texier and colleagues recovered ostrich shells from Diepkloof Rock Shelter in Western Cape, South Africa, that had been etched. After 11 years of study they would argue that the artifacts, numbering roughly 280, show evidence of graphic communication dating back 60,000 years. THE SCIENCE OF 1999

David Kulivan reported a pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers Campephilus principalis in the Pearl River region of Louisiana. This would cause renewed efforts to find surviving members of the population. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2000

Phil Currie suggested that T. rex had been a social animal that hunted in packs.

Based on Y chromosomes Peter Underhill inferred that all modern humans share a common ancestor, bolstering the 1987 announcement from Cann and Wilson. This suggests a “bottleneck” event (population crash) among human ancestors living in Africa, roughly 150,000 years ago. PALEONTOLOGY

A research team led by Paul Sereno discovered Rugops primus (“first wrinkle face”) in the Sahara. This dinosaur’s resemblance to South American fossils suggested that Africa had separated from the ancient landmass of Gondwana more recently than previously supposed.

Sally McBearty’s and Alison Brooks’s THE REVOLUTION THAT WASN’T challenging the long-held notion of a “big bang” in human intellectual evolution approximately 40,000 years ago. Instead, they cited evidence for earlier appearances of modern behaviors. THE SCIENCE OF 2000

Patrick Armstrong suggested in THE ENGLISH PARSON-NATURALIST: A COMPANIONSHIP BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION (Leominster, England: Gracewing Publishing Ltd; Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Cromwell Press) that the adventure of modern science might be considered to have begun with the Reverend John Ray.

WALDEN: We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone PEOPLE OF who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and WALDEN the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

JOHN RAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2001

The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (Human Genome Project)’s initial sequence and analysis of the human genome in Nature. Celera Genomics simultaneously published a draft human genome sequence in Science.

Joshua Smith and collaborators described a giant sauropod from Egypt, possibly the largest Cretaceous sauropod yet reported. It was considered a possible food source for 3 large carnivorous dinosaur species discovered decades earlier by Ernst Stromer. PALEONTOLOGY

Luann Becker and collaborators described carbon fullerenes (buckyballs) at the Permo-Triassic boundary in China, Japan, and Hungary. Because these can originate in meteorites, the fullerenes were cited as evidence for a meteorite impact at the end of the Permian. Other scientists would however have difficulty reproducing their results, so the hypothesis remains controversial.

Chris Henshilwood and collaborators discovered and described 77,000-year-old artwork: stones carved with lines and triangles in Blombos Cave on the Southern Cape coast of Africa. Three years later Henshilwood and collaborators would describe more Blombos artifacts: tiny snail shells apparently pierced and worn as jewelry about 76,000 years ago (a few years later another research team would find in Israel and Algeria similar shell beads at least 100,000 years old).

Odin and Néraudeau published a description of a Neanderthal flint tool found in southwestern France having on one side a fossil sea urchin. THE SCIENCE OF 2001 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Peter Raby’s ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE: A LIFE (Princeton MD: Princeton UP/London: Chatto & Windus). Although one of the greatest scientific minds in Victorian Britain, bedecked during his lifetime with honors such as the Royal Medal of the Linnaean Society and the Order of Merit, he has by now slipped into relative obscurity within the giant shadow of Charles Darwin. We think of Wallace as an adventurer, collector, naturalist and biogeographer and kindly pass by the fact that the actual man was also a spiritualist.

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7109.html

Gillian Beer, DARWIN’S PLOTS: EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE IN DARWIN, GEORGE ELIOT AND NINETEENTH- CENTURY FICTION (2d edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Interviewed for H-Ideas by Johann W.N. Tempelhoff ([email protected]), School of Basic Sciences, Potchefstroomse Universiteit vir Christelike Hoër Onderwys, South Africa. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The divide between science and fiction is infinitesimally small in the realm of the written word. Fiction attempts to present a sense of awareness about a human condition. Scientific discoveries usually are the result of the demand for innovation in a society where the public realm is conducive to human creativity and change. It is after all a matter of the “presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear” that assures us of the world and ourselves.1 But scientific theories, unlike fictional constructs, are not necessarily taken for granted outright. At the start of DARWIN’S PLOTS: EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE IN DARWIN, GEORGE ELIOT AND NINETEENTH- CENTURY FICTION Dame Gillian Beer offers an explanation for this state of affairs. “Most major scientific theories,” she states, “rebuff common sense. They call on evidence beyond the reach of our senses and overturn the observable world. They disturb assumed relationships and shift what has been substantial into metaphor... Such major theories tax, affront, and exhilarate those who first encounter them, although in fifty years or so they will be taken for granted... When it is first advanced theory is at most fictive. The awkwardness of fit between the natural world as it is currently perceived and as it is hypothetically imagined holds the theory itself for a time within a provisional scope akin to that of fiction” (p. 1). In this well-written and thoroughly contemplated intellectual history of nineteenth century literature, which has been published for a second time since 1983, the accent is on Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and the effect his scientific observations had on writers of fiction. Darwin had set himself the task of understanding the roots of a past in which humankind hardly featured. Many scientific thinkers of his time felt as he did about the matter. He was however the one - in concert with the perceptions of many of his contemporaries - to outline one of the major theories of modern science. The fact that it had been absorbed into literary thinking is an interesting barometer for determining precisely how and when his theories started finding their home in popular and intellectual thinking. Beer’s work is an intellectual history of the cultural environment in which Darwin found himself in the 1860’s and the 1870’s. Her knowledge of the literature of the period enables the reader to come to a better understanding of how the craft of writing was progressing under conditions of creative construction. Apart from the language (written and spoken) there are numerous discussions of devices used by authors in their work. They were writing at a time when ideas were being shaped by thoughts about observations on things beyond the shores of the British Isles. It was an environment conducive to addressing universal tendencies. The nineteenth-century author made use of specific strategies in the process of writing. In fiction the plot is a radical form of interpretation: it fixes the relations between phenomena. “It projects the future and then gives real form to its own predictions. It is to that extent self-verifying: its solutions confirm the validity of the clues proposed” (p. 151). Much the same could be said of Darwin’s style of writing. He was however far removed from the sophisticated craft of writing fiction. Yet this man who was to change the course of development in science had to construct his own metaphorical fiction in order to access the life of every day thinking in Victorian Britain. Reading science and understanding it requires of the historian of literature clarity on precisely what the process of reading implies. Beer gives an indication of this ability early in the work (pp. 4, 27). The reader is then made aware of Darwin’s reading tastes. Malthus and Milton had an impact on him. In his youth Darwin had an interest in fiction. Later it went into decline. It could quite well have been as a result of what George Elliot considered his preoccupation with expressing “life” (p. 34). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The reader is informed there was a driving force behind Darwin the writer to realize his objective of controverting attempts to distinguish meaning from matter. Meaning for him, Beer explains, inheres in all activity and in interrelations (p. 36). It has a bearing on the way in which he perceives the world around him and turns matter into an image of relevance. His sense of material implies a wide variety of meaning. It is a materialism that is sensuously grounded as a response to the world of forms and life. It is not an abstracting force (p. 37). Beer points out that in Darwin’s thought there is always a repetition of one movement: “the impulse to substantiate metaphor particularly to find a real place in the natural order for older mythological expressions” (p. 74). In the process he reminds the reader of the mysterious, explains the fact and discloses the marvelous (pp. 74-5). There are considerations of a psycho-historical nature that deserve consideration if we want to understand Darwin the writer. Beer lets him come across as a somewhat enigmatic figure, the subject of what the written world of his youth and his maturity had to offer him. He was the creator of his own world in which a comprehensive theory of scientific reality was in the process of taking shape. According to Beer, Darwin’s heuristic inclinations - the eagerness to discover - goes back to his youth. We take note of the child who had the habit of telling lies (fictionalizing) suggesting a hidden interest in power. It was one of the contributing factors in making Darwin the architect of ideas that profoundly unsettled the received relationships between fiction, metaphor and the material world. Ultimately that sense of power was nurtured by his omnivorous and powerful reading (p 27). But what was he trying to accomplish? “Darwin was seeking to create a story of the world - a fiction - which would not entirely rely upon the scope of man’s reason nor upon the infinitesimally small powers of observation he possesses, as they act within the world spread all about him, and as they enclose him through the shortness of his time span. Yet Darwin was not seeking a covertly metaphysical world not attempting an enthusiasm which would not extend the material into a form of mysticism. Throughout his use of metaphor and analogy one can feel the double stress - the attempt to create exact predictions and the attempt to press upon the boundaries of the knowable within a human order” (p. 92). As a historian of literature Beer draws the interesting conclusion that her text is in fact an “extensive fiction” intent on exploring the boundaries of that which is literally unthinkable. What is accomplished in the process is the awareness that the absoluteness of man’s power of reason as an instrument of measuring the world is displaced once and for all. The problem Darwin faced was to describe in words a process that he was convinced had been going on for a long time. Consequently he in turn had to be creative. In the process of creating a test he was “creating an argument.” It was an argument aimed at emphasizing production. He could not fully rely only on a fully experimental method. Thus he was obliged to work within the terms of an “experimental history” (p. 95). In the process he became a creative artist, outside the confines of Baconian induction. His creative energy was dedicated to authenticating his account of the way species formed. In a comprehensive discussion of Darwin’s myths, Beer explains Darwin was still deeply under the influence of the Christian inheritance. The manifold contradictions he perceived in the natural world, the interplay between life and death and more, were integrated into forms representing controlling powers of opposites. It also included the concepts of “artificial” and “natural” selection. The powerful was always the more benign. Within this framework she perceives the influence of Christian tradition. Darwin’s description of the “survival of the fittest” at first appears to be one of the single direction stories in evolutionary thought. Its tautological structure however, makes of it a satire on organicism. Beer notes: “The survival of the fittest means simply the survival of those most fitted to survive; this implies not distinction, nor fullest development, but aptness to the current demands of their environment - and these demands may be for deviousness, blueness, aggression, passivity, long arms, or some other random quality. So chance reenters the potentially determinist organisation of evolutionary narrative” (p. 109). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Between 1850 and the end of the 1870’s ideas of degeneration and development were common in arguments about myth and language. Mythographers and anthropologists were well informed on evolution and natural selection. Language was considered a crucial distinguishing feature between humankind and animals. Darwin himself instead emphasized the ability of animals to communicate (pp. 111-2). Of necessity class, race and discrimination became an issue. Writing with a suggestive hint of post-colonial consciousness, Beer notes the “brutal ignorance” of Victorian writers on what constitutes “real culture” and “savage culture.” It was generally considered that the decline of language was an indication of the degeneration of humankind. The anthropologist E.B. Tylor used the example of THE WATER-BABIES by Charles Kingsley - an evolutionist thinker with interesting insights - to project an impression of decline. Beer comes to the conclusion: “The idea of development harboured a paternalistic assumption once it was transferred exclusively to human beings, since it was presumed that the observer was at the summit of development, looking back over a past, struggling to reach the present high moment. The European was taken as the type of achieved developmental pre-eminence, and other races studied were seen as further back on the chart of growth. The image of growth was again misplaced from the single life cycle, so that whole races were seen as being part of the ‘childhood of man’, to be protected, led, and corrected like children” (p. 111). Central to these assumptions were the conceptions of the development of language and the corresponding awareness of myth. E.B. Tylor and Max Müller, the Sanskrit scholar, were active in propagating a debate on the development of language. Müller studied the phenomenon of myth from the perspective of the organization and roots of language. Tylor in turn concentrated on the “’stiffening of metaphor by the mistaken realisation of words’" (p. 112). Müller, like Darwin, was a monogenist, who believed in the common stock of all races of the world. He argued in favor of the common origins in the “roots” of the Indo-Germanic languages. His premises were: the major divide between the brute and man was language; second, he argued language had a common origin. He was a convinced supporter of Darwin and used the term “natural elimination” instead of “natural selection” to emphasize why some languages were able to make progress and others were subject to decline. The deterioration of language, he argued, is subject to the deterioration of metaphor and myth. Müller argued that myth was able to corrupt the relationship between language and thought. The changing nature of language, as a result of the agency of metaphor to act as agent of decomposition, represented for Müller the essence of the process of selection and elimination. The remnants of highly developed systems of myths in cultures were seated in what remained in the legends and fairy tales. Darwin’s descriptions of nature were more concerned with productivity than congress. It considered generation rather than sexual desire. His was a tendency to give another dimension to Victorian romanticism - this was a dimension that manifested in Virginia Woolf’s characterization of fertility. Beer explains that in the idea of evolution there was an abundance of life, a profusion of multitudes. At the same time there was an awareness of the potential effect of over-abundance. Is it possible that many authors missed what Darwin was driving at? The almost distanced perception of sexuality as an essential component of continuation is a romantic figment of the imagination. Beer explains: “The physical is prolonged through generations. In the methodology of life proposed by Darwin, production, growth and decay are equally needed for the continuance of life on earth” (p. 116). For Darwin development in great profusion was first and foremost a manifest reality that permeated everything he perceived. It was influenced by the awareness instilled by Wilhelm von Humboldt who accentuated the essential importance of human development. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The appropriation of Darwin’s theory in children’s literature is well described. Beer gives extensive consideration to Margaret Gatty and the Charles Kingsley (1819-75) children’s classic, THE WATER-BABIES (1863), in which a somewhat stark social comment is presented on the evolutionary process. Kingsley uses the theory to comment on the Malthusian order of things in which the identity and imaginary world, to which children are entitled, is dwarfed in the interest of progress. Beer explains that Kingsley wants to read the world with the transforming eye of the child. She sees in THE WATER-BABIES a richness of rebirth, an alteration to the human cycle of development. There are indications of an oceanic richness of pre-Freudian storytelling. Kingsley, a theologian and writer of fiction was a friend of Charles Lyell. He corresponded with Darwin and Huxley. It was an intellectual environment conducive to the creation of THE WATER-BABIES. The presence of George Eliot in Beer’s book is ubiquitous. It is perhaps here that the reader is made most aware of the impact Darwin had on nineteenth-century fiction. Eliot’s concern with Darwin and his theories were addressed in two of her major works MIDDLEMARCH and DANIEL DERONDA. Her first reading of Darwin’s ORIGIN did not impress Eliot. Yet it gradually started asserting an influence. MIDDLEMARCH starts with scientific experiments aimed at studying the history of man. “Experimental” becomes a free-ranging, exploratory, innovatory project without any fixed conclusion. In science this stands to reason, but in art it has a bearing on the experimental novel and/or theatre. It is also here where it becomes evident that scientific and artistic concerns are closely related. During the 1860’s and 1870’s the movement in scientific thinking was from description to narrative. It became an inherent part of theory. “This brings the objective insights of the scientist into accord with the procedure of the fiction writer and offers another kind of authentication” (p. 150). The emergence of fixed laws to explain the natural environment also had an impact on the artist. Law was in fact “the last fixed thing remaining in ‘the theatre of reiterated change’" (p. 150). The novelist therefore had to explore an organization in which man’s experience is traversed by laws, which took no account of humankind’s presence. The methodology of the scientist created new opportunities for the organization of fiction. In her references to the ‘history of man’ Eliot by implication refers to natural history. Middlemarch ostensibly deals with the ‘web of affinities’ determining the relations within a specific time and space. A sense of creation is present, of everything being knowable and eventually being subject to becoming known (p. 154). In Victorian times the word “web” was associated with woven fabric. The web as woven cloth expressed the process of coming to knowledge. In the case of Eliot’s work: “The web exists not only as an interconnection in space but as succession in time. This was the aspect of the image emphasised by Darwin in his genealogical ordering” (p. 157). The web is different from the chain, also from the tree. It has a comprehensiveness and a presence of interactivity in an environment of post- 90’s thinking. It constitutes an immediate response to knowledge and the art of knowing. In DANIEL DERONDA (1871) Eliot is concerned with the future - a project she had been contemplating for a long time. The link-up with Darwin is to be found in his THE DESCENT OF MAN and particularly the concept of selection in relation to sex, which shifted the evolutionary debate towards humankind’s specific inheritance and future. Eliot, who had lost faith in the survival of the individual, now looked at the development of the race, culture and the mind. The latter, Beer states, was a favorite occupation in the 1870’s. The development of the mind was considered as the possibility of exploring a better future - with generalized laws and perceptions of self as part of a greater pattern of things. Evolutionary theory had brought along with it a sense of being able to shape the future. However it is Eliot the novelist who is faced with the problematic situation of moral and emotional awareness. The eugenics of Francis Galton proposed to create an environment where it would be possible to predict the nature and the quality of the offspring to come. Social planning, the thought of being in a position to predict the shape of the future and its people, suggested in Darwin’s work that it was possible to go somewhat beyond the randomness of moral selection. The interaction between Galton and Darwin in the work of Eliot, Beer suggests, is that Galton in his eugenics applied evolutionary theory to the future. In THE DESCENT OF MAN Darwin accentuates acts of choice and will in sexual selection. “In DANIEL DERONDA past and future are dubiously intercalated: the order of telling and the order of experience are confused and can never be thoroughly rearranged. The work brings to the centre of our attention the idea of a future life” (p. 173). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Beer notes that in all Eliot’s previous novels time is end-stopped. In DANIEL DERONDA there is the prospect of a future, a tomorrow. Cause and effect and prediction are brought into play. For Eliot it meant a lot. There is no longer a critical unwritten gap of time between material and author. The fascination of many Victorian writers with race was in fact actually with class. Race and class raise identical questions of descent, genealogy, mobility, the possibility of development and transformation. According to Beer Darwin adopted the genealogical metaphor in heraldic terms in THE ORIGIN. In DANIEL DERONDA, Eliot took into consideration the peculiarity of the Jews and their place in British society. They were a wandering tribe, came from Asia and were not like the Homo asiatica. The Jews were also a favored nation.55 In both Darwinian and biblical terms they occupied a special position in the struggle for life. The recognition in Jewish culture that the principle of growth is situated in human choice makes the divine principle action, choice and resolved memory. It is these elements that Beer explores in Eliot’s DANIEL DERONDA. They are then applied in an evolutionary sense. She explains: “The relationship of will and choice to change, the confusion between change and necessary progress, are issues much of whose intensity comes from their urgent testing of evolutionary ideas in their possible application to human life” (p. 193). Eliot did not rely exclusively on Darwin for her insights. She had already read Hegel in the 1840s. She was also aware of Schopenhauer and Fichte. In the 1850s she read Lamarck and Spencer. By the 1870s she had changed the content of the anthropological debate in her works. There was the challenging relativism and the pessimism about the possibility of advance in English national life. The debate that influenced her was concerned with race and class. It had been sparked off by THE DESCENT OF MAN. Eliot chose to explore further the relations between men and women, thereby responding to Darwin’s views on sexual selection. By the 1870s Darwinist theories were contemplated within the context of their psychological and social implications. In particular it had a bearing on relations between men and women. In THE ORIGIN Darwin was of the opinion that true classification was of a genealogical nature. It is true that succession within the natural order of things had an egalitarian character. In human society it was however inheritance that organized society and sustained hegemony. It was however in THE DESCENT OF MAN (1871) and THE EXPRESSION OF THE EMOTIONS IN MAN AND ANIMALS (1872) that Darwin brought humankind squarely within the debate of evolution. The accent now fell, not only on natural selection, but also on sexual selection. Questions were now being asked with a bearing on what emotions values reflect. Actions could help the individual and race to survive. In the process medical theory became integrated with social and psychological theory. In his interpretation of Schopenhauer, Darwin came to the conclusion that the process of sexual selection had a bearing on the anticipation of the future generation - the future human race. The male was however intended to dominate in the matter of choice. Physically the male is more dominant. In a savage state of existence the female is kept in greater bondage than would otherwise be the case. The emphasis is on beauty generation, in itself a debate in the domain of aesthetics with reference to the process of sexual selection. In bio-political discourse by the late twentieth century this awareness suggested the re-translation of individuality, authenticity by repainting and remodeling the self.3 In Chapter 7 Beer gives attention to the role portrayed by the female in DANIEL DERONDA. She chooses the long route to come to that essence - perhaps the result of caution in an Eighties’ intellectual environment. First there is the focus on Deronda’s mother. Then follows the acknowledgement that the famous opera singer does not conform to the Darwinist conception of the female deriving her status from her genetic role. Elsewhere in the work there are very interesting insights. For example, what Darwin had done was to intensify the unsettled and long-used themes in relations between men and women by placing courtship, sensibility, the making of matches, women’s beauty, men’s dominance and inheritance in all its forms, squarely into the arena of a new set of problems. The consequence was that authors like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy started with the rereading of traditional fictional topics. This process was constructive in the sense that it led to a new fictional energy. It also paved the way for new perceptions of the art of writing fiction.

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Beer points out that in her last three works i.e., FELIX HOLT, MIDDLEMARCH and DANIEL DERONDA Eliot took the phenomenon of sexual selection and the role of the woman to its full extent. The role of the woman in these works included that of the vessel of continuity. They bear children and thereby pass on the inheritance of the race. At the same time women also represent a critique of culture. George Eliot was aware of the manner in which sexual selection became an instrument of oppression in a strong patriarchal order.

DARWIN’S PLOTS is an excellent work of great depth and significance for readers in a variety of disciplines. For historians it can open new insights in narrative, fiction and the construction of historical identity. For the student of literature it offers a unique insight into the Darwinian impact on nineteenth-century literature. Even for the scientist it would be interesting to take note how theory can influence the thinking of laypeople in a world where the exciting features of scientific discovery frequently become the material of interesting fiction. Ultimately the study makes the reader aware of dimensions where fiction and science share the stage. Together they light up a world in which contrasts are too frequently diminished because readers of science and readers of fiction too seldom care to indulge in new journeys of exploration. 1. H. Arendt, THE HUMAN CONDITION (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958), p. 50. 2. For interesting insights on the Jewish experience in nineteenth century Britain, see H. Arendt, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM (Meridian Books, Clevelands and Ohio, 1958), pp. 68-79. 3. See P. György, “The order of bodies” in A. Heller and S.P. Riekmann (Eds.) BIOPOLITICS: THE POLITICS OF THE BODY, RACE AND NATURE (Avebury, Aldershot, 1996), pp. 42-3. Copyright 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected] net.msu.edu. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2002

Reynolds, Morgan. CURIOUS BONES: MARY ANNING & THE BIRTH OF PALEONTOLOGY. 2002 MARY ANNING DINOSAURIA

Henry Petroski’s PAPERBOY: CONFESSIONS OF A FUTURE ENGINEER (Vintage Press).

E.O. Wilson’s THE FUTURE OF LIFE (Knopf).

David Lordkipanidze and collaborators excavated in Dmanisi a 1,770,000-year-old Homo erectus skull of a “toothless old man.” New bone growth after his loss of teeth suggested that he had been cared for by others — the oldest evidence yet found of care for the incapacitated among hominids. PALEONTOLOGY

Michel Brunet and collaborators described Sahelanthropus tchadensis, a hominid of western central Africa. Suspected to be 6,000,000 to 7,000,000 years old, this specimen was possibly the oldest hominid fossil yet found. Its location, in Chad, could be expected to spur hominid fossil hunting west of Africa’s Rift Valley. THE SCIENCE OF 2002 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2003

E.O. Wilson’s PHEIDOLE IN THE NEW WORLD: A DOMINANT, HYPERDIVERSE ANT GENUS (Harvard UP).

In Chile, a bus-length blob (similar to the St. Augustine blob of 1896) washed ashore. some suspected it to be from a giant octopus, but DNA analysis would reveal it to have consisted of mere whale blubber.

M.R. Sánchez-Villagra, O. Aguilera, and I. Horovitz described Phoberomys, a rodent from Venezuela that had been the size of a buffalo. OK, then.

Paleontologists in Germany identified the world’s oldest pantry: an underground burrow system probably dug by an extinct species of ground squirrel or hamster. Estimated at 17,000,000 years, the food stash was fortified with more than 1,800 fossilized nuts.

Two separate teams digging 2,000 miles apart found in the same week two new Antarctic dinosaurs. One appeared to be a Jurassic sauropod, the other a Cretaceous theropod.

John Horner and his team found an egg-laying female T. rex that would produce traces of blood vessels and blood cells. THE SCIENCE OF 2003 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2004

The International Union of Geological Sciences added a new period to the earth’s geologic timescale: the “Ediacaran” period ranging from approximately 600,000,000 to 542, 000,000 years ago. This was to represent the period that began after the final “Snowball Earth” ice age and resulted in the Cambrian period (this has been the 1st new geologic period to be designated in 120 years). Heather Wilson and Lyall Anderson described the oldest land animal fossil yet recovered, found by Mike Newman: Pneumodesmus newmani, a 428,000,000-year-old, centimeter-long millipede.

M.-Y. Zhu and collaborators described munched trilobite parts inside another arthropod, confirming our suspicion that other animals had been snacking on these abundant little water bugs.

Naama Goren-Inbar and her team described controlled fire use by hominids at a 790,000-year-old site in Israel, thus pushing the earliest known use of fire back 300,000 years from previous estimates.

X. Wang and Z. Zhou described the initial known pterosaur egg to contain an exquisitely preserved embryo. Inside an egg slightly smaller than your average chicken egg, the embryo sported a 27-centimeter wingspan. Several months later Z. Zhou and F. Zhang described a Cretaceous bird embryo, the 1st found with feathers.

Using CT scans on femurs of the early hominid Orrorin tugenensis discovered in Kenya, Galik and collaborators pushed back the development of bipedalism in hominids to 6,000,000 years (2,000,000 earlier than Australopithecus anamensis).

Qingjin Meng and collaborators described an adult Psittacosaurus dinosaur associated with 34 juveniles, apparent evidence of parental care.

When a team of Japanese researchers took the 1st photograph of a giant squid in the wild, in the process they unfortunately ripped off one of its tentacles. Oops, sorry.

The British Museum began excavation at Happisburgh in Norfolk. Over six years they would uncover evidence pushing back human activity at such a high latitude (45 degrees) to perhaps even 950,000 years. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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D. Néraudeau described deposits in western France containing hundreds of Acheulian and Mousterian tools, a dozen of them bearing fossils.

Peter Brown, Mike Morwood, and collaborators discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores an 18,000-year- old, 1-meter-tall hominid. Found near remains of giant lizards and pygmy elephants, they would name this Homo floresiensis and nickname it “the hobbit.” Though some suspected this to have been a malformed, small- brained midget, the results of braincase scans and wrist bones too primitive to be Homo sapiens, plus the discovery of other such individuals, now suggest direct ancestry from Homo erectus. THE SCIENCE OF 2004

The H.L. Blomquist Garden of Native Plants of Duke Gardens in Durham, North Carolina offered a home to Steven Church’s collection of 24 species of rare and endangered native plants. PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2005

E.O. Wilson’s FROM SO SIMPLE A BEGINNING: DARWIN’S FOUR GREAT BOOKS (W. W. Norton).

Yaoming Hu, Jin Meng, Yuanqing Wang, and Chuankui Li described two large carnivorous mammals from the Cretaceous, one of which appeared to have in its stomach the remains of a diminutive dinosaur. Such fossils overturn long-held presumptions that Mesozoic mammals had been mere rat-sized furry thingies scurrying around among all the massive dinosaur feet. PALEONTOLOGY

Yohannes Haile-Selassie and colleagues described a nearly 4,000,000-year-old hominid from Ethiopia, possibly the remains of Australopithecus anamensis.

Adrian Glover and Thomas Dahlgren announced a new species of marine worm discovered off the Swedish coast, that lives on whale bones on the sea floor. They named it Osedax mucofloris “bone-eating snot flower.”

M.A. Whyte announced a 330,000,000-year-old trackway of a 5-foot-long, 6-legged water scorpion (eurypterid) that was walking on land while the initial tetrapods were attempting to do the same thing (a couple of years later Simon Braddy, Markus Poschmann, and collaborators would discover a fossil claw of an 8-foot- long eurypterid). THE SCIENCE OF 2005 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2006

E.O. Wilson’s THE CREATION: AN APPEAL TO SAVE LIFE ON EARTH (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)., and his NATURE REVEALED: SELECTED WRITINGS 1949-2006 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP).

The Research Council of Norway announced that oil drillers had struck a piece of dinosaur bone 1.4 miles beneath the North Sea (world’s deepest dinosaur).

Qiang Li and colleagues described Castorocauda lutrasimilis, a Jurassic mammal that looked something like a mix between a beaver, otter, and platypus. Their discovery pushed back mammalian adaptation to an aquatic lifestyle by more than 100,000,000 years. PALEONTOLOGY

Neil Clark suggested that some “sightings” of the Loch Ness monster may have been inspired by partial glimpses of traveling circus elephants taking dips in the lake.

Jean Moliner, Gerhard Ries, Cyril Zipfel, and Barbara Hohn discovered that stressed plants not only mutate at a greater rate but also pass a tendency toward increased mutation to their offspring.

Zeresenay Alemseged and collaborators described a 3,300,000-year-old partial skeleton from Ethiopia, from a juvenile Australopithecus afarensis. The remains indicated that this australopithecene toddler walked upright and climbed trees.

Jin Meng and collaborators described a Mesozoic gliding mammal that pushed back the origin of mammalian flight by 70,000,000 years, suggesting that mammals may have been gliding before there were birds. THE SCIENCE OF 2006 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2007

Kate Trinajstic and collaborators announced a 380,000,000-year-old Australian fish specimen containing fossilized muscle.

Xing Xu and collaborators described the Gigantoraptor erlianensis of Inner Mongolia, a 25-foot-long, 3,000- pound dinosaur that was bird-like. This specimen runs counter to previous assumptions that dinosaurs must have been growing smaller as they acquired more features resembling those of birds. PALEONTOLOGY

Fred Spoor, Meave Leakey, and collaborators described Homo habilis and Homo erectus fossils found in the same rock layer only a short distance apart. The two species may have coexisted in the same area for up to 500,000 years, which would mean that H. erectus probably did not descend from H. habilis as previously supposed.

John Kappelman and collaborators announced a 500,000-year-old hominid skull from Turkey showing signs of tuberculosis. The researchers pointed out that this condition could have been induced by a Vitamin D deficiency resulting from a dark-skinned individual migrating to an area with less sunlight. THE SCIENCE OF 2007

Due to global warming, the Northwest Passage was open. On the composite satellite photo on the following screen, the fully black areas are areas not photographed. The brown line marks the open passage across the top of the North American continent, and the bluegreen line marks the open passage across the top of the Asian continent, with dots indicating a portion in which they still needed the assistance of an icebreaker ship. THE FROZEN NORTH

Tokyo Electric Power Company confessed that there had been much more to their culture of false quality reporting that had been exposed in 2002, than had been disclosed. Numerous nuclear reactor incidents still remained, needing to be disclosed and re-examined (these included an unreported criticality that had occurred in 1978).

“If anything bad can happen, it probably will.”

— Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss in the Chicago Daily Tribune, February 12, 1955) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2008

Chinese and Brazilian researchers described a sparrow-sized dinosaur from northeastern China. Although a juvenile, this pterosaur was no hatchling, and was more mature than any of the smaller specimens so far found. The researchers named it Nemicolopterus crypticus “hidden flying forest dweller.” PALEONTOLOGY

Susan Evans, Marc Jones, and David Krause described a fossil frog from Madagascar that had been the size of a bowling ball. Kerplunk! Because this Cretaceous creature’s closest living relative was in South America, the scientists were forced to contemplate a land link connecting South America, Antarctica, and Madagascar. They named their frog Beelzebufo ampinga “armored devil toad” and referred to it colloquially as “fossil frog from hell.”

After a study of grunting fish, Andrew Bass and colleagues reported that the part of the brain controlling this vocalization was extremely primitive and proposed that vertebrates may have evolved the ability to communicate by means of sound some 400,000,000 years ago.

Based on studies of fossils and extant carnivores, Chris Carbone and collaborators suggested that sabertooth cats had been sociable animals who hunted in packs. THE SCIENCE OF 2008 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2009

E.O. Wilson’s and Bert Hölldobler’s THE SUPERORGANISM: THE BEAUTY, ELEGANCE, AND STRANGENESS OF INSECT SOCIETIES (W.W. Norton & Company).

Gabriele Gentile and colleagues described a previously overlooked pink iguana on the Galapagos Islands, referred to as “rosada.” This pink lizard species might represent the earliest divergence of land animals on the island chain that Charles Darwin had made famous. PALEONTOLOGY

Chris Henshilwood and collaborators described 13 engraved ochre artifacts from South Africa’s Blombos Cave, some dating back 100,000 years (this discovery supplemented earlier finds pushing back the advent of human artwork).

Nicholas Conard and collaborators discovered 35,000-year-old flutes in Hohle Fels Cave at Ulm, Germany — one nearly complete flute carved from a bird bone, and flute fragments carved from ivory.

Anthony Martin and colleagues announced three 106,000,000-year-old burrows in Australia that were being considered to have been made by dinosaurs, perhaps to keep warm during the winter while Australia had drifted closer to the South Pole.

Australian paleontologists announced Zac, a plant-munching sauropod found on a sheep farm — the same sheep farm on which paleontologists had in 2004 discovered Cooper the armor-plated titanosaur.

Erik Seiffert and coauthors argued that the “missing link” Darwinius masillae described earlier in the year was not an ancestor of modern apes and monkeys but instead of modern lemurs and lorises. THE SCIENCE OF 2009 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2010

The final year according to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (Shaw, Eva. EVE OF DESTRUCTION. Los Angeles CA: Lowell House, 1995, page 223). MILLENNIALISM

Jesse Steele uncovered bones while digging a reservoir in Snowmass, Colorado. Excavations would turn up more than 40 species of Ice Age animals.

Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki and colleagues described 395,000,000-year-old tetrapod tracks from Poland — 18,000,000 years before tetrapods had been considered to exist. The early date, large size, and marine environment encouraged skepticism. PALEONTOLOGY

Adam Brumm, Mike Morwood, and colleagues argued that more than 40 stone artifacts found in situ and dated to approximately 1,000,000 years ago indicated that the ancestors of Homo floresiensis (the “hobbits”) had arrived on Flores some 120,000 years earlier than previously supposed.

When the Smithsonian Institution opened a new human-origins hall, they found they needed to keep rearranging the deck chairs. The new hall had been open for only a week when Johannes Krause and colleagues announced a fossil finger fragment from an unknown hominid from Siberia coincident with Neanderthals and modern humans (later dubbed Denisovans and found distantly related to modern New Guineans). Then a few weeks after that Lee Berger and colleagues announced a new hominid from South Africa, Australopithecus sediba. Then several weeks after that an international team announced a small DNA overlap between modern humans and Neanderthals, suggesting the likelihood of interbreeding.

In the same week separate research teams announced a 100,000,000-year-old mammal hair preserved in amber, and a 30,000,000-year-old pelican fossil with a 30-centimeter beak.

Abderrazak El Albani and colleagues described 2,100,000,000-year-old macroscopic fossils from Gabon. The specimens were multicellular, pushing back the record of macroscopic life by more than 200,000,000 years. The complex shapes of the fossils suggested cell signaling and coordinated growth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Nicholas Longrich described a new dinosaur among previously misidentified fossils at the American Museum of Natural History. He awarded this ceratopsian the name Mojoceratops.

Ryan Kerney announced an algae Oophila amblystomatis living inside the embryo cells of the spotted salamander Ambystoma maculatum, the 1st discovery of a photosynthetic symbiont that had become a symbiont inside vertebrate cells. –Mommy, can I go out in the yard and grow my own food?

Scott Sampson and colleagues described two exuberantly horned ceratopsians from late Cretaceous sediments in Utah: Utahceratops gettyi and Kosmoceratops richardsoni.

Juan Amat and colleagues announced that pretty pink flamingos use makeup to decorate their feathers during HDT WHAT? INDEX

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mating season (admittedly, they acquire this makeup out of their own behinds).

The candy makers Hershey and Mars financed competing genomic sequences for cacao (primary ingredient of chocolate).

Meijer and Due announced the discovery on the island of Flores of a 1.8-meter-tall, 16-kilogram, likely landlubbing, carnivorous stork Leptoptilos robustus. Whether the storks had eaten Homo floresiensis juveniles, or the hobbits had hunted the storks, or everybody had pretty much left everybody else alone, is a matter that remains unresolved. THE SCIENCE OF 2010

Pliny the Elder beer was being highly recommended by fans of heady hops: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2011

Junchang Lü and colleagues announced a Jurassic fossil from China, a probable female pterosaur that had died while laying an egg. The egg was tiny compared to the mother and had a parchment-like eggshell. The specimen suggested that pterosaurs buried their eggs and that females lacked head crests. PALEONTOLOGY

Jianni Liu and colleagues described the Diania cactiformis “walking cactus.” This was a kind of leggy worm known as a lobopodian that lived in the Cambrian Period some 520,000,000 years ago. The authors indicated that it might be close to the ancestral line for arthropods — jointed animals ranging from lobsters to ladybugs.

Longrich and Olson described a newly discovered wing feature of an extinct, flightless Jamaican bird named Xenicibis: built-in nunchucks.

Michael Waters and coauthors described a stone tool assemblage at the Buttermilk Creek Complex in Texas certifying that humans had already been present in the New World some 15,500 years ago — more than 2,000 years prior to the earliest Clovis sites.

Relying on molecular dating and some (literally) lousy fossils, Vincent Smith and colleagues asserted that lice had been rapidly evolving since well before the end of the Cretaceous, and may have hung out on feathered dinosaurs before annoying other species.

Bruce Archibald and coauthors described a hummingbird-sized species of flying ant that had been able to hop from continent to continent during the early Eocene.

Esther Ullrich-Lüter and colleagues described photoreceptors in the tube feet of sea urchins, indicating that the entire organism may have functioned as a large compound eye.

On the sesquicentennial of its discovery, the status of Archaeopteryx as the earliest known bird was challenged. Xing Xu and coauthors proposed that Archaeopteryx and the newly discovered Xiaotingia were closer to nonavian dinosaurs. Reactions were mixed.

Darren Naish and coauthors dated a 27.5-centimeter bird jaw found in Kazakhstan to the Late Cretaceous. With only the jaw, we can’t be sure whether it loped like an ostrich, or was able to fly.

Lee Berger and coauthors argued that Australopithecus sediba was a direct ancestor of modern humans and proposed that our family tree be rearranged. Other paleoanthropologists weren't so sure about that but did agree that Sediba’s weird mix of primitive and advanced features demonstrated a remarkable ancestral diversity.

Two studies released in the same week indicated that modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians had HDT WHAT? INDEX

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descended from an earlier migration out of Africa than had any other populations. Further, the studies suggested that participants in this earlier migration had interbred with Denisovans.

Robert Anemone and coauthors described their reliance on a computer neural network (artificial intelligence) to spot fossil-rich localities in Wyoming.

John Paterson and coauthors reported their findings on Anomalocaris, a meter-long Cambrian predator so weird its remains had at one time been mistaken for both a shrimp and a jellyfish. They found that its eyes, mounted on the ends of stalks, were compound, each possessing 16,000 separate lenses like dragonfly eyes — but supersized. THE SCIENCE OF 2011 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2012

Eric Rittmeyer and coauthors described Paedophryne amauensis, a 7.7-millimeter-long frog from New Guinea, as “the smallest known vertebrate species.” PALEONTOLOGY

After examining fossil feathers with an electron microscope and comparing them to modern feathers, a team of American and Chinese scientists announced that Microraptor, a 4-winged dinosaur from China, probably had an iridescent sheen to its feathers.

Frank Glaw and coauthors described several new species of miniature chameleons from Madagascar. Among the tiniest was Brookensia micra, with juveniles small enough to stand on the head of a match.

Chinese and Canadian researchers announced Yutyrannus huali, a distant T. rex relative in which the 1.5-ton adult sported long filamentous feathers.

Extrapolating from contemporary cows, a team of British scientists contended that sauropod flatulence, releasing the potent greenhouse gas methane, played a significant role in the Mesozoic’s warm, moist climate.

Walter Joyce and coauthors announced a new discovery in Germany’s Messel Pit, a famous Eocene fossil site. The discovery includes multiple pairs of fossil turtles, trapped in the act of copulation.

An international team indicated that aphids might be able to engage in a photosynthesis-like process, using carotenoids for the “capture of light energy.”

A team of British and US scientists describe the color mechanism of a brilliant iridescent blue African fruit, Pollia condensata. Like some beetle shells, butterfly wings, and bird feathers, the fruit gets its color from microscopic structures rather than from pigments — but the fruit’s coiled strands of cellulose are like nothing previously discovered in nature.

Clive Finlayson and coauthors argued that Neanderthals collected bird feathers for personal adornment.

Studies in Science and Nature described two groups of ancient tools from South Africa. One group, estimated to be about 71,000 years old, had small bladelets likely made from heat-treated stone, while the other group, estimated to be about 500,000 years old, had spear tips.

Gregory Retallack argued that Ediacaran fossils long thought to be marine animals were actually land-based, and were lichens. His argument pushed back the beginnings of land-based life by 65,000,000 years. Anticipating “sharp intakes of breath in the paleontological community,” Nature set up a comment forum.

While sorting and relocating the Cambridge Herbarium a university librarian found some fungi and seaweed wrapped up by Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle — in newspaper dated 1828. THE SCIENCE OF 2012 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2013

In the ongoing measures/countermeasures struggle between the species Mycobacterium tuberculosis and the species Homo sapiens, conditions in India, China, and Eastern Europe have come to be of “epidemic proportions.” The crumbling health system of Moldavia has caused the rise of tuberculosis strains resistant to the “PIERS” cocktail-mix of drugs Pyrazinamide, Isoniazid, Ethambutol, Rifampicin, and Streptomycin. The US/Mexico border is now another “very hot region for drug resistant TB.”

Dale Greenwalt and coauthors described a 46,000,000-year-old fossil female mosquito from Montana with traces of a last bloody meal (iron and porphyrin) in its bloated abdomen — strong evidence that these insects have been irritating for tens of millions of years.

Robert Reisz and collaborators announced “discovery of an embryonic dinosaur bone bed from the Lower Jurassic of China, the oldest such occurrence in the fossil record.” Marie Soressi and coauthors contended that Neanderthals made leather-working tools similar to the modern- day lissoirs used on pricey handbags.

David Legg described a Cambrian arthropod with front appendages like scissors — the species would be named Kootenichela deppi after Johnny Depp:

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Robert DePalma and coauthors described a likely T. rex tooth lodged between hadrosaur vertebrae. The bone had regenerated and massively overgrown subsequent to this bite. They cited this as evidence not only that T. rex hunted, but also that one lucky hadrosaur had survived to munch leaves another day.

David Lordkipanidze and coauthors argued that all hominid fossils of Dmanisi, Georgia were Homo erectus, and suggested that hominid species from that period, worldwide –Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis– might all belong to a single species having a great deal of local variability.

Based on new genetic research, David Reich, Svante Pääbo, and collaborators announced at a Royal Society of London meeting that Denisovans had interbred with Neanderthals, ancestors of people now living in East Asia and Oceania, and with another group of extinct archaic humans who were genetically dissimilar to both Neanderthals and modern humans. A few weeks later Matthias Meyer, Svante Pääbo, and coauthors describe the oldest hominid DNA sequence to date, from a 400,000-year-old femur found in Spain’s Sima de los Huesos. The mitochondrial DNA indicated an unexpected link to Denisovans.

Using genetic material from more than 300 individuals, including aboriginal Australians from the Northern Territory, a team of geneticists argued that Australians –long believed isolated from other populations for some 45,000 years– had about 4,230 years ago received substantial gene flow from India.

Reporting on some 12 years of research at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, William Rendu and coauthors supported the original interpretation of intentional Neanderthal burials. They concluded that the burial pits could not be explained by natural processes, and that, unlike the site’s various scavenged animal bones, the relatively undamaged human remains at the site could only have been buried quickly. THE SCIENCE OF 2013

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Paleontology HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: February 18, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PALEONTOLOGY PALEONTOLOGY