Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms Read Free

on giant deer (“Irish elks”) painted on cave walls, chapter 11 on Bahamian land snails for a fable about Columbus,and chapter 12 on the dodo’s fate, made even sadder by human insult added to the ultimate injury of extirpation. The essays of the last two sections—on evolutionary theory, and on perspectives of other organisms—focus on the nonhuman side (again with such exceptions, as chapter 14 on papal statements about evolution, chapter 15 on the contrast of Robert Boyle and Charles Darwin on naturaldesign, and chapter 18 on Percival Lowell versus Alfred Russel Wallace on Martian canals and the true domination of earthly life by bacteria.)
    All these essays are grounded in a precious paradox that has defined the best of the genre ever since Montaigne: intimate and accurate detail—the foundation of most good essays—serves as a source of delight in itself, and also as a springboard to discourseabout generalities of broadest scope. I would never dare to take on “the nature of truth” by frontal assault and abstract generalization—for fear of becoming an empty, tendentious buffoon, pontificating about the unanswerable and undefinable. But the subject must rivet us, and we can legitimately “sneak up on” (and even genuinely illuminate) this great issue by discussing how Darwin and his creationistAmerican soulmate Dana constructed alternative taxonomies for toothed birds that should not have existed under previous concepts of reality, but had just been discovered as fossils (chapter 5). Similarly, if I tackled “the nature of tolerance” head-on, naked of intriguing and specific illustration, I would sound like a vain preacher crying in the wilderness (negative definition!). But ifI confess some childhood humor in juxtaposing, for alliteration as well as content, the Diet of Worms with the Defenestration of Prague (chapter 13), then a seemingly superficial, even ridiculous, union wins legitimacy for joint illustration, and provides fair access to factual and moral dimensions of the general topic.
    These essays probe, arrange, join, and parry the details within a diverseforest of data, located both in nature and in the documents of human struggle—all to access an inherently confusing but infinitely compelling world. As I survey the contents of this eighth volume, I find that I have followed four primary strategies to promote these details into coherent frameworks with sufficient generality to incite an essay.
    1. In some cases, an intense study of original sourcesyields genuine discovery, despite the paradox that materials for a solution have always been patent. The story of nonuse for the giraffe’s neck by early evolutionists had not been documented before (chapter 16), and surprising absences often reveal as much as unrecognized presences. I located a new dimension, largely in favor of the “vanquished” Owen and not the “victor” Huxley, in the greathippocampus debate that animated evolutionary discussion in the 1860s (chapter 6). Dana’s important theory of cephalization, and its link with his natural theology (in interesting contrast with Darwin’s developing alternative), has never been elucidated, in part because Dana scattered his views through so many short and technical papers (chapter 5).
    But I am, I confess, most proud of the openingtitle essay on Leonardo’s paleontology. The excellence and prominence of his observations on fossils have been recognized—and dutifully honored in all accounts, popular, textbook, and technical—for more than a century, since the full publication of his private notebooks in the 1880s. But no one had identified the special reasons (based on his own, and largely medieval, views of the earth as analogousto a living body) for his intense focus on fossils, and for the placement of his statements in a codex largely devoted to the nature of water. So these wonderful observations had stood out, disembodied from context, and misinterpreted as the weird