I Have Landed Read Free Page B

embarrassingly perfunctory footnote)—as in my all-time favorite evolutionary historical puzzle of why E. Ray Lankester appeared as the only native Englishman at Karl Marx’s funeral (essay 6); my first-ever modern exegesis of the bizarre, but internally compelling, reconciliation of Genesis and geology presented by the unknown Isabelle Duncan, even though the chart accompanying her book has become quite famous as an early “scene from deep time” (essay 7); the first analysis based on proper biological understanding of the Lamarckian and recapitulatory theories needed to justify the particular claims of a newly found essay by Sigmund Freud (essay 8); the recognition that the apparently trivial addition of a fifth race (Malay) permitted Blumenbach, in devising a system that became almost universal in application, to make a fundamental alteration in the geometry of racial classification from unranked geographic location to two symmetrical departures from maximal Caucasian beauty (essay 26); and the first published analysis of the first extensive set of fossils ever drawn and printed from a single locality, the 1598 treatise of Bauhin, invoked as a model for inevitable errors in depicting empirical objects when no well-formulated theory of their origin and meaning guides the enterprise (essay 10).
    A third category indulges my personal conviction that the joining of two overtly disparate people (in time, temperament, or belief), or two apparently different kinds of events, in a legitimate union based on some deeper commonality, often provides our best insight into a generality transcending the odd yoking. Thus, Church, Darwin, and Humboldt do shout a last joint hurrah in 1859 (essay 5); the stunning anti-Semitism stated so casually and
en passant
in the preface of a famous seventeenth-century pharmacopoeia does link to old ways of thinking, the little-known classification of fossils, and the famous case of the weapon salve (essay 9); the Latin verses used by Fracastoro to name and characterize syphilis in 1530 do contrast in far more than obvious ways to the recent decipherment of the bacterial genome causing the disease (essay 11); Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series do deeply link to Jim Bowie’s Alamo letter, hidden in plain sight, as both become foci for a universal tendency to tell our historical tales in predictably distorted ways (essay 3); and the totally different usage and meaning of the same word
evolution
by astronomers discussing the history of stars and biologists narrating the history of lineages does starkly identify two fundamentally different styles of explanation in science (essay 18).
    In a fourth, last, and more self-indulgent category, I can only claim that a purely (and often deeply) personal engagement supplies a different, if quirky,theme for treating an otherwise common subject, or gaining an orthogonal insight into an old problem. Thus, a different love for Gilbert and Sullivan at age ten (when the entire corpus fell into my permanent memory by pure imbibition) and age fifty leads me to explore a different argument about the general nature of excellence (essay 4); I could develop some arguments that far more learned literary critics had missed about Nabokov and his butterflies because they did not know the rules and culture of professional taxonomy, the great novelist’s other (and original) profession (essay 2); the unlikely conjunction of a late-twentieth-century ballplayer with a dying hero at the Alamo does reinforce an important principle about the abstraction behind the stark differences, but how could the linkage even suggest itself, absent a strong amateur’s (in the best and literal sense of a lover’s) affection for both baseball and history (essay 3); and, finally, T. H. Huxley’s dashing wife, passing a grandmother’s torch to grandson Julian two generations later does mirror the first words written in terror and exhilaration by my